Hi guys,

I just realized my game doesn't look so great with anything less than 8x multisampling, even 4x causes ugly alaising/flickering. My 8800GT card has 8x cabability.

What about your card ? And how about laptops, do they have good video cards these days ?

I plan on selling my game on Steam so I'm figuring most buyers there will have a halfway decent system.

What do you think ?

Thanks.

If you're dealing with Steam then here are the figures.

I don't, or if I do, I can't run modern games with multisampling on without running at a really low resolution which looks even worse on my monitor.

One nice thing about the cap in processor speed in recent years, along with the continued configurability of graphics options, is that I can still just about play modern games on a 3 year old system - something unthinkable a few years ago when processor speeds were increasing all the time.

Still, write for your target market. I appreciate I am not typical of a hard-core gamer.

I cannot run modern games at all... on my main PC. But even Quake 3 can run at 8X MSAA with no problem on GeForce 240 DDR3 and GeForce 6600 GT (I'm not sure max AA level was 8x). Warcraft3 will also run at max AA level with no trouble on both, even at top resolution.

Old standards, I know, but you get an idea of complexity.

For everything that is discrete, I'd say 8x MSAA is commodity... if the game is simple enough.
But on integrated I'd say it's a tough call.

Specifying 8x MSAA as a requirement is a very bad idea -- a 1080p frame-buffer is 8MiB x 2 (16MiB total for front and back).
If you've got 8x MSAA enabled too, then the device needs to reserve an extra 63MiB for the MSAA buffer (now up to 79MiB total).
My home monitor's native resolution is 2048x1152 - 8xMSAA requires 90MiB total, compared to 18MiB.

Frame buffers of this size will perform very poorly on older cards, forcing people to reduce their resolution.
I'd rather play in 2048x1152 with no AA, rather than in 720p with 8x AA.

I have to wonder what it is about your graphics that are making 4x look that bad.

Can you post a screen shot of the problem? There's a chance that the ideal solution might not be technical.

I have Radeon 67xx and I don't run with anything above 2x AA, simply because it adds so much latency. It may make certain edge cases look slightly better, but I just don't find it worth the extra sluggishness.

Then again, I used to be able to tell the difference between 80 and 100 FPS, while considering anything below 120FPS unplayable.

I don't even know what my card supports anymore, considering it's like 5 years old. I can't play any modern games on my computer at all.

I wouldn't place a requirement for 8x multisampling anyway. Why would you mandate something like that? Are you going to hard code your game to use 8x mutlisampling and nothing else? This is a prime example of the sort of option that PC gamers expect to be able to adjust to meet their hardware's abilities.

Needless to say, I'd be pretty ticked if I had a graphics card that was otherwise able to run your game but didn't meet that requirement and so I was unable to play the game.

Needless to say, I'd be pretty ticked if I had a graphics card that was otherwise able to run your game but didn't meet that requirement and so I was unable to play the game.

I was pretty ticked when magicka would not run on my laptop on minimum settings. Wierdly, the gameplay worked fine, but the menus were totally messed up.

IIRC 8xAA on nvidia cards (last time I looked) is combo of
4xMSAA rendered at twice the windows size thus also 2xsupersampling.
I assume its the supersampling (which is expensive) which is causing a large difference.
post a screenshot