Bloom vs AA, Advanced Sound

[Astalder]

For some reason if I turn on Bloom, I can't have AA, and likewise. Could someone explain why this is, or is it a bug?

Also, I have a SBL X-Gamer 5.1 with EAX, but none of the sound boxes are checkable, is that how it should be?

[Heresy_Fnord]

Bloom is a lighting effect which casts a glow of light from the original source onto things around it. Sort of indirect light glow.

It's a little hard to explain but it will not work right with AA (multisampling) turned on and this was set by the developer.

Not sure if anyone here played or is playing Deus Ex 2 and owns a Radeon card.

If you turn bloom on in the game and AA in the hardware card section, you see all these odd little squares on the vertexes of everything in the game.

Anyway the short of it is it doesn't work and was disabled by the developers.

If you go into your directory where thief is installed you'll see a readme file. Scroll down and look for Known Graphical Issues and there is a bit that talks about bloom and multisampling, also known as anti-aliasing.

[Kyrandos]

Bloom and AA sort of do the same thing. As I understand the technology (shaky knowledge):

Bloom is a filter, it is applied after a scene is fully rendered, and blurs everything uniformly. It sort of looks like someone just hit you hard on the head, and now you are walking around seeing everything in a daze. Try looking around real fast with it on.

Anti-Aliasing happens during the individual rendering phases, and only affects the edges of surfaces being drawn. Problem is, theres a lot of surfaces to hit, and it has to SEARCH for them, however many times you specify it to. (2x,4x,6x,8x)

Bloom is much more efficient, but looks like crap, IMHO. I would imagine that if both AA and bloom were used together, it would cause a very odd effect around the edges of surfaces, with that area having two different blurring processes applied to it.

I'm sure theres a better explanation though.

[Heresy_Fnord]

Originally posted by Kyrandos
[B]Bloom and AA sort of do the same thing.

Not true.

Look again in the readme file and for that matter do some searches for the bloom tech used in Deus Ex 2 and Thief 3.

Light Bloom give the lighting in the game a glowing look to it.

It has nothing to do with multisampling/anti-aliasing which is used to reduce jagged edges on lines.

They simply are not compatible.

[KenH]

To get the eax going, you have to select them one by one in order.. I was stumped for a bit on this as well when I went straight to the last one.

[Kyrandos]

Originally posted by Heresy_Fnord

Light Bloom give the lighting in the game a glowing look to it.

It has nothing to do with multisampling/anti-aliasing which is used to reduce jagged edges on lines.

Ah, regardless, it still blurs everything on the screen pretty bad

[Heresy_Fnord]

Ah, regardless, it still blurs everything on the screen pretty bad

Perhaps, although I feel with Bloom off the game looks to clear and that's just me.

Anti-aliasing is a far different type of blur and it has nothing to do with "blurring your view" like a lighting effect such a bloom might do.

Anti-aliasing, is used to re-render a scene a number of times (2x, 4x) and to get rid of the jagged edges by blurring their appearance.

You see lines in games aren't like lines drawn on paper. They're actually horizontal or vertical bars stacked on top of each other. Well when you stack bars you get what looks like stairs right?

Well if you re-render the scene say twice in a row (2x AA) with slightly different math equations, you get the stairs in two slightly different places, therefore blurring the jagged edges by 2. 4x would make 4 times the number of edges and therefore give you less jagged edges because of the blurring effect.

Bloom on the other hand is a lighting effect and may or may not blur your view through Garretts eyes. To really see the effects of bloom it's actually best to play Deus Ex 2 and to disable the effect and renable as needed while you're need a neon glowing sign.

[Quillan]

EAX is only supported if you have an Audigy or Audigy 2 sound card. The games uses EAX 4.0, which the older cards don't support (because it hadn't been developed yet).