EDIT: 2012 January
These methods are now outdated. Unstickied.
Nvidia drivers have hardcoded disabled AA on BF2.exe due to a bug in teargas (which we use for post processing), so don't expect the wounded shader to work anymore.
Luckily FH2 now uses ForgottenHope2.exe for optimal AA settings.
http://ifihada.com/~jbp/fh2pub/usermanual/#2bOther BF2 shader bugs, such as black terrain patches, were fixed at the root, which Nvidia and ATi had both modified drivers to fix.
Original:
Here is a fix that can be used for the broken shaders when AA is enabled, that were introduced by Nvidia with their drivers newer than 177.83. We told Nvidia/DICE about it but they did not do anything yet to fix it.
Usually when your health goes under 25% the shader kicks in and your screen gets blurry and your minimap is not showing any infos until you apply a bandage to stop the bleeding. When AntiAliasing is enabled ingame this did no longer work, also forcing AA via the ControlPanel was simply ignored and no AA was present ingame.
Now this can be fixed by using a tool called nHancer, it does override the AA setting from outside and the shader works like intended.
What you need:nHancer
http://www.nhancer.com/?language=eIngame BF2 Video Settings > AA > Off
nHancer Settings:- enable 'Options > Allow override of predefined settings'
- pick the BF2 profile
- enable AA > Multisampling > set AA to what you like/your PC can handle
- optional you can also enable AF (AnisotropicFiltering) for some smoother textures, depending on the distance. (the ingame setting 'texture filtering' has a maximum of 4x compared to the possible 16x via nHancer)
nHancer does not need to run in the background for the changes to kick in, it will override the settings anyway.
Another good idea, not 100% sure if it is necessary at all, is to delete the shaders cache for BF2 and FH2 after the changes were done.
C:\...\My Documents\Battlefield 2\mods\bf2\cache
C:\...\My Documents\Battlefield 2\mods\fh2\cache
They look like: {D7B71E3E-46A3-11CF-9854-9B0400C2CB35}_3134_3
Important:Since the latest version of nHancer is a few month old now there are some problems when running it with the latest Nvidia drivers. If you use 19x.xx you might want to to try nhancer 2.5.3 beta.
http://forum.nhancer.com/showpost.php?p=4492&postcount=18hslan.Lord Helmchen just tried the nHancer beta with 190.62 and said it works.What the shader looks like:Additional infosCard: GTX285
Driver used: 186.18 WHQL, all BF2 settings on default in the ControlPanel
DirectX: 9.0c 9.27.1734 August 2009
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=04ac064b-00d1-474e-b7b1-442d8712d553Alt+Tab Hotfix
http://forums.electronicarts.co.uk/battlefield-2/804570-battlefield-2-update-1-50-alt-tab-fix.html (might not be necessary any more, did not test that)
XP Pro 32bit SP3