Force Direct3D anti-aliasing in a Direct3D game

anti-aliasingdirect3dgamingnvidia-graphics-card

Some old games look really jagged nowadays on large displays without any anti-aliasing, but don't have any option built-in to the game to enable it.

On a PC with an NVIDIA graphics card, it's possible to force anti-aliasing in the NVIDIA control panel which can really improve this. But I'm playing the game in Parallels on a Mac, and although the Mac has an NVIDIA graphics card, it's Parallels' emulated card that Windows sees and so obviously there's no NVIDIA control panel.

Is there some generic way I can force anti-aliasing for a Direct3D game without using the NVIDIA control panel?

Best Answer

You can force SMAA on a DirectX 9, 10 or 11 game by using injectSMAA. It should work with any graphics card brand.

Description

  • adds "Subpixel Morphological Antialiasing" to an application
  • is based on "injectFXAA" (written by "some dude")
  • is supposed to work only with directx 9, directx 10, directx 11, x86 applications
  • may be incompatible with any other form of antialiasing
  • may be incompatible with overlays (Steam Overlay, MSI Afterburner, Fraps, ...)

SMAA is a very efficient GPU-based MLAA implementation, capable of handling subpixel features seamlessly, and featuring an advanced pattern detection & handling mechanism.

http://www.iryoku.com/smaa/

injectSMAA screenshots from the game, Halo: Combat Evolved (does not have an in-game anti-aliasing (AA) option and does not support graphics driver-forced AA):

Click image thumbnails below to view higher-resolution, original-sized image.
No AA:

With SMAA:

Screenshots source: http://mrhaandi.blogspot.com/p/injectsmaa.html (more screenshots from other games from the same webpage)

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