Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion Archive [2010]

assurdum · Oct 23, 2010

Shifty Geezer said:
I think the big problem is still don't capture the temporal aliasing. MLAA can't resolve subpixel changes. In motion small polygons do look...blobby. This won't appear in static screenshots.

Yes, true. But I think it is far away to be a messy imho.

Arwin · Oct 23, 2010

Shifty Geezer said:
I think the big problem is still don't capture the temporal aliasing. MLAA can't resolve subpixel changes. In motion small polygons do look...blobby. This won't appear in static screenshots.

One of the reasons why it works so well in God of War is no doubt that it is used together with the various excellent motion blur techniques.

NeoTechni · Oct 23, 2010

assurdum said:
The MLAA work perfectly even in kz3 beta and LBP 2. Quite messy? Are you joking? The 2xmsaa is even worse in the long distance or in the high contrast...

Those 2 shots looked amazing

Nesh · Oct 24, 2010

assurdum said:
The MLAA work perfectly even in kz3 beta and LBP 2. Quite messy? Are you joking? The 2xmsaa is even worse in the long distance or in the high contrast...

They look amazingly good. Are you sure these arent bullshots?

KKRT · Oct 24, 2010

Those screens posted guy on neogaf who is in beta, so they definitely are direct feeds.

Trejser · Oct 24, 2010

More here: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=23993341&postcount=2407

Silent_Buddha · Oct 24, 2010

assurdum said:
The MLAA work perfectly even in kz3 beta and LBP 2. Quite messy? Are you joking? The 2xmsaa is even worse in the long distance or in the high contrast...

Those aren't bad for console. But the AA still falls apart at certain points. Especially in the second screen where there's more high contrast noise.

In motion I'm sure I'd be able to easily pick out even more areas.

Anyways, that said, those shots do look quite nice for console. And definitely better than either Quincunx or 2xMSAA.

Regards,
SB

Silent_Buddha · Oct 24, 2010

Nebula said:
Anyway MLAA + MSAA on the roll for ATI cards with MLAA being almost perfomance penalty free at high resolutions. That would be second to best which is SSAA. Would be interesting to see the take on 360 and MLAA from devs.

That said MLAA is no magic bullet.

Aye, MLAA is so cheap on ATI hardware due to the massive amount of shaders it has available. Hopefully they'll enable it on 5xxx and 4xxx series GPUs also as there doesn't appear to be any reason why it wouldn't be.

RGSSAA should remain the best. But as MLAA attempts to mimic SSAA, hopefully it can be tweaked in the future to further match it.

As well, since it's a shader based approach, nothing precludes them combining it with MSAA similar to Edge Detect. Although the question then becomes, does the inclusion of MSAA provide a large enough IQ benefit to justify the much larger hit it will incur.

Or is it possible to further refine MLAA such that it takes a larger hit (although still not as much as regular box MSAA) and gets quality closer to RGSSAA.

Love it when companies experiment with AA. After all these years, it's still the single biggest detraction from games. As even 8xMSAA (or 24x EDAA) + transparency SSAA doesn't do a good enough job. Damn shaders. And RGSSAA is too expensive to use in newer games, not to mention not available in Dx10/11 on ATI cards. And for Nvidia I believe they are still limited to OGSSAA (bleh), although I haven't kept up on that so I may be wrong.

And even then 4xRGSSAA is still too little (for me), and 8xRGSSAA is way too hard on performance.

Will be interesting to see how MLAA evolves. Although I don't particularly like the MLAA nomenclature as it applies to many many different forms of software/shader based AA.

Regards,
SB

assurdum · Oct 24, 2010

Silent_Buddha said:
Those aren't bad for console. But the AA still falls apart at certain points. Especially in the second screen where there's more high contrast noise.

In motion I'm sure I'd be able to easily pick out even more areas.

Anyways, that said, those shots do look quite nice for console. And definitely better than either Quincunx or 2xMSAA.

Regards,
SB

Ah sure. On pc there are a lot of more chances. But I think the MLAA remains the better alternative after the MSAA... the only problems are the hideous artifact in the slow camera motions...

marcus_rocks · Oct 24, 2010

In this video: a comparison between MSAA and MLAA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uu1mEVrCE6Q&feature=youtu.be&a at 1:35 minutes in, you can see that even at MSAA 8X we still can see the severe aliasing of the moving objects. So my conclusion is that the sub-pixel problem in MLAA is not as bad as it is made to be.

