Alternative AA methods and their comparison with traditional MSAA*

[Andrew Lauritzen]

Yeah agreed that you have to have a pretty low end GPU for it to be the bottleneck in Skryim... it's a pretty heavy CPU game (I imagine it has pretty poor batching/command submission optimization on PC) and it does almost nothing on the GPU. I kid you not when I say it runs exactly the same frame rate at 2560x1600 as it does at 1280x800 (on a single 6970) in a lot of cases...

Thus it's pretty hard to complain about the performance of MSAA in Skyrim.

 

[homerdog]

Thus it's pretty hard to complain about the performance of MSAA in Skyrim.

Especially when it produces such better results than FXAA.

 

[KKRT]

Yeah agreed that you have to have a pretty low end GPU for it to be the bottleneck in Skryim... it's a pretty heavy CPU game (I imagine it has pretty poor batching/command submission optimization on PC) and it does almost nothing on the GPU. I kid you not when I say it runs exactly the same frame rate at 2560x1600 as it does at 1280x800 (on a single 6970) in a lot of cases...

Thus it's pretty hard to complain about the performance of MSAA in Skyrim.

Dunno, i have like 20-30 fps difference between 1.5x1.5 OGSSAA and native resolution [on 560]. I'm still near 60fps most of the time, but i hate going down to 40, especially in games without motion blur.
MSAA is not heavy in Skyrim, but still cost performance and i think could increase my low fps to 50 if i would used postAA solution.
I would love to use 2x2 OGSSAA + SMAA [with FXAA was awesome], but it makes game more unstable, gives me lower performance than 1.5x1.5 OGSSAA + 4x MSAA ;\ [and i cant make screenshots with fraps in this resolution - dunno why]

 

[Andrew Lauritzen]

Dunno, i have like 20-30 fps difference between 1.5x1.5 OGSSAA and native resolution [on 560]. I'm still near 60fps most of the time, but i hate going down to 40, especially in games without motion blur.

"20-30fps" difference is a meaningless statement. Use milliseconds per frame for such comparisons.

Also ordered grid SSAA is a massive, *massive* waste of computational power. You have MSAA hardware that does jittered grids. You have per-sample shader execution (i.e. super-sampling). Why in the hell would you ever do ordered grids other than hating yourself?

 

[snarfbot]

what version of fxaa inject are you guys using?

im using ver 10 and it actually performs worse than smaa, at least in re 5.

im going to install crysis, and see if i get the same results.

also im getting wierd alpha artifacts in dead space with smaa injector.

 

[KKRT]

"20-30fps" difference is a meaningless statement. Use milliseconds per frame for such comparisons.

Also ordered grid SSAA is a massive, *massive* waste of computational power. You have MSAA hardware that does jittered grids. You have per-sample shader execution (i.e. super-sampling). Why in the hell would you ever do ordered grids other than hating yourself?

Because normal SSAA and TrMSAA from nvidia inspector dont work for me in my Skyrim [probably driver issue, i'm waiting for new full release].
And i cant tell You 'ms' difference, because i have only fraps info. The difference is 40-70, instead of 55-90fps average.

 

[PeterAce]

The nVidia 290.36 Beta drivers now support 'forcing' FXAA on both D3D and OGL (it's not exposed in the regular Control Panel, use nvidia Inspector instead).

Workes great in GTA IV.

It does seem that as newer games are quite quickly intergrating FXAA into their game engines the injectors/overiding techniques will no longer be required.

 

[Andrew Lauritzen]

And i cant tell You 'ms' difference, because i have only fraps info. The difference is 40-70, instead of 55-90fps average.

To convert fps to milliseconds, use "1000 / fps", so in this case it would be say, 1000 / 60 ~ 16.7ms and 1000 / 70 ~ 14.3ms so a difference of ~2.4ms. Note that those ranges are pretty wide though so it's hard to determine anything conclusive from them.

FXAA/MLAA/whatever is dead simple to implement in a game, hence why many will add it (like SSAO last generation). Unfortunately (deferred) MSAA often takes a bit more work, so even if it is better some people simply don't have the time or experience to do it

 

[Gitaroo]

question, does GWFL, steam or starcraft 2 detect these injection method as cheat? I want to know for SC2. Don't want to get my account banned.

 

[homerdog]

The difference between 4xMSAA and 8xMSAA is very noticeable in Skyrim. Generally I don't go higher that 4x because I can't tell much difference, but in this game I certainly can. Especially in the loading screens. I wish more devs would implement this amazing feature.

