So say you just came back from running a modern game at high graphics and you come back to our good old Istaria. Immediately, you're hit with its age. The textures, while not horrible by any means, are a small resolution, there's no normal maps or specular maps, and, the worst offender - the lack of anti-aliasing. Here is an unmodified screenshot of Istaria on absolute max settings including shadows...

THE HORROR! THE PIXELS!

Sadly I can't help with the first two, but I can definitely help with the last! Introducing.. the nVidia Control Panel.

Aw yeah.

So to get here, just...

1. Search your PC for "NVIDIA Control Panel"
2. Choose "Manage 3D Settings"
3. Find "istaria.exe" or "Istaria" under the drop down list. If it does NOT show up, click "Add" and choose istaria.exe in your install path.

Now you're here on this wonderful screen! Let's get started. The techy of you can figure it out from here, probably, but these are my settings:



Anisotropic filtering doesn't seem to really do anything that I can visibly tell, so I had turned that on/off and made it bold by accident. Whoops. Ignore that.

The rest is purposeful. The gamma correction might not be needed, but the others are important.
Set Antialiasing - Mode to Override any application setting.
Set Antialiasing - Setting to whichever setting your computer can handle. 8x is max, which is what I have.
Set Antialiasing - Transparency the same - you'll get jagged edges on the edge of transparent textures otherwise. (Ex. dragon frills)
Make sure to hit "Apply" in the bottom right! It's easy to miss.
Do NOT use Antialiasing - FXAA! This causes your UI and text to blur out.

Now.. what did you do all of this for? The heck did it change?
Take a look:


Those pixely edges smoothed out gives the game a much smoother and more modern feel to it than those horrid jagged ones.

Now go out there and enjoy your smoother game!

I'll say this now - I have absolutely no idea how to do this for any other brands than nVidia cards. If anyone knows how, please post below!

Thank you Scaleeth for making me aware of this ages ago! <3