When will we completely get rid of jagged edges in games?

[Tim Murray]

to thread starter:

your questions are silly and subjective. in the most literal sense, we will always have jagged edges until we have resolutions orders of magnitude higher than current displays or we get rid of pixels (how do we do that? got me). in a less anal-retentive sense, probably 10 years till you would have to use 1600% magnification to notice them due to improvements in resolution, antialiasing, and poly count.

 

[MuFu]

It could also be caused overzealous edge-enhancement in the DVD master (which can be made a lot worse by certain software features).

Nope; wasn't the case. It almost sounds like I dared to doubt the holy grail of antialiasing. "Nearly" perfect is only the human eye.

But surely a shortcoming in the ability of our visual system to resolve fine detail would make us *less* sensitive to edge aliasing in a motion picture?

As for aliasing in the real world, that can only really occur in your peripheral vision (foveal sampling is anti-aliased optically and AFAIK, there's a huge margin for natural deviation). There's moiré, which you can see quite often in movies, but that isn't really a sampling issue as such.

I don't think anybody really dounts that you saw what you saw, but I would have thought that an oversight on Pixar's behalf would be pretty low on the list of possible causes.

 

[Bolloxoid]

How about at least some wit when it has to come to cheap sarcasm? If you haven't ever noticed any form of minor aliasing with the naked eye in real-time (no not while watching any form of image processing/motion picture), then I'm not so sure that I'm the one that needs his eyes checked.

What do you mean by aliasing with the naked eye, can you describe it more specifically? I'm not following you.

 

[Randell]

Well I definitely noticed aliasing in Shrek at the cinema

 

[Hyp-X]

What do you mean by aliasing with the naked eye, can you describe it more specifically? I'm not following you.

Maybe he means that since your eye takes discrete samples it can produce aliasing.
And it does.

Looking at a sparkling of a water surface in a sunny day does not look that much different to the aliasing effect produced by the specular highlight on the computer.
That's because it has the same cause.

 

[Simon F]

How about at least some wit when it has to come to cheap sarcasm? If you haven't ever noticed any form of minor aliasing with the naked eye in real-time (no not while watching any form of image processing/motion picture), then I'm not so sure that I'm the one that needs his eyes checked.

What do you mean by aliasing with the naked eye, can you describe it more specifically? I'm not following you.

The eye takes samples of the world and so 'could' have aliasing if the thing you are looking at has high frequencies.

IIRC the reasons you don't see this are twofold:

1. Apparently the lens of the eye acts as a low-pass filter and in the centre of the retina the sampling cells are packed very densely. This dense packing exceeds the required sampling rate for the low-pass filtered image,
2. In the outer regions the sampling rate is not high enough to avoid aliasing but because the cells are arranged in a pseudo-random pattern, the aliasing appears as high frequency noise which is far less noticeable than the low-frequency errors (eg "jaggies") that you get with regular sampling patterns.

(Incidently, it is about 4am here and our baby has jetlag so I';m not entirely awake at the moment ...)

 

[Ailuros]

As for aliasing in the real world, that can only really occur in your peripheral vision (foveal sampling is anti-aliased optically and AFAIK, there's a huge margin for natural deviation). There's moiré, which you can see quite often in movies, but that isn't really a sampling issue as such.

Moire can be cured though via antialiasing last time I checked. Irrelevant to that, a weird example is if a window/door is screened with one of those ultra fine meshes for mosquitos and you look outside. Of course does it depend on what you're looking at, it's pattern, distance and a whole lot of other factors, but something like a fine fence outside or anything with very close parallel lines is about enough to expose a moire pattern.

That example hasn't of course anything to do with Pixar's movie in question.

But surely a shortcoming in the ability of our visual system to resolve fine detail would make us *less* sensitive to edge aliasing in a motion picture?

I'm not talking about any shortcomings or special abilities at all. Coincidentially I did notice something the first time I saw the movie and I thought that I was just a bit too tired or something else. I fooled around with the movie at home in quite a few scenarios and yes it was there. Extremely hard to notice. Most people concentrate on the movie itself and don't notice such fine details anyway; in my case it was a pure coincidence. Apart from that aren't they using a stochastic 64x sample FSAA algorithm? Why wouldn't a weird frequency and/or an extremely weird angle NOT in fact expose any form of aliasing after all? We're not talking about 10000x samples per pixel here, are we?

 

[davepermen]

could be aliasing.. could be dvd compression errors, too.. at least i note tons of them in movies like finding nemo, shrek, or ice age. and i find them very annoying..

afai remember, i've seen some jaggies myself in nemo, too.. but i'd had to watch it again..

 

[Bambers]

What do you mean by aliasing with the naked eye, can you describe it more specifically? I'm not following you.

Maybe he means that since your eye takes discrete samples it can produce aliasing.
And it does.

Looking at a sparkling of a water surface in a sunny day does not look that much different to the aliasing effect produced by the specular highlight on the computer.
That's because it has the same cause.

Thats because the water is changing constantly and the points which reflect the sun into the eyes are constantly changing rather than aliasing from the eyes.

 

[digitalwanderer]

I'm not following it entirely, but I'm finding the whole human eye anti-aliasing stuff just bloody fascinating!

Thanks for all the info everyone, muchly food for thought.

 

[Ailuros]

could be aliasing.. could be dvd compression errors, too.. at least i note tons of them in movies like finding nemo, shrek, or ice age. and i find them very annoying..

afai remember, i've seen some jaggies myself in nemo, too.. but i'd had to watch it again..

MuFu has a point when he mentions different hard- or software for DVD playback. The aliasing is still there in the cases I've seen, varying from hard to notice, to very easy to notice. PowerDVD5.0 truly presents more aliasing in general, while winDVD6.0 far less.

For anyone who's curious fetch a genuine copy of the movie and look at Chapter 24 a couple of times under different scenarios. If on a PC, preferably pick an as high resolution as possible. I have to give that thing another shot with NVIDIA's nStantMedia to see if that makes any difference.

 

[beginner16]

Thread hijackers...where are your morals?!

 

[Bolloxoid]

An announcement to all passengers: this thread has been hijacked. Remain calm and stay on your seats and you will not be harmed. This thread will land on the nearest airport in minutes.

 

[digitalwanderer]

Thread hijackers...where are your morals?!

Over in my PM box at Rage3D where I left 'em for safe keeping....why? :|

 

[Ailuros]

Thread hijackers...where are your morals?!

In about 10 years time, games hopefully will look like that:

 

[davepermen]

but please at a higher resolution

 

[MuFu]

I dunno, I think I'd settle for that resolution on my PSP3. 8)

Digi... those frames show evidence of EE. It looks like they might have even been processed twice in such a manner (!).

 

[Simon F]

Digi... those frames show evidence of EE. It looks like they might have even been processed twice in such a manner (!).

"EE"?

 

[digitalwanderer]

"EE"?

I'm guessing "edge enhancement".

 

[MuFu]

Sorry - yes, edge enhancement. Not "electronic engineer".