Post subject: Windows 7 & Antialiasing
Former player
Joined: 10/12/2004
Posts: 19
Location: Montreal beach, baby!
Just wondering if anyone experienced the same issue... It seems that while running FCEUX (or even FCEU, for that matter) on Windows 7, you do not get the same "Antialiased" effect as when it's ran on Windows XP; it remains pixelated. Any known way of getting the image to look as smooth as it was in XP?
Karma can be vengeful, don't screw around wit it!
Joined: 10/15/2007
Posts: 685
Amusing - I like to avoid that hideous Vaseline interpolation whenever and however possible. Go to Config -> Video, uncheck 'disable hardware acceleration'.
Kirby said so, so it must be true. ( >'.')>
Joined: 11/4/2007
Posts: 1772
Location: Australia, Victoria
Use a better filter, like the HQ ones. Trust me, you will never go back. Edit: In response to the below post, I was talking to the topic creator, not you, the creator seems pretty intent on using filters, I just gave him a better suggestion. =p
Joined: 10/15/2007
Posts: 685
I have, and I did. The hq*x filters are okay with a very small number of games. Generally, in my eyes, anything with detail will look terribly wrong with any attempt to add further definition in upscaling. Graphically simpler games usually skate by, as long as there's no dithering. I'd rather there be no filters of any sort. I'll take my big blocky pixels, thanks. Now 3D, on the other hand, sure. I'm more than happy to play at whatever resolution the monitor will allow.
Kirby said so, so it must be true. ( >'.')>
Experienced player (618)
Joined: 11/30/2008
Posts: 650
Location: a little city in the middle of nowhere
Just for comparison... I chose this screen because it contains relatively simple graphics and more complicated graphics on the same screen. When applying the hq3x filter, the filter does not dumbly interpolate, but the filter is supposed to intellegently find lines of gradients 0,1/2,1,2 and undefined, and replicate those lines and antialias them. The above image is not scaled with this algorithm, but the super 2xSal algorithm. However the above image does demonstate what happens to source images of varying complexity. When a scaling algorithm encounters a complicated image (like the covers of the games above) it simply scales by 2x with nearest neighbor interpolation, but when it encounters images with less color detail (such as the text) the image is scaled more naturally to a larger size.
Measure once. Cut twice.
Banned User
Joined: 12/5/2007
Posts: 742
Location: Gone
Okay, Windows 7 and Vista both run a service known as "uxsms". Not only this deals with anti-aliasing, but also to have Windows Aero theme work properly. Though FCEU 0.98.28 shows smoothness on one shot while it's all pixelated on FCEUX (at least that's how I compared), it's a little easy to tell. Windows 7/Vista "Basic" theme on the other hand completely eliminates any acts of anti-aliasing and everything you see will look exactly like andymac's second screenshot, regardless of emulator and version. You'll get the "Basic" theme if either (1) you selected it, or (2) if "uxsms" service is not running.
Experienced player (618)
Joined: 11/30/2008
Posts: 650
Location: a little city in the middle of nowhere
Beleive it or not, none of the screenshots above used hardware acceleration. There is no antialiasing in the first screenshot. The comparison is between a nearest neighbor interpolation and super 2xSal, and does not represent the scaling abilities of different operating systems. Your output will look like the first screenshot if you enable a special scaling algorithm, but will look almost as crappy as the second if you rely on hardware acceleration. also, the emulator was snes9x.
Measure once. Cut twice.