Cartglow Problems?

[FadedOasis]

So here's a thread for anyone who doesn't see the shiny glow around payload carts. Some have speculated that it's an ATI video card problem, but I'm running NVIDIA and also had the problem.

One possible fix for cartglow: Disable anti-aliasing. This worked fine for me, but now everything looks crappy. :-/

[fivealarm]

My cartglow is broken on a Radeon 4870 with Catalyst 10.4 and FSAA enabled. If it's a driver problem I might be SOL. I haven't been able to get Catalyst 10.5/10.6 to install properly.

[Whatsit]

I don't see them on an nVidia 8800GT.
Okay I'm going to start permutating and will post my steps here, in the hopes that it helps others. Okay that was stupid and un-helpful. Here's a summary:

1) Changing Antialiasing from 2xMSAA to None made the outline visible, 8xCSAA removed the outline again.
2) There's some funky buffering going on, so the change only actually occurred when I changed resolution or restarted TF2. The former resulted in some other oddities so I wouldn't trust that, definitely restart TF2 before calling anything broken/fixed.

Oh well, guess I'm stuck with no antialiasing till valve fixes it.

[FadedOasis]

Wow, uh...

So the solution seems to be "keep fucking with things until it works."

Glad you got it working, Whatsit, but I don't really see a huge resolution loss worth cartglow. I hope Valve fixes it soon.

[Jeziah]

If you really want the cartglow and antialiasing at the same time, and your monitor is LCD, just decrease your resolution to slightly less than native. For example, my native resolution is 1280x1024; if I decreased it to 1024x768, the 1024x768 image will be stretched across 1280x1024 pixels and aliased lines will actually be smoothed out by running on a lower resolution xD
'course, small details and things in the distance would seem a little blurred and fonts would be sorta messed up, especially if you don't use ClearType smoothing.

In fact, everybody right-click on your desktop->click "appearance" tab->click "effects"->change the dropdown box with the header "Use the following method to smooth edges of screen fonts" from "standard" to "ClearType" right now, it looks so much better no matter what resolution you are running.

[FadedOasis]

Jeziah, the lower-resolution thing doesn't work for those of us running in windowed, especially if we're windowed-nobordered so we can alt-tab out without TF2 hanging for two minutes.

[fivealarm]

No way would I recommend the below native resolution trick.

All that will do is lower overall image quality and increase eye strain. Definitely not worth it for a pretty cart glow.

[FadedOasis]

It might be worth it if you're only dropping from 1920x1200 to 1680x1050, but definitely not to 1280x768 or something.

[fivealarm]

Even 1920x1200 to 1680x1050 on a large enough screen will look significantly more blurry. The blurriness is what creates the strain, not the number of pixels.

[Jeziah]

I said, "if you REALLY want the cartglow and antialiasing..." Also noteable is that the strain and blurriness is due to the way smaller/more distant/more sharp things are effected, which is why I recommended the ClearType smoothing.
Also of course it doesn't work in windowed mode I mean really

EDIT:
So I tried the resolution trick myself, just to see it, and it wasn't bad at all. The blurring is at a par with gamma exclusion AA, which is to say not bad at all. Hardly noticeable even. The only problem I saw was that distant, thin (crosshatched fences, guardrails) objects were still very badly aliased. Oh, and theres the fact that 1024x768 is a bit low. Still, I might even play like this, if I can confirm it gives me a fps boost.
Oh and ClearType smothing really really makes a big difference.