Neb · Oct 24, 2010

marcus_rocks said:
In this video: a comparison between MSAA and MLAA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uu1mEVrCE6Q&feature=youtu.be&a at 1:35 minutes in, you can see that even at MSAA 8X we still can see the severe aliasing of the moving objects. So my conclusion is that the sub-pixel problem in MLAA is not as bad as it is made to be.

Looks more like texture alising like if user had negative LOD bias to -1 or higher. Will create shimmering problems no mather AA and is really only set to negative values if you play with SSAA. Anyway you should base your conclusion on more than a video. Theres lots of MLAA processed screens now from different games and there is a tool by ATI online to apply MLAA to any PNG image. But anyway for example Gothic 4 shows how it's quite good while game like HL2 shows how it utterly fails.

AlNom · Oct 24, 2010

marcus_rocks said:
So my conclusion is that the sub-pixel problem in MLAA is not as bad as it is made to be.

That's not at all what we mean by sub-pixel... That's a shader/lighting issue.

upnorthsox · Oct 24, 2010

Nebula said:
Looks more like texture alising like if user had negative LOD bias to -1 or higher. Will create shimmering problems no mather AA and is really only set to negative values if you play with SSAA. Anyway you should base your conclusion on more than a video. Theres lots of MLAA processed screens now from different games and there is a tool by ATI online to apply MLAA to any PNG image. But anyway for example Gothic 4 shows how it's quite good while game like HL2 shows how it utterly fails.

Do you mean this?

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

That shot is worst case and shouldn't be construed as the whole game either. Hardly an utter failure and It's still better than no AA. 4x MSAA ain't nothing to write home about in that shot either.

It's still early days for ATI's implementation (Like day 2), and we haven't even heard from Nividia yet. As we go along it'll break down into 2 categories, the no matter category where it's applied irregardless of what's running and integrated category where the devs use the IHV tools as part of their build or at least take it into account.

One of the things we'll have to deal with now that screenshots can be treated arbitrarily is will it be used as an AA bullshot tool.

Neb · Oct 25, 2010

upnorthsox said:
Do you mean this?

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

That shot is worst case and shouldn't be construed as the whole game either. Hardly an utter failure and It's still better than no AA. 4x MSAA ain't nothing to write home about in that shot either..

Have you played game? Similar thin detail objects throughout game. Anyway doesn't mather if 4xMSAA is nothing to "write home about", it is greatly superior, period. And that without even having TSAA eanbled!

Here are some screenshots I took with TSAA enabled some time ago of HL2.

http://forum.beyond3d.com/showpost.php?p=1428928&postcount=1367

Billy Idol · Oct 25, 2010

Do we know if "MLAA" is "MLAA"?
In the sense that if the GOW3 MLAA is comparable to the ATI MLAA..
According to the GOW3 devs, their first implementation was not good at all (with respect to performance, but especially with respect to IQ). Then they have tweaked and tuned the algorithm - and I am not aware if there is a document available that details those changes?

So in short: is the ATI MLAA the same as GOW3 MLAA?
Is the MLAA available for PS3 devs the same as the GOW3 MLAA?

I am a bit surprised to see that MLAA blurs the image a bit compared to no AA. GOW3 looks super crisp to me, And I wonder if their MLAA had the same slight blur as presented in the ATI shots?

I am only aware of this comparison here showing "Sony MLAA":
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=22661479&postcount=29

but the pics are rather small to judge blur - what do you guys think?

PS: I am astounded how much detail 1080p mode packs in!!
Higher resolution for the win?!

nightshade · Oct 25, 2010

That's what I was thinking MLAA is too general of a term to use for these technique which actually end up being quite a bit different from each other (for eg. Intel's solution)

ps2rocks · Oct 25, 2010

Billy Idol said:
Do we know if "MLAA" is "MLAA"?
In the sense that if the GOW3 MLAA is comparable to the ATI MLAA..
According to the GOW3 devs, their first implementation was not good at all (with respect to performance, but especially with respect to IQ). Then they have tweaked and tuned the algorithm - and I am not aware if there is a document available that details those changes?

