Alternative AA methods and their comparison with traditional MSAA*

Quality should be close to the same, performance could maybe benefit from forcing triple buffering?

 

And of course user game profiles like Nvidia has will actually make it practical to use.

I retain a bit of reserve on the whole MLAA thing though. It's certainly going to open another can of worms for the iq vs performance debate, and compared to MSAA, not in right direction of higher iq.

 

I dont see it as a replacement as it is ifnerior to 4xMSAA when it comes to avg jaggy smoothing. However a combo of MLAA and MSAA is what really interests me and as a solution to games which dont allow MSAA in any form nor are suitable to play with SSAA. I just cant stand jaggies just like lack of AF and vsync.

 

Examples of AMD's algorithm in action:

Here

Here

And here.

Looking mighty good indeed, and by all reports its basically "free" in most games. So much potential.

 

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=23995596&postcount=354

I dont think it looks very good in HL2, I guess different game have different result.

 

That just is a game that shows the limitations of this technique as you cal see the subpixel powerlines it does nothing for but look at the posts and the hotel name which it helps. Though it looks like there might be a bug in combining it with MSAA atm as the powerlines in the 4x MSAA + MLAA look a lot worse then those just with 4x MSAA.

 

Does a good job on some edges (tops of the buildings are great, posts look good, sign on the building etc), not so well on others. Is the performance nearly free?

 

Was just playing civ 5 with mlaa and it looks amazing. 2x fsaa edge detect and mlaa look even better !

 

Some comparision shots from '3D Center Forum' with no AA, MLAA with ATI GPU.


Dead Space.

No AA.
http://www.abload.de/img/1xaabnya.jpg

MLAA.
http://www.abload.de/img/morphpnbe.jpg

Maybe not a so good comparision

 

In most cases, yes.

 

Personally I'm not too fond of the impact on onscreen text - in Civ 5, for example, graphics look good, but the overlay text has been rounded, which gives an overall 'fuzzy' and wrong look to it. EVE Online is basically unplayable because of its use of small fonts, whereas Quake III is more or less unaffected.

 

I asked Remedy if they were going to look into MLAA or other Anti-Aliasing techniques.. This is what Markus had to say:

http://forum.alanwake.com/showpost.php?p=111126&postcount=22

 

It's actually a very good one, it shows how MLAA doesn't really work on pre-filtered images.

 

Say what? I can count off a few engines that can do that, and surely he is more knowledgeable than me.

 

LittleBigPlanet and Killzone 2 at least have 2xMSAA and deferred rendering, but I don't know if any Xbox 360 games have both.

I would be interested to know how many 60 fps console games are there with full deferred rendering/lighting... Trials HD can't be the only one :S

 

Oh, I didn't consider that he might only be talking about console games

Are there no console UE3 games that use MSAA? I know UE3 supports MSAA on PC, so I assumed it worked on consoles..

 

UE3 only defers shadows. It's otherwise just a forward renderer.

 

The Gears of War games have always had 2xMSAA, but only for static geometry. Same for Mirror's Edge on Xbox 360.

 

Oh. What would be an example of an engine that is "fully deferred" ?

 

STALKER, Metro 33, Trials HD, Starcraft 2, etc. There's a whole set that do lighting deferred in a middle pass (so-called "light pre-pass" variants) that really count as "fully" deferred in this context as well.