Downsampling , the last hope of mankind.

[gl33k]

Okay, pc gamer all know that now !
downsample a game ,and let it achieves the best picture ...quality ...ever. you can even enable blurrish post-processing now , it doesnt matter 111!!

More seriously, i realized something fews days ago , playing skyrim@2880x1800.
the texture rendering is better. it's like an upgrade of my texture asset with something like 4K texture mods. i would thing , at first though , that downsampling would only smooth the picture, by removing edge aliasing. but it does improve texture sharpness, tiny detail.
the effectiveness is astonishing , even with my 24 inch 1920X1200 monitor. i actually SEE more thing. basically, everything distant is far better, and anything close stay the same , minus aliasing , of course.

i presume it has something to do with how the engine handle texture ?

 

[Grall]

When you increase rendering resolution, the game will be able to use a larger texture MIP map* closer to the camera, leading to increased percieved detail (up to a point; you obviously can't go beyond the largest/sharpest MIP map the game is delivered with... )

*MIP mapping is a technique where a game's textures are downsampled into multiple powers-of-two copies to be used on far surfaces. This reduces texture aliasing ("crawling ants" in moving surfaces).

 

[pjbliverpool]

How do you downsample with NV cards?

 

[Billy Idol]

How do you downsample with NV cards?

At GAF, there is a whole thread dedicated to downsampling. There is also a tool by Durante (the guy who fixed Dark Souls PC) which does downsampling.

Just browse over to GAF if you need a nice writeup.

 

[gl33k]

When you increase rendering resolution, the game will be able to use a larger texture MIP map* closer to the camera, leading to increased percieved detail (up to a point; you obviously can't go beyond the largest/sharpest MIP map the game is delivered with... )

*MIP mapping is a technique where a game's textures are downsampled into multiple powers-of-two copies to be used on far surfaces. This reduces texture aliasing ("crawling ants" in moving surfaces).

i got it !

i use gedosato to downsample , with lanczos scaling. sharp as a razor.
but i really wish i can do that from GPU drivers level , as gedosato / kegetys tripplehead don't work with DX11 yet .

 

[Deleted member 13524]

SMAA and MSAA variations will still be a much more effective way of reducing jaggies but as said before, it will likely do nothing good to (or even hurt) texture quality.

I guess this will be the perfect way to put to use the massive amount of ROPs in my 290X.
At least until new-gen games appear that will actually put some weight on it, or until I decide to get a 2K/4K monitor, or Eyefinity setup.

 

[gl33k]

SMAA and MSAA variations will still be a much more effective way of reducing jaggies but as said before, it will likely do nothing good to (or even hurt) texture quality.

I guess this will be the perfect way to put to use the massive amount of ROPs in my 290X.
At least until new-gen games appear that will actually put some weight on it, or until I decide to get a 2K/4K monitor, or Eyefinity setup.

you mean , for screenshot ?

150% X&Y oversample + 2X MSAA is my choice.

 

[Albuquerque]

Not quite the same, but I had a chance to play with Steam's in-home streaming last night. Loaded up my "Big Rig", and then loaded the Steam client on my ancient Dell Inspiron E1505 with a Core 2 Duo 7600, 4GB of ram and an ancient GeForce GO 7300 powering a 1280x800 display.

Just for giggles, I streamed FarCry 3, Fallout 3 New Vegas, and Skryim all at 2560x1600 resolution onto my Inspiron, and it worked very well. And it was indeed downsampled, as you could see the GUI elements briefly during a windowed mode transition to show that it was indeed the 2560x1600 being crammed into the 1280x800 viewport of my crappy old laptop.

I was very impressed with the streaming performance, and the graphics were every bit as nice as the big rig (which makes all the sense in the world, but still...)

 

[gl33k]

holy shit , pixel are expensive ...but are all but expendable .... everyone of them matter !

 

[homerdog]

I prefer better pixels over more pixels. 720p movies look great to me, and I would be ecstatic if my games could look that good.

 

[swaaye]

I prefer better pixels over more pixels. 720p movies look great to me, and I would be ecstatic if my games could look that good.

Isn't this the truth. Supersampling does make pixels better though! I still own 1360x768 TVs and running a 2720x1536 downsample does eliminate the desire for a 1080p upgrade.

 

[homerdog]

True, but box grid oversampling is not a very elegant way to go about AA. There are much better AA solutions that could either reduce the performance cost for the same IQ benefit or give you better IQ for the same performance cost.

Unfortunately developers don't always give us much more than silly FXAA post process blur filters, so oversampling is the only choice.

 

[swaaye]

I've been seeing supersamping options in some games. I imagine it's not ordered grid. Serious Sam 3 has sparse grid IIRC. Thief has SSAA too.

What is bizarre to see though is plain MSAA as an option when that is so useless now days.

I am usually ok with SMAA. SMAA T2X/S2X are good stuff and aren't insanely demanding like SSAA.

 

[betternatethanlever]

When you increase rendering resolution, the game will be able to use a larger texture MIP map* closer to the camera, leading to increased percieved detail (up to a point; you obviously can't go beyond the largest/sharpest MIP map the game is delivered with... )

*MIP mapping is a technique where a game's textures are downsampled into multiple powers-of-two copies to be used on far surfaces. This reduces texture aliasing ("crawling ants" in moving surfaces).

This thread is perfect for discussing my small idea. Muddy textures in the distance can be very unpleasant, visually. Even with 16X AF enabled, I see the ground textures in the farther distance looking bad.

What if we could disable the use of MIP mapping completely and render the game at twice or thrice the native resolution of your monitor (SSAA)? Would I still be seeing texture aliasing? I tested this years ago with HL2. I saw a decrease in the performance, but the texture aliasing is what bothered me the most. The degradation of texture quality can easily be seen when looking at a wall from an angle, even with all the texture filtering options to the max.

 

[gl33k]

wouldnt it imply texture aliasing ? the same artefact we can see when force a negative mipmap LOD ?

 

[homerdog]

wouldnt it imply texture aliasing ? the same artefact we can see when force a negative mipmap LOD ?

If you oversampled enough, no. But for distant objects, you would need a tremendous amount of oversampling. I mean say you have an object occupying 4 pixels with a detailed 4kx4k texture. Do the math...

 

[betternatethanlever]

I guess this wouldn't be feasible, perhaps with games that aren't demanding, this might work. On top of that, no big budget game developer would even consider this.

 

[homerdog]

It would be feasible if you had:
short draw distance
low res/low detail/low contrast textures
fairly simple objects

And a very powerful GPU with lots of bandwidth and memory. But then your game looks dumpy anyway.

I'm not sure what your beef is with AF. Even 8xAF looks good to me. Maybe you're referring to some games that don't apply AF to all surfaces, e.g. Crysis and Warhead at max settings? Maybe you have an old GPU with crappy AF to begin with?

 

[jlippo]

If you oversampled enough, no. But for distant objects, you would need a tremendous amount of oversampling. I mean say you have an object occupying 4 pixels with a detailed 4kx4k texture. Do the math...

It really isn't even a matter of distance, if surface is tilted to an angle you would have huge amount of aliasing.
Similar to Ps2 which did use mip-mapping, but mipmap selection was based only on distance.
Quality was horrifying in most cases.

Also turning off mipmaps would trash texture caches completely as well.

 

[gl33k]

nvidia recently add downsampling feature to last maxwell drivers.
AMD , what are you doing ???