Neverending Upscaling/Resolutions/AA etc Thread #3 (Rules Post #1!)

No need to feel bad. If you misunderstood my prior post on the matter, then I must not have communicated it clearly. The important thing is you learned something

 

High contrast worsens the aliasing (higher frequencies = more aliasing). It's their choice of colors and lighting.

 

I still think it looks really good despite the lack of AA, amazing in fact... but yeah... I wasn't sure if it was 720p or not either I guess due to the high contrast.

So I guess if they wanted at least 2xAA they would have to had sacrificed some textures, or get a really good texture streaming algorithm ala Uncharted.

 

Of course it consumes RAM on PCs. In that regard the PS3 is much closer to a PC than the Xbox360 - a PC with 256 of RAM and a 256 MB videocard.

 

I think in a PC, AA consumes the video card ram and not the main memory (same as in the PS3). For the XBOX360, to get those fast AA, you need to fit into the 10MB edram.

Btw, how fast (or slow) XBOX360 compared to PS3 for AA if it can't rely on the edram (in terms of performance and not the overall performance)?

What is the resolution limit on XBOX360 when you want to take advantage of the edram to perform AA?

 

in terms of performance hit!

 

Forgive me again but your complain continues to be ridicolous, to establish 360 more better for two or three objects is absurd, when epic has more time to optimize that on 360 and its experience on this console is really huge compared to ps3. And not I can see better texture on 360 in this shot.

 

Yes, on the PS3 and PC, AA costs memory, bandwidth and shader power. On 360, AA doesn't cost memory (*) or bandwidth, it still costs shader power, and it costs drawcalls and geometry due to sending (parts of the) scene twice for tiling.

(*) - not exactly true, but close

Nobody knows, as the 360 can only render to EDRAM; there's no way to perform this experiment.

You can do something like 1024x576 with 2xAA (or for two rendertargets, in the case of Halo3) and still fit in the EDRAM without tiling, which is why it is a popular resolution.

 

Apologies for contributing

If you're confused, try here

 

I said it before, it's the HDR. Yes, the colors probably make it worse. But in case you noticed, the game actually has a contrast and brightness setting of itself, so you can make the colors more washed out or darker and make the jaggies stand out a bit less as much as you like. For the record, once playing, they don't bother me. The visuals do not seem to be this game's major problem, as far as I am concerned.

 

it's important to do MSAA or MRT on x360.To maximize edram bandwith usage you need it. Because the 256GB/s are in fact split in 4 32GB/s path. If you do single RT noAA, you can only use a part of the total bandwitdh.

I saw that it consumes shader power in a previous post, it's not right. The only thing that is supersampled is the Z. Their still only one pixel shaded by pixel. GPU decide then with the Zs (and alpha to coverage) how many samples it writes.

And at last, you have to blend the "multi samples" surface to a final texture. On X360, it's done at the Resolve and PS3 has a similar pass too.

 

Doesn't this shot suggest some kind of selective AA going on - we've seen it in UE3 games before (Medal of Honor):

360: http://img125.imageshack.us/img125/5770/mirror360000ne0.jpg
PS3: http://img82.imageshack.us/img82/893/mirrorps3000ww2.jpg

Majority of the time though, platforms are like-for-like - the only variance being in screen tear, which I've yet to measure, but does seem to be more prevalent on PS3 (albeit tough to notice).

360: http://img125.imageshack.us/img125/4739/mirror360001fg2.jpg
PS3: http://img407.imageshack.us/img407/3867/mirrorps3001vp3.jpg

I concur though that based on what's in the demo (later environments may change this), there's little real-life difference between the game on either platform. Once it's finished rendering I'm going to upload a full 720p60 comparison for those genuinely interested.

Another interesting image, plucked via screengrab as After Effects renders the vid:

Shot: http://img90.imageshack.us/img90/4294/54959460df3.jpg

 

However in those shots IMHO the aliasing seems really the same on 360, where is the AA 2x?

 

The edge of the structure "touching" the fence at the bottom shows 2xAA.

edit: I've circled AA'd edges in green and non-AA'ed in red.



I recall in Mass Effect that it was also easy to find edges where only part of the length was AA'd similar in situation to what is shown above here.

They must be doing supersampling of the alpha textures too; the chain-link looks flawless in both.

edit2: I've marked a bunch of spots in the second 360 shot. Zoom in with mspaint (or whatever you use).

http://i192.photobucket.com/albums/z211/Alstrong/marked2.jpg

In motion, I imagine the AA is much more appreciated with reduced edge shimmering...

 

Yeah, in these shots it's totally clear that the 360 version has 2xAA. In fact, it's clear in all the shots, if you look careful enough (you won't notice it as clearly in more vertical diagonal lines than in more horizontal diagonal lines, but even in near vertical lines you can see it in the colors being affected slightly.

Thinking about it though, I seem to recall that UE3 on 360 got 2xAA at some point early this year, so that would make sense. Does anyone remember that more precisely?

 

well, only UE3 game i remember with 2xaa is Army of Two.

 

There has always been this weirdness surrounding the subject. I mean, there is evidence of *some* sort of edge AA going on in Gears of War and Mass Effect (same in Gears 2 720p non-bullshots); it's just not applied as consistently as we expect (Ao2 being a possible exception).

 

There are quite a few UE3 titles old and new with varying levels of 2x MSAA on Xbox 360, absent on PS3. Strangehold, The Bourne Conspiracy, Army of Two and others. As I mentioned earlier, Medal of Honor Airborne also has some AA.

 

Didn't Rainbow Six Vegas 1&2 have some AA on 360? And R6V2 on PS3 had AA, I believe.

 

Yes of course, mea culpa.