The Wii doesn't have a PhysX processor. I don't know where you heard that, but it's a silly, unfounded rumor/lie.
A Summary of the Huge Wii Thread
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The_legend_of_drtre
Newcomer
I think he saw the Ageia PhysX symbol on the back of Sonic and the Secret rings box and got a little confused.
Blazkowicz
Legend
AA would have been possible with more EDRAM I think. (if the GPU supports MSAA at all..)
No,it is possible with the current configuration too.
The issue is that it cut into 2/3 the color depth and it cut into half the fillrate.Ah,and need programming.
tongue_of_colicab
Veteran
I dont think AA is that important. Im currently playing the godfather and that doesnt really have any noticable jaggies on my sd tv with standard Wii cable so I rather see all that power used for more poly's or better textures than on reducing jaggies.
AA makes the difference. Compare an image with no AA next to one with AA, even on an SDTV, and it's a significant improvement. I was playing CON with 2xSS for ages, and then the next game I played was FFX, with hideous aliasing and texture shimmer. FFX just looked plain ugly. I'd take GC graphics with 4xSS than no AA with 4x the poly counts any day.
It was quirky, but a lot of games used it. Like Goldeneye and Mario 64. And it is definitely noticeable; Goldeneye has few jaggies. Funny how it became uninteresting to the hardware designers.Maybe because it's never been a selling point? Screenshots always have absurd amounts of AA/AF, and if it's not going to make the difference in selling your game--or releasing pretty screenshots, why focus on it? Why waste more silicon than you have to on AA, when you could be demonstrating more particles and polygons than your competition?
I'd love to have more AA/AF in video games...although my TV is only 480i, and Nintendo's deflicker filter along with judicious use of mip-mapping (and whatever else) make games like Metroid Prime, Wind Waker, Beyond Good & Evil, and F-Zero GX look extremely smooth...and color-rich, I might add. It's sad...back in the 3dfx era, new implementations of AA were all the rage.
Nowadays with videos, AA is going to make a difference in selling the product, as is just showing it to friends. Furthermore, the reason to add something isn't just to improve sales. Otherwise why use 4 textures per object when 3 textures per object will do? 4 textures isn't a selling point. Why choose parallax mapping over normal mapping? It's not going to increase sales of a game.
The overall game experience can't be borken into it's constituent parts and each part dealt with individually. You want high game ratings, and AA gives a sense of polish that can contribute to general impression. It's like if you were to submit a book manuscript to a publishers, would you send it typed, double-space, on clean paper, or scrawled in handwriting with scratching outs on old and coffee-stained lined paper? The presentation matters. AA adds considerably to presentation. AA+60fps would provide an incredible sense of quality which will impress people and give them a better feeling towards your title. They'll then be probably be inclined to rate other parts in a more favourable light - first impressions and all that. Alternatively go with 30 fps and no AA, and look the same as every other game out there. Or, if everyone else is 60 fps + AA, look rough in comparison.
As long as people are watching uncompressed HD footage downloaded over Live/PSN, assuming they already do or soon will offer it. But if you're watching those highly-compressed vids on IGN, it won't make that big a difference.
Because it makes the graphics look snazzy, and snazzy graphics sells games. AA significantly hits resources that could be used for other stuff that is more visible in devshots and compressed videos. And on the PS3, you have a graphics chip that really doesn't like doing AA if you also want HDR (yes, I know there are some workarounds), and on the X360, you have eDRAM that isn't quite large enough to do AA unless you use tiling, which in itself seems to limit what you can do with your graphics engine. And then there are all these tricks you can do that mask a lot of the aliasing as well as add a bullet point to your list of "cool effects," like depth of field, light bloom, and motion blur.
Yet, reviewers don't really seem to care. They didn't care on Xbox when image quality got sacrificed to show off super-duper new graphics tricks in Chronicles of Riddick or Halo 2. GTA has always looked like ass, even for a PS2 game, but reviewers have been extremely forgiving because, well, it's GTA! If reviewers had already shown themselves to be merciless to games that spend most of their time well under 30 fps and plagued with jaggies, we might see a different story. Or if the console manufacturer required a certain level of image quality of their licensees.
Personally, I'm for AA. I would be more than happy with Cube-ish graphics with 4xAA. I simply don't expect developers and publishers to care much about it, not when there's so little payoff.
Well, I'm not really convinced that they don't care. It all comes down to the cost of development it adds. I don't think graphics programmers think entirely about the bottom line. They care about tech and want to push it forward. A graphics programmer would have to be blind to miss what AA can do and how much it has developed over the past 8 years or so.
With 360, we have a console that can do 4X AA for free if you take the time to do use tiling. This isn't some little quirky rendering method; it's how the machine was designed to be used. So, I think AA on 360 is going to become very prevalent. I for one am very pumped for Forza 2, which seems to run ~60fps with 4X AA. Undoubtedly it is going to look very nice if that is the case.
