AMD, or ATI, has made an official statement regarding the handling of antialiasing in the just released StarCraft II. ATI confirms that it has chosen not to enable antialiasing in the driver, since the performance hit is too great.
According to ATI the problem arises from the fact that Blizzard developed the engine without support for antialiasing, which means that the graphics card makers has to force it through the drivers. This is a pretty inefficient solution that locks up a lot of resources for unnecessary optimization, when comparing to engines that can tell whether antialiasing could be useful.
Picture courtesy of PC Perspective
Competitor NVIDIA has the same problem, but has still chosen to enable antialiasing with its drivers, which renders great performance hits, but at the same time gives the users a choice.
ATI feels the hit is too great, but says that it hopes to offer support for antialiasing in StarCraft II at a later stage, and with a less significant drop in performance.
This is how AMD defends its measures in a statement to HardwareCanucks;
AMD constantly strives to deliver great gaming experiences for our customers and the upcoming launch of Starcraft II is no exception. Blizzard’s focus on incredible game play for all, means that gamers using ATI Radeon(tm) products can enjoy smooth HD gameplay and industry leading image quality with our current generation of ATI Radeon products as well as many of our past generation cards.
In discussions during the development of StarCraft II, Blizzard indicated that they would not initially include options to set levels of in-game anti-aliasing (“AA”). This meant that support for AA within StarCraft II would only be made possible by including it in the driver, an approach that could significantly impact performance.
Some third party reviews of the Starcraft II beta echo our concerns that AA can cause gameplay impairment. In these reviews, the third parties found that 4x AA led to a reduction in fps rendering at lower screen resolutions, which only became more noticeable at larger resolutions.
After evaluating our options, our engineering team opted not to provide AA support for StarCraft II within the Catalyst Control Center, even though the competition has included AA support in their driver at launch.
We are committed to making AA perform at an acceptable level before we release it to our customers. We will continue to work with Blizzard on this matter and hope to offer our customers an acceptable AA solution at a later date.
