Anti-Aliasing... so far

[KimB]

You are missing the point by a wide margin. If I render a mesh that causes some hole, then render another mesh on top of that, completely occluding the first mesh, then:

• If I keep the second mesh still, MSAA produces the same result every time, regardless of the nature of the contents of the first mesh.
• Your scheme doesn't.

Well, personally I think the only way to really resolve this issue is to write a software implementation, generate a worst-case scenario, and compare.

Personally I think it'll be a really small issue, because you're not going to be misrepresenting the area of foreground triangles by much at all.

 

[3dcgi]

Not a good example. Digging through actual videocard reviews of the Parhelia, many of them do point out that there were - at the time - a number of rendering artifacts, un-AAed edges and just plain incompatible games with FAA - and I have seen no evidence that suggest that those issues were fixable.

Yes there were artifacts, but I was specifically referring to being able to use the artifacts to detect an enemy behind a wall or something like the situation you described.

Like Chalnoth, I believe this is a small issue if a good merge criteria is used as it would only happen at the edges of the front object thus resulting in minor aliasing artifacts.