It has been dominating the news the past couple days, apparently Valve are having trouble getting FSAA (a method of improving image quality) working on nVidia DX9 based graphics cards. Unfortunately it appears to be a problem which cannot be fixed through driver updates, but something which is affected by hardware and will not be fixed until DX9.1 compliant cards emerge on the market.

nVidia graphics card users may have to resort to not using FSAA if the problem is not fixed by the time the game hits retail stores - I struggle to notice the difference generated by FSAA anyway when concentrating on getting my next frag and this slight flaw wouldn't stop me going out and buying Half Life 2 in September. Or maybe it's just me...?

The highly-anticipated Half-Life 2 game will have a major bug with current DirectX 9.0 hardware resulting in impossibility in enabling Full-Scene Anti-Aliasing, a popular feature that dramatically improves image quality in games. Apparently, there is a limitation in DirectX 9.0 and/or DirectX 9.0-compliant hardware that will not allow the function to be enabled on certain graphics cards if the workaround is not found.

 

According a Valve officials quoted in forums at HalfLife2.net web-site, there are problems with the way that current hardware implements FSAA. If you enable it, you will see a lot of artifacts on polygon boundaries due to the way that current graphics processors sample texture subjects with FSAA enabled.