How long did Blizzard spend developing StarCraft II? Since 2003, give or take some time here and there when the company needed all hands on deck for World of Warcraft. So you’d think that would be enough time to figure out how to implement anti-aliasing into the graphics engine, right? You see where I’m going with this.
Blizzard has come underunder fire from certain sections of the PC gaming crowd for the lack of in-game anti-aliasing. Does a game like StarCraft II really need AA? Eh… debatable. I mean, you absolutely want to see it in there, no question. It is 2010 after all. But will the lack of AA kill your enjoyment of the game? Probably not, no.
Nvidia’s latest software gives gamers the ability to force AA, but this comes at a performance hit.
ATI, on the other hand, offers no such option. At least not yet.
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.
This was followed up, a few hours later, with a tweet from ATI that says a hotfix, one that would offer some sort of AA implementation, is on the way.
So there we have it. No AA from Blizzard, a brute force option offered by Nvidia, and ATI saying, “One moment, please…”
As the world turns, I suppose.