How long until we see...

[Hellbinder]

I was thinking about this today. How long until we see a 3d architecture that incorperates AA and Tri/Aniso into the normal default operation? In other words if the game is on.. its on... there is no "turning it on" or "Turning it off".

What kind of resources would be required and what changes to the current pipeline/tmu approach would be required?

 

[KimB]

I hope we never see it.

What we do have today, however, are video cards for which there is little reason to turn either off (Ti 4600). Particularly for the upcoming R300 (and certainly the NV30 as well) turning either off would be pointless, all the way up to 1600x1200.

For comparison and benchmarking purposes, as well as the longevity of the video cards (there are bound to be upcoming games that would make aniso/FSAA of any current card slow...albeit perhaps not for a while...), I think we always need the option of turning those things off.

 

[Geeforcer]

Better question is, when will we see cards come with AA and AF turned on by default. At this rate, soon.

 

[KimB]

Better question is, when will we see cards come with AA and AF turned on by default. At this rate, soon.

Yes, turned on by default would be good (I hope the R300 does this).

Being unable to disable them would not be good.

 

[Hellbinder]

Exactly why would it be a bad thing to have an architecture designd to function this way??? If its designed to operate with AA and Aniso while delivering top notch perfromance...

whats the problem..

Also, You know damn well that the R300 is not going to have this on by defaut.. is this yet another childish ploy of yours to find some assinine fault with the R300 once its shipped...

 

[DemoCoder]

You want to be able to turn it off for some operations, like when you are doing render-to-texture, or for certain multipass effects.


Even today, you can turn off even bilinear filtering. The ability to switch these things off is crucial. If you built a card where you couldn't switch them off, you'd be wasting performance, or worse, cause inaccurate rendering in some circumstances.

 

[KimB]

]Also, You know damn well that the R300 is not going to have this on by defaut.. is this yet another childish ploy of yours to find some assinine fault with the R300 once its shipped...

No, I wouldn't consider it a fault at all to fail to have them on by default. As Democoder said, there may even be some drawbacks.

One that I know of has to do with Diablo II. I don't know if Radeon 8500's handle it properly, but D2 looks pretty bad if I run it with anisotropic filtering forced on.

 

[Dolemite]

With today's high-end cards and today's software, there doesn't seem to be much point to running without AF and AA.

I had thought Doom 3, Unreal 2, et al would bring current hardware back to normal non-AA, non-AF levels, but it doesn't look to be working out that way, with Doom 3 running quite well with at least 2x AA on early R300 hardware. I guess I had hoped these games would push the envelope enough enough to do that.

I remember back when there were games that you basically needed a Voodoo2 or a TNT to play (and it was actually worth it to upgrade), but I don't think we'll ever come to that sort of divide again.

 

[KimB]

The only way we'll have games like that is if they're funded by one of the graphics card companies themselves. It's just not economically-viable for publishers to publish games that really require high-end hardware.

But, I think that HLSL's and similar technologies will help to accelerate the usage of new features.

 

[Dolemite]

Yeah, I understand that, but it makes me wonder how those first few thresholds happened.

I guess back then 3D acceleration was still kind of a fringe/enthusiast thing and most games still had software renderers to fall back on. Now that 3D is completely mainstream, there's more of a need target the mainstream....or something like that.

 

[Nagorak]

Although the first thing I always do when I install a card is change the settings, I'd still feel more comfortable with it shipping with AA off. I think Anisotropic filtering is already on by default on R8500, no?

 

[Randell]

No its not on by default. But the Catalyst driver panel has a quality slider that goes from performance to quality and for quality turns on AF automatically and for Optimal qulaity turns on 2x quality AA and 16x AF. Which is quite neat. All can be ovverridden of course.

 

[Fuz]

]I was thinking about this today. How long until we see a 3d architecture that incorperates AA and Tri/Aniso into the normal default operation? In other words if the game is on.. its on... there is no "turning it on" or "Turning it off".

Do you mean when we will see cards doing AA and Aniso (to a limited degree) for free? Now, that would be awesome, no options to turn it on or off, it just does it, sort of like how Bi-Linear Filtering made its way on to 3d cards.

Otherwise, there will always be a need to turn it off. A Ti4600 may run todays games with AA and AF just fine, but I don't think it will with DOOM III.

 

[Basic]

We've already got cards that is optimized to do AA and AF with a small hit. We will see cards that are even more opimized for it. But having a card where you can't turn it off is BAD, even if the features truly would come for free. As been said many times, with pixel shaders there's a new way of seeing the "per pixel" operations. It's no longer just about images were a pixel tells the color in the image, and the pixel nearby is the nearby color.
I sure don't want my differential equation solving for water ripples in a texture get messed up because AA/AF can't be turned off. And you can find other things to do that would hurt even more by forced AA/AF.

I wouldn't buy a card were AA/AF can't be turned off, just as I wouldn't by a card were I can't select pointsampling for textures. Luckily, such cards aren't likely to ever be produceed.

 

[Neeyik]

I think you're all confusing what a typical end user might want and what a programmer needs. For certain no programmer would want a card that always uses anistropic texture filtering but your average game player, given the choice of using AF (with no noticable performance hit) or not using AF, will gun for the former every time.

 

[MDolenc]

Forcing AA or AF to be always on would be very dangerous and very stupid. These two features SHOULD always be user selectable in a GAMES. Just like you can chose between bilinear and trilinear filtering you should also be able to select anisotropic filtering, and just like you cen select different display modes you should be able to select AA.
If a game would use many textures, or many render targets (eg. cube environment mapping) any card (including Radeon 9700) would run out of memory or out of bandwidth. Applications define whether or not AA and AF are "free".