Cen
22nd November 2015, 12:17 AM
W3 is a very old game now and it doesn't look very good anymore, especially on a large screen (1440p or 4K) and unless you have a very low end GPU, it will idle and hunger for more work because W3 is so simple to render nowadays.
Even if you turned on all the highest settings there is still something you can do: force AA and AF in your GPU driver.
Instructions are for AMD owners (Catalyst drivers). If you have an older AMD card you might not have some of the settings. Nvidia users have similar solutions but I can't provide screenshots for that.
1. Create a new game profile under Gaming->3D application settings->Add, find war3.exe
Set settings like this (8xMSAA and 16xAF). This will make GPU add additional AA and AF post processing to the final picture.
178690
2. Enable VSR. This basically makes the GPU to fake a larger screen than you actually have. For example, my screen is 2560x1440p but with VSR I am able to select 3200x1800 in W3 settings. What this does is make W3 render at higher resolution while GPU scales the picture back to your native screen size, improving the image quality.
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3. Game settings
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4. Result: no VSR, no override
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5. Result: VSR, no override
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6. result: VSR+Override
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We can see that AF does not really help much if at all (textures are just too old and low res) but VSR+MSAA do help. If you dl the screenshots and zoom into the moonglades for example, in result 4. and 5. you can see nasty jaggies in the inner circle but in 6. you can see that the line is much smoother and blurred out.
So all in all, not huge benefits but if you can, why not?
Even if you turned on all the highest settings there is still something you can do: force AA and AF in your GPU driver.
Instructions are for AMD owners (Catalyst drivers). If you have an older AMD card you might not have some of the settings. Nvidia users have similar solutions but I can't provide screenshots for that.
1. Create a new game profile under Gaming->3D application settings->Add, find war3.exe
Set settings like this (8xMSAA and 16xAF). This will make GPU add additional AA and AF post processing to the final picture.
178690
2. Enable VSR. This basically makes the GPU to fake a larger screen than you actually have. For example, my screen is 2560x1440p but with VSR I am able to select 3200x1800 in W3 settings. What this does is make W3 render at higher resolution while GPU scales the picture back to your native screen size, improving the image quality.
178692
3. Game settings
178693
4. Result: no VSR, no override
178691
5. Result: VSR, no override
178694
6. result: VSR+Override
178695
We can see that AF does not really help much if at all (textures are just too old and low res) but VSR+MSAA do help. If you dl the screenshots and zoom into the moonglades for example, in result 4. and 5. you can see nasty jaggies in the inner circle but in 6. you can see that the line is much smoother and blurred out.
So all in all, not huge benefits but if you can, why not?