Assetto Corsa's shadows and AA on an AMD card (470)

Hi,
I recently upgraded my GPU from a Nvidia 660GTX to an AMD 470.
Because it is my 1st AMD card i had to negotiate with the never ending quest to kill these polygons and especially regarding this game, these awful shadows.
AMD's driver (Crimson) has a million settings with strange names (AAeQ) so i decided to perform a test.
I did all combinations (well most of them) and see the performance and also the result.

AMD's driver is looking like this :


The installed games are there as profiles. You can choose a game, change a setting and then launch the game from the profile game to see the results.

So let's see what tests i did.

The game is vanilla, default filter and the settings are these :

FULLSCREEN: ON
AA:4X AF:16X SHDW:4096 BLUR:0
WORLD DETAIL: 5 SMOKE:5
PP: QLT:5 HDR:1 FXAA:0 GLR:5 DOF:5 RAYS:1 HEAT:1

Reflections like these



Track was Nordslhleife at 0900 and a KTM Xbow.

Each time i had different AA settings , either from game or AMD.

The settings are us follows :



Ok some info :

None = off

AA = from game settings
FXAA = from game settings
SWEETFX SMAA = enable SMAA from sweetfx
AAX8 ini = enable AASAMPLES=8 inside video.ini
All AMD settings are from profiler, when using override i had AA=OFF in game, when Enhance, i had AAX4 in game.
VSR= Virtual Super Resolution, method of using more res and then downsample to screen. (like Nvidia's DSR).

My screen is a 1080p TV.

For each setting a took a picture with MSI Afterburned to show fps and then 2 crops.

FPS results :



So, i saw the the AMD settings have some kind of bug. They all look the same and all same fps.
They did work, because i had AA=OFF in game for override , but the look the same.
The same with Ehanced.
SWEETFX and FXAA, are taking a big fps hit but with minimal improvement.
Morphological effect, is the same like FXAA but with better FPS.

If i had to choose is the VSR method. The 470 was unable to be smooth at 2160p but was smooth at 1440p AAX4 and with better quality than AAX8 through ini.
Game's AAX4 is descent.

Below are the pictures.

 

Pictures













uploadimage

 

Crops
https://postimg.org/gallery/13nxfzc32/

 

You can download all picture from here

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B1UNl21-h5iHX3lRaHlRMDRkRXc

 

Some of the pictures

 

As far as i can tell, modifying settings from individual games profiles is bugged since forever even for me. The only way i made settings work properly is using the general tab that applies effects to every game you will launch, so a bit problematic. My advice is to avoid AA as much as possible especially supersampling that is really heavy and eats a lot of resources. Instead use VSR and play in 1440p with 4xaa only(no fxaa) from the game. Shame VSR is not supported on my 21:9 screen, i would like to play with better resolution because AC suffer of bad aliasing even at my 2560x1080+ 4xaa and since i have also DOF off, it makes things look even worse

 

I have 280x with 4690k
1080p 2x AA Mirror Res Normal, Mirror HighRef - off, Smoke Normal, Shadow High, Reflec Quality Normal

Everything else maxed out I never go below 60FPS in any situation.
when I go 4X on AA or High on shadow or High on Ref Quality, I get 50FPS when it is Overcast, otherwise 60 again.
hope this helps too lazy to read topic.

 

In my opinion, AA is a general weak point in Assetto. I use an NVIDIA card and I never managed to get a decent AA setting with acceptable performance. The game's builtin settings are no good at all for removing aliasing effects.

 

Have you tried if it get any better with DSR?

 

I did try that and most of the other suggestions from various threads here in the forum. DSR had some positive effect on aliasing, but artefacts were still very present especially on the barriers. Regarding quality, the sparse grid supersampling (or similar) did the best job, but it eats up a lot of gpu time.

 

Too bad there is none such setting to AMD cards.

Can you post a similar screenshot like mine with this on? You know the place/hour. Also crop like mine. Thanks

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As far as shadows goes all I can say is nope, nothing you do will fix them and they will look as bad as ever as long as you are in cockpit view. That's pretty much how AC works, and the only place currently where shadows look like they are actually supposed to i.e. sharp and not blocky and patchy is in the F5 cam mode.

 

Using enhance application settings + adaptive multisampling works well if applied on the general profile.
Combined with vsr it almost totally removes aliasing.
Using assetto profile doesn't work.

 

@liakjim how will you compare ati/nvidia image quality?

 

I can't . I sold my nvidia card.
I hoped that someone will post similar photos, that's why i mentioned exact settings.

 

thanks liakjim for your testing!
VSR really does look nicer, the performance hit is noticeable, though. At least on my i2500k system it seems to be partly due to the processor, which has to run near 100%.

 

All this time later and still the same
I guess this is something that doesn't bother or affect Kunos , probably they have powerhouse PC's and play at DSR 8k down to 4k with sparse grid x8 ,lol