questions about TF2 settings
- Thread starter D-Tektive
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- Jun 23, 2008
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to save me from typing out the explainations of the terms you asked for just try to google them to get your answer.
- Joined
- May 18, 2008
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Yeah, Google is your Friend. I'll try to summarize though, since image processing is my job...
Generally speaking, they're settings that effect the quality of the image at a cost of computer resources.
Antialiasing is a technique used to make jagged lines appear smoother in computer graphics. You can see what text looks like without antialiasing by opening Notepad, setting the font to courier at a very large size. Type a few characters and you'll notice that they appear to have very jagged edges. Antialiasing tries to smooth these edges out so they don't appear so severe. This is also referred to as FSAA in gaming. (Full Screen Anti-Aliasing)
Anisotropic filtering is a technique to make textures look more realistic and less blurry at high angles. Graphics cards work by first drawing many polygons (rectangles and triangles, traditionally) and then 'painting' them with a texture. The textures are drawn in 2-D, but in 3-D games you can view these textures from any angle. Anisotropic filtering makes these textures look better and less blurry from certain angles.
Mipmaps are used to store smaller or larger textures or models so that as you get further away from something, it can be shown at less detail and save computation time. Up close, you notice small details about the size and shape of an object, but as you get further away from it it becomes smaller and you can't see the detail as well. Mipmaps provide alternate, less complex copies of an object. If we didn't have them, the computer would always have to render the high-detail version of the object, even though on the screen the details can't be seen.
Triple buffering allows the system to work further ahead of what is currently displayed on the screen. The game creates a new frame (rendering lots of polygons, applying textures, etc, perhaps using some mipmaps!) and then has to wait for the screen to catch up and display what the game has drawn. During this time, it can work on the next frame that needs to be displayed. If the computer is fast enough, it may finish this frame as well. With enough memory, it can go to work on yet another frame in the 'triple buffered' scheme. There are other advantages, but the general point is that it takes extra memory and can provide a frame rate increase.
Z-buffering (I think that's what you mean - not x-buffering) is another computer graphics technique. Once the computer has drawn an object, it has to place it in reference to other objects on the screen. For instance, if your player is holding a gun and facing a tree, the gun is drawn on top of the tree. This sounds simple enough, but when you have hundreds or thousands of objects on the screen, determining what parts of what objects are in front of or behind other objects becomes very complex. The more bits available in the Z-buffer scheme, the better a job the computer can do to determine what objects are in front of other objects, leading to a cleaner looking 3-D image.
The bottom line on most of these technologies is: how much of your computer's resources are you willing to devote to pretty graphics? The more powerful your computer is, the more you can prioritize better looking graphics over other important things, like actually playing the game.
