Granted that AMD's solution isn't perfect...its still much better than not having it at all (well, in most of the cases). The level of blur it induces to the image depends from game to game (in case of Mirror's Edge is completely non-existent, I can post screenshots with no MSAA/MLAA to give you a comparison of sharpness but that will mean I have to play the game over again to take screenshots
)...but for most of the games its completely worth turning it on.
I think you are misinterpreting what my point was. Or maybe I just worded it very poorly, but I prefer the explanation that puts the blame on you.
I agree that it doesn't tend to blur the overall image at all. While it does sometimes create a flattened look that's more noticeable in certain games, there's enough evidence already online showing that the people claiming that MLAA lowers texture quality are just seeing things.
What I'm saying is that MLAA + MSAA is in most cases a waste. I have no doubt that Mirror's Edge looks better than without any AA applied at all. What I'm saying is that in most games I've tried out - including UE3 games - it makes almost no improvement at all over just choosing one or the other.
Maybe Mirror's Edge actually does benefit from having both because of how much of the design is angular, but I would be interested in comparison shots of the ones you posted above with either
just MSAA or
just MLAA and see if much a difference can be discerned. In my experience, it does not.
As an example of how it occasionally makes things worse, in
Half-Life 2 it makes the
edges (not the image) has that "cardboard cutout" look that sometimes happens with MSAA and the MLAA on top seems to accentuate that. As another example, Dead Space looks much worse with the software AA applied and MLAA on than with just MLAA alone.
It makes sense if you think about it. MLAA is a post-process effect, so it's trying to blur out the edges and angular corners. MSAA being applied beforehand gives MLAA nothing to do or confuses it.
There may be examples where having both on would be superior (like a game that has a lot of angular edges and a lot of jaggy shadow effects), but my point was that sometimes MLAA is better, sometimes traditional methods are better, but in most cases the quality improvement of having both on at the same time is negligible. Of course, if he's running two 6970 cards in Crossfire, maybe my point is moot anyways because it's not like he's going to lose much in performance.
