what's analytical antialiasing

[ccanan]

is it the MLAA?
the analytical AA is mentioned in the 4AEngne for metro2033, links:
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/metro-2033-4a-engine-impresses-blog-entry

thx

 

[MfA]

Generally it's used to indicate that you use the analytical edge equations to determine "exact" subpixel coverage of polygons (limited by numerical precision in practice of course).

In the general case (ie. polygon soup rendering) this means that you pretty much have to maintain a BSP per pixel ... and no one is doing that.

In a more limited case you could do silhouette extraction and use the edge equations only on silhouettes with back to front rendering ... with some justification you could call this analytical AA.

PS. personally I'd call all this analytical edge AA, but that's just me.

PS. and no it has nothing to do with MLAA, MLAA tries to extract edge equations from the image for adaptive "blurring" of staircased edges (it's adaptive at the pixel level, so it doesn't result in a blurred staircase). Which is more ad-hoc than analytical.

 

[ccanan]

Thx for that.

 

[CarstenS]

Do not forget that marketing speak might have arrived at engine programmers. Basically, you could justify any kind of sorting (analysis) done before multisampling as being analytical. Hell, even plain multisampling is based on some kind of "analysis": Yes, this is a polygon edge! AA-resolver - do your stuff.

 

[dkanter]

Analytical implies (to me) you are using functions...hopefully functions that are analytic.

DK