So in short: is the ATI MLAA the same as GOW3 MLAA?
Is the MLAA available for PS3 devs the same as the GOW3 MLAA?

I am a bit surprised to see that MLAA blurs the image a bit compared to no AA. GOW3 looks super crisp to me, And I wonder if their MLAA had the same slight blur as presented in the ATI shots?

I am only aware of this comparison here showing "Sony MLAA":
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=22661479&postcount=29

but the pics are rather small to judge blur - what do you guys think?

PS: I am astounded how much detail 1080p mode packs in!!
Higher resolution for the win?!

Would certainly go by this... MLAA is something which going by itself is quite controversial. Saboteur had a specific way of implementing it and gow3 did a totally different route with further customizing and 'improving' the algorithm. An impressive level of further implementations we are looking at now with LBP and KZ3. Likewise taking under consideration its specialty in regards to overall performance, GPUs are adopting it. All of these implementations really seem to be varied from each other and needs much scrutiny to reach an optimum condition. We really can't go on and call all just MLAA... they are isolated implementations of the basic idea, all different.

MLAA, which in my opinion is vastly better than MSAA or any other method... primarily because of the exremely low performance hit in comparison, but also that being a software-thing it acts as quite a flexible approach which is leaving up a remarkable overhead for tweaking... and such amazing results. While MSAA might be done better right now with mostly "More Resources Good - Low Resources Bad" slogan but in the world of tech, "achieving more from lowest defines greatness". Here I believe that GPUs with their immense power can do wonders by implementing MLAA rightly, just too much overhead remains there to improve the effects first hand which other AA techniques can't start to compare

KKRT · Oct 25, 2010

ps2rocks · Oct 25, 2010

KKRT said:
@ps2rocks
I actually recommend my direct feed screens choices for showing how good MLAA in gow 3 is. [tried to get as much varied locations i could find and without dof and motion blur].

Bloody amazing

, crisp and clear, have been a fan of your screenshots since a while at other forums...
Nice show of variety and expression of MLAA. That game really showed how amazing the results could be if the technique is done in proper way. And its a game extremely taxing on the PS3 hardware as well. We can easily estimate an even further exponential improvement in results for a game that still has room for more. Maybe GPUs will show it or not, or maybe we get to see even more from Sony for their games on the platform in near future or late, but this thing (MLAA) is bound to get better and its gonna show it.

Neb · Oct 25, 2010

Billy Idol said:
I am a bit surprised to see that MLAA blurs the image a bit compared to no AA. GOW3 looks super crisp to me, And I wonder if their MLAA had the same slight blur as presented in the ATI shots?

There's a bit of blur it seems though it varies. Also ATIs MLAA is right now AFAIK part of unofficial drivers and also only works in DX9. Also many are using the MLAA on 5xxx series via a driver hack but ATI said they will give MLAA option officially for 5xxx series and hopefully 3-4xxx series. GOWIII could also use a sharpen filter applied after MLAA pass to sharpen up frames. Your pics looks like they have a bit of sharpening going on. I do know some games use sharpen filter. For example Crysis games uses customisable and adaptive sharpen filter and CE2/CE3 allows this.

Btw found this image of Darksiders. Style/artwise it has similarities to GOWIII. ATI GPU MLAA works good in this scene.

http://www.abload.de/image.php?img=----------2pidr.jpg#

I am only aware of this comparison here showing "Sony MLAA":
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=22661479&postcount=29

but the pics are rather small to judge blur - what do you guys think?

Seems to add a tiny bit of blur.

PS: I am astounded how much detail 1080p mode packs in!!
Higher resolution for the win?!

Ehhh.. welcome to yesterday...

Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion Archive [2010]

assurdum

Arwin

Now Officially a Top 10 Poster

NeoTechni

Nesh

Double Agent

KKRT

Trejser

Silent_Buddha

Silent_Buddha

assurdum

marcus_rocks

Neb

Iron "BEAST" Man

AlNom

Moderator

upnorthsox

Neb

Iron "BEAST" Man

Billy Idol

nightshade

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ps2rocks

KKRT

ps2rocks

Neb

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