Alternative AA methods and their comparison with traditional MSAA*
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Driver teams of course would still be able to reverse engineer the shaders and turn them into something not retarded if the programmers refuse to stop herp-derping, but yeah ... the universal overrides will break.
The best way to solve the situation is for Microsoft to stop lobbying developers for poor PC support (I just don't see any way for say mr. Sweeney to have proper fucked the PC port of his engine to the extent he has without financial benefit) and for PC gamers to wake up and smell the coffee and stop rewarding mediocrity.
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Well I'd say we'd have to be blind to not notice that game experiences are becoming homogenized/normalized and the PC gamer enthusiast niche is clearly being quietly eliminated by the game publishers (the guys who pay the devs). Even consoles are losing their exclusives unless it's first party stuff.
I won't even be surprised if in the future it becomes all cloud based Onlive-like gaming to remove all hardware variability and minimize end user support challenges. And this probably isn't even going against what most modern gamers want from gaming. Hardware junkies whining about FSAA and AF are definitely the minority.
I won't even be surprised if in the future it becomes all cloud based Onlive-like gaming to remove all hardware variability and minimize end user support challenges. And this probably isn't even going against what most modern gamers want from gaming. Hardware junkies whining about FSAA and AF are definitely the minority.
You don't need to be a hardware junkie to notice the lack of FSAA and AF, you just need to be other than blind.
It might not make or break the experience for them, but that doesn't mean they wouldn't prefer it. If there's a competitive alternative offering significantly better visuals I think it becomes an issue.
http://www.hardocp.com/article/2011/07/18/nvidias_new_fxaa_antialiasing_technology
[H] FXAA performance and IQ review based on FXAA1 in FEAR3.
[H] FXAA performance and IQ review based on FXAA1 in FEAR3.
Nominated for worst article ever. This really lets me know how little people understand these methods though if even a semi-techy site can post stuff that is obviously as wrong as that.HardOCP Article said:
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Those guys don't pretend to be technical or necessarily need to know the finer details. All that matters to them is what their eyeballs see.
They are clearly overexcited about all the new post process AA filters. It seems that they have missed the most important point... Without any sub pixel data you cannot recreate the lost detail. Post process filters will reduce the visible aliasing (in many cases), but these techniques will also increase the error in the image signal.
Post AA is currently a good compromise for consoles, because it's cheaper than 2x MSAA and often looks better. Pure post AA filters are not going to replace subsample based techniques in the (near) future. Subsample based techniques will always have better image quality, since they have more data to use.
It's going to be interesting to see whether post AA or MSAA based techniques are used more in the next generation console games. Full HD (1920x1080) is 2.25x pixels compared to 720p. The increase in resolution will reduce the post AA errors. The more DPI you have, the less sophisticated AA is required. MSAA will of course be cheaper in the future hardware as well, and with more sophisticated GPUs we can utilize various techniques to reduce the impact. If 60 fps gaming gets more popular, temporal reprojection techniques combined with post AA filters could provide the needed extra subsamples and some extra temporal stability.
Assuming a fixed frequency of surfaces in your scene, yes. But I'm assuming better hardware will also cause people to make more complex geometry (tessellation w/ displacement, etc). There's obviously a limit where it just becomes visual noise, but the world is still a fair bit more detailed than what we have in current generation games so we have a ways to go
Yeah I'm on the fence on temporal methods like that as they tend to fail at the worst possible times (i.e. when frame-rate is dipping), but I agree there's potential.
It would be nice to finally see 4X MSAA in every game, but I won't be surprised if they yet again prioritize other eye candy. It will probably depend on all platforms having a similar capacity to perform MSAA.
Of course, shader aliasing is now a major problem that can make MSAA seem ineffectual, so we need the post process AA since nobody besides me and homerdog gives a damn about SSAA.
Isn't that just a very easy to make typo - MSAA instead of MLAA when you're typing lots of acronyms and have been using MSAA for years already? I haven't read the article so maybe it is nonsense, but I'd read that first-and-foremost as a typo and assume the authors aren't completely blind to the benefits of MSAA.
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