FXAA looks subjectively much worse than even 4xMSAA, and with vsync on none of these settings (4 or 8xMSAA or FXAA) have any impact on framerate. So 8xMSAA + FXAA it is.

 

[Gitaroo]

anyone with 460 get huge frame drop with 4XMSAA in skyrim? I heard ppl keep saying that the MSAA is free in that game, or is 460 too weak

 

[KKRT]

To convert fps to milliseconds, use "1000 / fps", so in this case it would be say, 1000 / 60 ~ 16.7ms and 1000 / 70 ~ 14.3ms so a difference of ~2.4ms. Note that those ranges are pretty wide though so it's hard to determine anything conclusive from them.

I know how to convert it , i thought You were asking for GPU ms time. So fps i gave was meaningful, because i gave direct comparison [that 'i'm close to 60fps most of the time'], but its not meaningful of course if You're talking about 20-30 difference and dont mention that it was really in range of 270-300fps

And they were wide, because i was talking about min-max fps situation [excluding looking at walls/skies of course].

 

[homerdog]

anyone with 460 get huge frame drop with 4XMSAA in skyrim? I heard ppl keep saying that the MSAA is free in that game, or is 460 too weak

Dude it works without a hitch on my GTX260. Mind you I game at 1440x900 but I think your GTX460 could hand 4xMSAA @ 1080p without breaking a sweat.

 

[Gitaroo]

but I am getting huge drop in frame rate at 4XMSAA @ 1080p.

 

[homerdog]

http://techreport.com/articles.x/22048/1

According the that article the GTX460 can handle 8xMSAA @ 1080p. I think 4xMSAA should not be a problem.

 

[Man from Atlantis]

FXAA Temporal is on the road..

TEMPORAL ALGORITHM

The new algorithm makes use of 2x temporal super-sampling for much higher base quality with none of the disadvantages of the prior only spatial FXAA 3.11. Render even frames with a quarter-pixel shift to the upper left and odd frames with a quarter-pixel shift to the lower right

RUN-TIME VARIABLE RESOLUTION RENDERING

Rendered input frame can be either larger or smaller than native resolution. FXAA automatically does the re-sampling for free. Supports any fractional resolution (does not have to be a multiple of native size). Supporting up to ultra-high-quality 4x OGSSAA all the way down to 1/4x native area. Game can dynamically adapt rendering resolution to maintain desired frame rate.


MIX MSAA + OGSSAA + FXAA 2xTSSAA

This version of FXAA is designed to work really well with already filtered input. The new algorithm is based on a pure filtering approach, without any "searching" which would constrain the algorithm to a pixel grid or would cause problems when MSAA "hides edges". Use MSAA or CSAA during normal rendering and just pipe that into the new FXAA. FXAA enables free mixing of variable resolution hardware AA like MSAA, OGSSAA (ordered grid super-sampling), and TSSAA (temporal super-sampling). Game can scale to any quality level.


REALLY DAMN FAST

The current high quality setting uses only 9 texture fetches per pixel. This is the same number of texture fetches taken by FXAA 3.11 Console on PS3. Have not ported the new FXAA to PS3 or 360 yet, but there will be a direct console port!

Assuming texture bound on PC, a mid-range 560 Ti is likely able to process a 1080p frame in around 0.36 ms. Still modifying the algorithm, so don't have final numbers yet.

http://timothylottes.blogspot.com/2011/12/big-fxaa-update-soon.html

 

[KKRT]

http://timothylottes.blogspot.com/2011/12/big-fxaa-update-soon.html

DO WANT!

 

[Ethatron]

LOL, seems a little fame-war going on here ...?

 

[sebbbi]

Scaling during post AA filter is a really good idea. The filter has already calculated extra information about the edges, so it should be able to upscale the image better than standard upscaling algorithms. Most Xbox 360 games are running at slightly sub 720p resolution, so better scaling is always a good thing to have.

I am really interested in the new FXAA, because it doesn't have extra texture operations, and it supports temporal data input (works really well with 60 fps rendering). It should improve the quality most in far away geometry (slow movement), and that's where we currently have the most problems (current post AA filters are bad in small far away geometry). The new FXAA should be straightforward to plug in for us at least (we already have temporal jittering implemented in our old temporal AA solution).

 

[swaaye]

KKRT, I got SGSSAA working on my 560 with the current drivers and I posted instructions in the Skyrim PC Gaming thread. In NV Inspector, use the Enhance Application AA mode, 4X MSAA, 4X SGSSAA and have Skyrim on 4X AA.