Alternative AA methods and their comparison with traditional MSAA*

[Shifty Geezer]

Going OT, but wouldn't it be best for the IHVs to have a hook so developers can choose to opt-out of driver options? That way games that would suffer can sidestep the forced-AA and other issues as simply as setting a flag without the IHVs having to list games at all.

 

[tabs]

...and the majority just would, in case of errors. Yay for less choice for the consumer, I guess. I'm all for protecting devs/pubs from legions of forgetful people ringing up their customer support, but please don't take away my options. I like gaming on a PC for a reason.

I think the best solution would be to leave AA and AF out of the global override settings. It doesn't really have a place there any more. Nowadays too many games have issues with it, and with the broad spectrum of games we play they frequently require different AA modes anyway, to get a nice IQ/FPS balance.

Give me MORE driver AA options, like FXAA and different supersampling modes, but make them tied to a particular executable.

 

[homerdog]

...and the majority just would, in case of errors. Yay for less choice for the consumer, I guess. I'm all for protecting devs/pubs from legions of forgetful people ringing up their customer support, but please don't take away my options. I like gaming on a PC for a reason.

IHV just needs to make sure the global override doesn't apply to that particular game. Then if the user defines a profile for that executable he can wreak whatever AA havok he wants. Everybody wins.

 

[Andrew Lauritzen]

but in the end MSAA often just feel like it's standing in the way and making everything complicated.

Indeed, it does make everything more complicated, but for good reason: it introduces multi-frequency shading and non-uniform visibility samples, both of which are really important in getting high quality, temporally stable rendering. You can do fancier reconstruction filters *in addition* to that, but no matter how fancy, I know of no better way than those tools to actually address real aliasing in any sort of efficient way.

So yeah, while I'm the first to say that GBAA, FXAA, MLAA, etc. is all a step up from no anti-aliasing, it's quite clear when they are compared directly that MSAA is still the king of quality. I just don't see how you can get around the fact that in some places you really do need to shade more than once per pixel (and probably evaluate visibility even more than that) if you want a good image.

As far as overrides go, they should be specific to applications at the very least, and only turned on for applications that the IHVs have tested themselves (or that the user overrides on a per-application basis only - no global overrides!). They already do this for shader replacement and other scheduling optimizations. Even then, patches can still break crap, but it's a start. The key here is that the default for an application that they don't know about should be to just do what it says and not screw around with it.

 

[homerdog]

I MSAA. I'd consider the post process AA in Witcher 2 to be pretty good for what it is, but it's a mess compared to proper AA like I see in Just Cause 2.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

I just don't see how you can get around the fact that in some places you really do need to shade more than once per pixel (and probably evaluate visibility even more than that) if you want a good image.

And remember what Carmack also mentioned at Quakecon, once you start raytracing reflections on bumpy surfaces, you'll quickly find that even 4-8 shading samples per pixel aren't nearly enough. As the quality and complexity starts to increase, so will the need for better AA.

 

[swaaye]

IHV just needs to make sure the global override doesn't apply to that particular game.

I don't think it's ideal to rely on the IHV to look into every single game release. There are too many. This is why I think the global options should simply go away completely and both vendors should only have profile-based settings for specific games.

 

[Andrew Lauritzen]

I don't think it's ideal to rely on the IHV to look into every single game release. There are too many. This is why I think the global options should simply go away completely and both vendors should only have profile-based settings for specific games.

That I can get behind, particularly if there's a big fat warning saying it can screw stuff up in addition

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I don't think it's ideal to rely on the IHV to look into every single game release. There are too many. This is why I think the global options should simply go away completely and both vendors should only have profile-based settings for specific games.

Yes, I think that's best. Have users be required to set options per title, with sufficient warning that not all features are supported by all games and there may be problems. That shifts the onus off IHVs and developers and on to users.

 

[reptile]

I'm not sure it'll belong to this thread, but anyway... has anybody else experimented with using these post-effect AA shaders for anything else? I'm actually using FXAA for upscaling my quarter-size particle buffer - the quality is pretty good for adding only a few 0.1's to the original vanilla bilinear shader. Interestingly, modifying the GREEN_AS_LUMA to "RED_AS_LUMA" does slow the shader down somewhat, but it's not too bad, and the quality improves a lot - red is much more likely to be the dominant component in a grayish-orangeish particle buffer.

 

[PeterAce]

FXAA beta10 Injection DLL hack works really well in Sniper: Ghost Warrior - an added bonus is that it softens the edges of the 1024x1024 shadows maps nicely (by far the worst aliasing in this title).

 

[Dave Baumann]

Though based on MSAA techniques here is an EQAA dev paper for AMD Radeon 6900 GPU's:

http://developer.amd.com/sdks/radeon/assets/EQAA Modes for AMD HD 6900 Series Cards.pdf

 

[Andrew Lauritzen]

Though based on MSAA techniques

That's a good thing, not bad

Do you guys provide any additional details on what exactly happens with EQAA in the ROP stage? Since there's no depth per coverage sample, does it depend on the triangle rendering order (front to back or vice versa)?

 

[Novum]

Isn't EQAA the sames as the CSAA that NVIDIA had since G80?

 

[swaaye]

I have a question about EQAA/CSAA. Does it break in some games? I noticed in Oblivion that 16X CSAA looks worse than 4X MSAA. Of course this is it being forced on a game that normally doesn't support HDR + AA.

 

[Andrew Lauritzen]

Isn't EQAA the sames as the CSAA that NVIDIA had since G80?

It seems to be pretty similar, but neither is well-documented at a technical level.

 

[homerdog]

AMD's EQAA is conceptually similar (identical?) to NVIDIA's CSAA, but AMD offers more modes, including the interesting 2xMSAA + 2 extra coverage samples to give a cheap 4xMSAA effect.

NVIDIA states that you'll want to have 4 color samples before you start adding more coverage samples, and they are probably right, but if 4xMSAA is to taxing it's nice to have the 4xEQAA option.

 

[orangpelupa]

I have a question about EQAA/CSAA. Does it break in some games? I noticed in Oblivion that 16X CSAA looks worse than 4X MSAA. Of course this is it being forced on a game that normally doesn't support HDR + AA.

seems break some game. i tried on Dragon Nest and it make weird blurr for 2cm hight from left to right. in almost middle screen.

 

[itsmydamnation]

i have been loving Subpixel Morphological Antialiasing 2.4 (SMAA) for oblivion via OBGEv3

its really nice because you are able to do comparisions of

FXAA(version 3)
MLAA
DLAA
MDLAA
MFXAA
SMAA

for me SMAA leaves the others in the dust.


edit: EQAA brakes oblivion for me ( when im not running OBGE, which is never ;p )

 

[KKRT]

i have been loving Subpixel Morphological Antialiasing 2.4 (SMAA) for oblivion via OBGEv3

its really nice because you are able to do comparisions of

FXAA(version 3)
MLAA
DLAA
MDLAA
MFXAA
SMAA

for me SMAA leaves the others in the dust.


edit: EQAA brakes oblivion for me ( when im not running OBGE, which is never ;p )

Can You make some screens and videos with comparison of FXAA, SMAA and MLAA? :>