RSX can obviously do AA, but I don't think it has the capability for it to be almost free like 360. PS3 is kinda a lopsided machine though, IMO. Super dooper CPU with a strangely old-tech GPU.
We don't know that Wii can do AA any better than Cube. I'd hope they would've improved that aspect but, from what we've heard from a few devs, it has a lot of Cube like limitations already. To enhance AA functionality over more basic rendering capabilities (like shaders) would be a bit backwards methinks. So, I don't think Wii will much AA, if any. We're seeing a lot of depth of field blur and stuff though, which is sorta another way to deal with some of the aliasing. DoF adds a cool cinematic feel too, which is very nice.
With 360, we have a console that can do 4X AA for free if you take the time to do use tiling. This isn't some little quirky rendering method; it's how the machine was designed to be used. So, I think AA on 360 is going to become very prevalent. I for one am very pumped for Forza 2, which seems to run ~60fps with 4X AA. Undoubtedly it is going to look very nice if that is the case.
RSX can obviously do AA, but I don't think it has the capability for it to be almost free like 360. PS3 is kinda a lopsided machine though, IMO. Super dooper CPU with a strangely old-tech GPU.
We don't know that Wii can do AA any better than Cube. I'd hope they would've improved that aspect but, from what we've heard from a few devs, it has a lot of Cube like limitations already. To enhance AA functionality over more basic rendering capabilities (like shaders) would be a bit backwards methinks. So, I don't think Wii will much AA, if any. We're seeing a lot of depth of field blur and stuff though, which is sorta another way to deal with some of the aliasing. DoF adds a cool cinematic feel too, which is very nice.
tongue_of_colicab
Veteran
But why would you want AA on Wii so bad? Even a port of the godfather doesnt have any jaggies I notice while playing on my SD tv. I rather see they spend the power on better textures and more poly's in wii games. Though if AA is possible I wouldnt mind if ofcourse.
DeadlyNinja
Veteran
Just what is AA!? Let me rephrase that. Was it anti-aliasing that I saw? If not, then what the heck is it?
Someone kept mentioning AA on the N64 and I've seen plenty of jiggies in the polygons. For example, look at the pedestal during the cinematic rotation as Link pulls out the Master Sword. At the same time, I have seen slanted edges that look completely smooth in an N64 game as well. If the N64 is capable of AA, why do I still see jiggies? Yes, I know the higher level of AA, the better the results, but you can see two completely different thinks at the same time! One surface can look smooth while another isn't.
Same deal with GC/Wii. I saw the Elebits screens and they were barf-tastic. I saw the hideous looking aliasing on the edges, but they were extremely hard to see in the actual game. I actually paid special attention to them when I first played that sucker at the Digital Life Conversation last year. I did notice a slight blurring near the edges of the polygon. I saw the same blurring that I see in the sample image when I turn on AA on my video card. If that's not AA that I saw, then what the heck is it?
Someone kept mentioning AA on the N64 and I've seen plenty of jiggies in the polygons. For example, look at the pedestal during the cinematic rotation as Link pulls out the Master Sword. At the same time, I have seen slanted edges that look completely smooth in an N64 game as well. If the N64 is capable of AA, why do I still see jiggies? Yes, I know the higher level of AA, the better the results, but you can see two completely different thinks at the same time! One surface can look smooth while another isn't.
Same deal with GC/Wii. I saw the Elebits screens and they were barf-tastic. I saw the hideous looking aliasing on the edges, but they were extremely hard to see in the actual game. I actually paid special attention to them when I first played that sucker at the Digital Life Conversation last year. I did notice a slight blurring near the edges of the polygon. I saw the same blurring that I see in the sample image when I turn on AA on my video card. If that's not AA that I saw, then what the heck is it?
Yes, AA is shorthand for anti-aliasing. We use that little acronym all the time here at B3D.
Not all N64 games use AA. Quite a few do, however. Mario 64 and Goldeneye for certain. It is called edge AA, which is a finnicky AA method used on older hardware mostly. But it is still very effective. An issue with it is that it won't anti-alias all of the polygon edges in a frame, for whatever reason. This type of AA didn't get used much at all in games. I've only personally seen it otherwise used on Rendition's Verite cards within games programmed for Rendition's Speedy3D API. VQuake and Indycar Racing 2, for example, on PC.
GC very rarely used AA. I'm not sure I've ever seen it do AA, actually. It has some nasty drawbacks when used on that hardware. Really hurts performance.
I don't think any Wii games use AA.
As far as I know, Gamecube and Wii have a certain filter to reduce jaggies, an effect very similar to 2xAA - basically for free. This effect is not visible on screenshots (more precisely framebuffer grabs), though...
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