Will next gen games be fully anti-aliased?

http://translate.google.com/transla...hread.php?t=454129&sl=de&tl=en&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=346325

http://www.pcgameshardware.com/aid,684782/GTA-4-Higher-visual-quality-with-Downsampling/News/
http://www.pcgameshardware.com/aid,...close-to-photorealism-with-downsampling/News/

 

I've been reading this on B3D for years now but why aren't game developers doing this now? I suppose it's just another result of the old consoles holding everything back?

Quite a few games still won't work with forced MSAA/SSAA. AFAIK, NVIDIA and AMD have to profile games and set the driver up to have forced AA work in most cases these days. Sometimes they don't bother. I find it completely ridiculous that we have not gotten past this crap yet. FXAA and MLAA have probably made things even worse because now developers can just easily drop in a fairly low overhead full screen effect that looks like nice AA (in screenshots anyway).

 

Lack of shading power for the consoles, and if you're usign the same shaders on PC they'll also be unfiltered.

I find it odd the games all run on DirectX and yet can't have a simple flag to toggle exposed to the users.

 

Comes back to an issue I have with forcing anything in the driver.

Yes you get features like AA in older games, but what you really do as the driver writer is assume responsibility for the feature.
.
Later as rendering techniques evolve and as a result the driver hacks no longer work devs still feel no real need to implement the feature. Why should they, if the game is popular enough the driver writers will have to hack the functionality in for them.

Back when every rendering pipeline was based on OGL 1.X driver overrides made a lot of sense, they were just overrides for global state values. Now when there are so many parts of the pipeline programmable, you're pretty much guaranteed any generic approach will fail on any renderer that pushes the boundaries.

I have the same issue with the automatic stereoscopic 3D feature in the NVidia drivers, you need it short term, but it's a hack and not a long term solution and in the end all it will really do is delay adoption by devs.

 

I have a lot of dislike for driver overrides for the simple reason that they make what's already not much of a platform(to put it mildly) into something even less predictable, as you can't even trust the things application sets itself to stick anymore.
And responsibility always (at least partially)gets pushed on the devs, whenever a game is "incompatible" with driver overrides too.

 

It sounds like a nightmare. I don't see how it would ever go away though because end users expect to be able to force options and the IHVs use it as selling points.

The forced driver features have been around forever. I remember Riva 128 being troublesome because of its auto mipmap generation that messed up some games. I think NV backpedaled on that feature in later drivers.

 

can multiple-render-targets implement the old 3dfx t-buffer idea efficiently (i.e. multiple instances of the same triangle rendered simultaneously fetching the same textures, fetching the geometry once) .. if so do any demos exist

 

Why cant they have a separate feature for racing games that give just the whole car say 16xaa while the rest of the environment has only 4xaa? Or same with weapons & hud.

 

Of course you can do it.
Problem is the memory consumption etc. for the 16x pass and the actual combination pass.