please share your knowledge about graphics

[SeraphimLeftNut]

General issue:
The settings in the game menues are identical, however the graphics look drastically different. Particularly the LOD settings, the decal quality, etc. You can see this across different pc's, or on the same pc after you restart the pc, or something crashes, etc.

These locations do not have this information:
AppData\Local\Gas Powered Games\Supreme Commander Forged Alliance\Cache
game.pref
Mods folder, etc.
Nvidia Cache folder etc.

Please suggest locations where game graphical data can be stored. (don't mention the above unless you have something special to add about those locations)

Please state anything you know about the superfetch or prefetch services, that may be involved.

Please state anything you may know about AA settings.

Please state anything you may know about nvidia, overriding settings, enhancing settings.

Your input is appreciated.

[Mel_Gibson]

All i know is, that whenever i install an nvidia driver, it's like watching and listening to every application going through a blender.

[d-_-b]

• prefetch services have zero bearing on this.
• AA settings MAY or may not have any bearing: specifically, the type of multi/supersampling involved. Multisampling alone will not improve detail level of decals etc, but some adaptive multisampling algorithms will, as will supersampling as that naively samples every pixel on the screen regardless of whether it is a "jaggy" geometrical edge or not, and can improve clarity on small textures, especially when AF is low.
• Some things that are overriden can be reset by alt-tabbing (if using fullscreen mode), what these are highly depends on the driver and the method used to override. For example, a tool that forces triple buffering on D3D instances must reapply this override every time the window is maximised/resized/whatever

To be honest, from the "lod settings" "decal quality", (LoD by the way is the level at which things fade out/decay in geometrical quality, and also sometimes refers to mipmapping), it sounds more like Anisotropic Filtering is your main concern here, and highly affects the quality of small textures at relatively oblique angles.

I don't think FA has any ingame option for AF, so you must force it by the driver panel. It most likely is just using trilinear filtering by default.

[SeraphimLeftNut]

anisotropic filtering is definitely a big help for supcom FA. I set it to x2 in the nvidia control panel. Setting it to x16 has a significant effect on performance. The difference between off and x2 is big enough to use it.