Driver-applied MLAA on D3D9 games like GTA 4?

[Brad Grenz]

What do you think? Any chance MLAA will work with 5XXX and 4XXX cards as well?

 

[AnarchX]

HD 5000 probably yes => Compute Shader 5.0.
HD 4000 probably not => Compute Shader 4.1.

 

[fellix]

Finally, for those of you curious how this is being handled internally, this is actually being done by AMD’s drivers through a DirectCompute shader. Furthermore they’re taking heavy advantage of the Local Data Store of their SIMD design to keep adjacent pixels in memory to speed it up, with this being the biggest reason why it has such a low amount of overhead. Since it’s a Compute Shader, this also means that it should be capable of being back-ported to the 5000 series, although AMD has not committed to this yet. There doesn’t appear to be a technical reason why this isn’t possible, so ultimately it’s up to AMD and if they want to use it to drive 6800 series sales over 5000 series sales.

HD4000 may not get the goods here, if the LDS woes in RV770 from OCL are valid to some extent for DC4.x.

 

[Tamlin]

It absolutely kills performance though, will be interesting to see how this compares.

Here it is in Starcraft 2:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-hd-6870-radeon-hd-6850-barts,2776-4.html

 

[brain_stew]

So its essentially "free" for all practical purposes, then? Fantastic.

Here's a gif of the results, it is slightly destructive but no where near as bad as that slide implied, the only real "gotcha" is that it effects HUD elements as well. Still a huge step forward, its going to be a life saver for games without proper MSAA support and even prove useful in games where there is proper MSAA support but performance makes it unfeasible (like Starcraft 2).

http://media.bestofmicro.com/E/8/266192/original/morphological aa comparo.gif

and the HUD:

http://media.bestofmicro.com/E/A/266194/original/morphological aa text.gif

 

[Neb]

Yeah those slides where crappy. Anyway this + 2-8xMSAA will be awesome. Also perfomance impact seems minor despite doing MLAA on 1920x1080 frames.

 

[digitalwanderer]

I just like how MLAA works with GTA4, so cool to finally have some AA going in that game!

 

[Malo]

So its essentially "free" for all practical purposes, then? Fantastic.

I don't think you could count 1 example as free overall. It might be that just for this title there is free computing resources available to process the MLAA with no cost.

 

[no-X]

HD 5000 probably yes => Compute Shader 5.0.
HD 4000 probably not => Compute Shader 4.1.

It also means, that MLAA won't be available for XP users.

 

[BRiT]

Would XP users even own a 5000 or 6000 series card? It kind of seems silly to think they'd own a recent GPU but not a recent OS.

Unfortunately it seems like 6800's MLAA information is kind of scarce right now. It's the most interesting aspect right now because it's new-ish. If it's truely shader-based then it could be possible to have different MLAA shaders or settings per game to tweak the results. It would be a lot of work, but the payout could be great.

 

[Jawed]

What's the betting that NVidia delivers MLAA to gamers first?

(What a stupid acronym it is, too.)

 

[AlexV]

It also means, that MLAA won't be available for XP users.

Why would it? If ATI chooses to expose it, it's just fine.

 

[Malo]

Would XP users even own a 5000 or 6000 series card? It kind of seems silly to think they'd own a recent GPU but not a recent OS.

Remember how many 8800's ran (and still run) on XP? Same thing here really. It's probably far less prevalent given the much higher adoption of W7 compared to Vista, but it will still happen a lot.

 

[no-X]

Why would it? If ATI chooses to expose it, it's just fine.

I think you can't run CS5.0 in XP, co if MLAA is CS5.0 dependant, it will be available only in Vista/W7.

 

[AlexV]

I think you can't run CS5.0 in XP, co if MLAA is CS5.0 dependant, it will be available only in Vista/W7.

Why would it be dependent on that though? Unless ATI are knobs (I have sincere doubts this is the case), their implementation is at least two levels lower.

 

[Davros]

Would XP users even own a 5000 or 6000 series card? It kind of seems silly to think they'd own a recent GPU but not a recent OS.

Game wise xp is more compatible than win7

 

[Brad Grenz]

Game wise xp is more compatible than win7

But it's an old and broke down piece of shit, too. If you had an old 386 with a soundblaster 16 it'd be super compatible with ancient DOS games, too. At a point you have to decide if you want backwards compatibility or forwards compatibility. Windows 7 x64 is awesome. The sooner developers stop worrying about Luddites who won't upgrade from XP, the better.

 

[karlotta]

Game wise xp is more compatible than win7

Well if you call your self a "real"PC gamer. you have a XP box and a Win7 box.( also a old game box). If you call your self a real gamer who loves IQ, then you will have a 4.gz CPU and more System Ram than you can use.
As for me i can run many XPish Games on win7 NP.

 

[digitalwanderer]

It also means, that MLAA won't be available for XP users.

MLAA should be supported by all DX11 AMD cards.

 

[no-X]

Yes. But AMD says, that MLAA is done via DirectCompute. You need DX11 installed to use direct compute. And it's not possible to install DX11 on WinXP... so? :neutral: