The last week has seen a lot of good progress with the Dreamworld technology version. The issues we mentioned last week with the poor performance of the anti-aliasing feature have been resolved with a little help from our friends at NVIDIA, and the introduction of a new form of anti-aliasing known as FXAA. The first versions with this solution have now been deployed to the test server and are being put through their paces.

Our Lead render coder Fred Richardson was happy to elaborate a little more about the new option:

"We are actually one of the first games to get access to this new solution. FXAA is a new anti aliasing technique developed by NVIDIA which provides highly effective edge smoothing, based on image luminance variations. It is designed to be extremely compatible with deferred engines, by avoiding the issues traditional hardware MSAA presents with regards to retrieving sub-pixel depth buffer samples. In addition it has much lower video memory requirements, while still producing extremely high quality results and avoiding slight image blurring which is common to other image based anti aliasing solutions."

That testing means we should now be in the last leg of testing for the engine update. We felt it was worth the few extra days to ensure that there was an Anti-aliasing option available when the update goes live. We have now checked through most of the important performance indicators, and are very pleased with the progress. Memory handling has vastly improved so that those running 32 bit operating systems should no longer suffer from out of memory issues. The DX10 version runs much smoother, and is in fact now slightly faster than it's DX9 counterpart. For it's part the DX9 version now has a far more fully featured visual suite of effects, which have been introduced with minimal impact (for most there will be no change, for lower end machines trying to run higher settings you may notice a slight dip in fps due to the enhanced visuals now available in DX9. Likewise the reaction from testers has reflected that improvement as we have worked through the versions, so we are looking forward now to the deployment stages of the update.

So with a little luck the next week will see the completion of the Dreamworld testing, presuming the FXAA doesn't require further tweaking, and then we will be outlining the plan for deploying the update to the live servers.