Question on Anti-Aliasing and Full Screen Anti-Aliasing

S

saf1

Newcomer
Odd question if you will...

Is Anti-Aliasing and Full Screen Anti-Aliasing done at the hardware layer only?

Over the weekend I was trying various setting on my 9500 Pro and noticed no difference between the settings. Then I started to think maybe it was the game I was playing, developed by Mythic, called Dark Age of Camelot. I'm using their latest expansion, which uses some DX9 features...yet displays horrid jaggies. Esp with shadows... /boggle

Anyway - I went ahead and installed the latest drivers because I wanted to try a demo found in another fourm - good job by the way Humus - when I noticed no difference between any of the settings. Last thing I tried, and am still running, is 6x 16x with everything set to max quality. Driver panel shows this as well. Reboot, etc.

Was going to post this in the game forum but figured it was more hardware related than software. My understanding was that AA / FSAA is hardware via the gpu but wanted to be sure.
 
I'm not quite sure what the question is (the answer to the single line question is 'mostly' but I don't think that helps you very much!), so here's a few possible answers.

1. Some games are not compatible with hardware antialiasing.

2. Some parts of some games may not be compatible with hardware antialiasing. (For example, anything which is rendered to a texture rather than to the framebuffer is not antialiased).

3. Software antialiasing at the application level is possible - using the age-old technique of drawing an antialiased line (or 1-pixel wide polygon which has alpha= 100% at the inner edge and alpha=0% at the outer) down all polygon edges as a postprocessing step.

4. While in theory the software solution above could be implemented inside the driver - and I have a vague memory it may have been in some many years in the past - it's a bit of a nightmare and so isn't done now.

I have another vague memory that DAoC may fall into category 1, but I don't know for sure. I think OpenGL_guy would know...
 
Splinter Cell isn't compatible with FSAA. You get leaking light (can't describe it better) if I remember correctly.

Prince Of Persia: The Sands Of Time also isn't compatible with FSAA. Same problem. That one I experienced first hand. ;)
 
SC / POP:

The problem experienced on these games are the result of the application not being aware of AA being done.
Can't really blame the application though as it was forced in the drivers.

IIRC, the application renders to the backbuffer and the associated Z-buffer, than reuses that Z-buffer for rendering into a texture.
If you force AA in the control panel the backbuffer will be multisampled, but the texture won't so the Z-buffer won't be compatible anymore - hence the artifacts.

This is the two solutions the driver writers provide: you get artifacts or you get no AA at all.

It can only be solved if AA is supported by the application and used a multisampled offscreen render target instead of the texture which is then copied to the texture.

It would still break down if AA is forced on the control panel...
 
saf1 said:
Ok - thanks for the information everyone. I'm starting to think that maybe DAoC does not support it. I have tried to add a screen shot that shows the jaggies which raised the question in the first place...
Click to expand...
What version of the driver are you running? There was a problem a while back (like Cat 3.2 or something) that was causing AA to get disabled in DAoC when you zoned, but I fixed that long ago...

If something else is causing DAoC to lose AA, I haven't heard anything about it.
 
OpenGL guy said:
What version of the driver are you running? There was a problem a while back (like Cat 3.2 or something) that was causing AA to get disabled in DAoC when you zoned, but I fixed that long ago...

If something else is causing DAoC to lose AA, I haven't heard anything about it.
Click to expand...

Thanks for fixing that; used to annoy the hell out of me whenever I zoned.

Saf1, try reinstalling the latest Cats and the control panel; I've spent. . .well, more hours than I'm going to confess playing DAoC with R3xx hardware and AA definitely works with the game.
 
Hyp-X said:
It can only be solved if AA is supported by the application and used a multisampled offscreen render target instead of the texture which is then copied to the texture.
Click to expand...

What about Deus Ex: IW?
It has ingame controls for multisampling, yet it fails to work with the bloom filter which is implemented (I believe) as a render-to-texture effect...
 
Laa-Yosh said:
Hyp-X said:
It can only be solved if AA is supported by the application and used a multisampled offscreen render target instead of the texture which is then copied to the texture.
Click to expand...
What about Deus Ex: IW?
It has ingame controls for multisampling, yet it fails to work with the bloom filter which is implemented (I believe) as a render-to-texture effect...
Click to expand...
Because the game still does render to texture even when you select AA from the app's options...
 
So it implies that they're added the bloom stuff close to release and haven't bothered with modifying the code to support AA well... thanks. Maybe they'll release a patch...
 
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