X360 and Anti Aliasing?

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RobHT

Newcomer
So where are we with X360 games and AA? MS originally stated that ALL title would be required to have at least 2X AA since the design of Xenos (and edram) allowed "free" 2X AA and ~ 5% hit for 4X AA. Dave Baumann's review supported this.
However, recent previews of launch titles have indicated many are lacking any AA and someone even mentioned that MS will allow various techniques to qualify as "anti-aliasing".
Now that some folks have been allowed "hands on" demos of launch titles can anyone comment on the status of AA on X360 launch titles?
 
What are you looking for to determine if AA's present or not? Jaggies with 2xAA seem to me to look about the same as without any AA, so going by a Jaggie-o-meter you'll get false negatives.
 
Yep, just going by the 1280X720 stills I have seen and what others have said on this forum.
I'm just curious, from a technical standpoint, if developers are having some difficulty implementing AA on X360, for some reason.

Disclaimer: I'm not trying to be derogatory toward X360 or their devs, just curious as to what is going on. I have an X360 preordered and am very much looking forward to 11/22! :D
 
Well, there's definite word that some games are going sans-AA for the first generation, and MS has supposedly ok'd this on some level or another. I myself am not sure what's up, but seems devs are having more issues getting the 'free' AA extracted than previously expected.

I don't know - there's certainly enough devs hanging around here that I'm sure someone will weigh in with personal experience.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
NucNavST3 said:
I'm not sure if my point is valid or not, but I can't recall anyone mentioning jaggies while playing the games, it seems it might be a screen capture issue more than anything else, or people may just be so distracted by the great (my word) visuals that they haven't paid much attention.
Click to expand...

Could be a screen capture issue. I wonder if photos would show different results
 
Games in motion hide the jaggies a lot better than stills. Some stills we've seen have also had oversized jaggies as though the image was upscaled. Direct grabs will show worse jaggies than photos or other capture methods, as these will add a degree of blur or fuzz. Jaggies are contrast between pixels and that contrast is highest from direct screen grabs.

I'm more inclined to think the AA is there but not making enough difference for people to really notice. Without seeing comparative shots of 'with' and 'without' AA it's hard to determine what the benefit is. As I've said, much to my annoyance 2xAA and 4xAA don't do much to elliminate big jaggies. I think the main advantage lies elsewhere. I saw recently a series of screen grabs of the same pic showing the difference but can't find it now.
 
Sometimes a screencapture makes it work worse than it is, but sometimes not.

As for the AA, you must remember, AA doesnt just get rid of jaggies, but also helps rid of pixel popping and other issues, this is more obivious benefit to me at low level AA (2x) so this would be it for now.

Once dev's get a good grasp with what they are working with then I see no real issue getting "free" AA out of the X360. Visuals on consoles always improve greatly as time goes by.
 
In watching one of the X05 PDZ movies, you can hear the person giving the demo being asked about the apparent lack of AA. He indicated that AA "was not entirely free" and that they opted for the use of motion blur instead. Listen carefully starting at the 1:42 mark.

http://www.xboxworld.nl/media_file/854
 
2x can be hard to spot in screenshots sometimes. If they use temporal AA, it'll have double effective samples, but screenshots won't show that. As long as the game is running at 60fps (to prevent flickering edges as the sample patterns change), games can have 4x quality AA with 2x performance hit. If 2x is really free, then 4x should be as well, as long as the game's at 60fps or higher.
 
Thanks for all the responses.

In watching one of the X05 PDZ movies, you can hear the person giving the demo being asked about the apparent lack of AA. He indicated that AA "was not entirely free" and that they opted for the use of motion blur instead. Listen carefully starting at the 1:42 mark.
Click to expand...

RARE is saying they are using no AA on PDZ (not even 2X)? Does the motion blur RARE is employing use the exact same resources that AA would?
I guess I am just confused because it seemed that much of the GPU chip logic was designed for the specific task of AA and yet a first party AAA title is possibly opting not to use it. Thoughts?
 
RobHT said:
Thanks for all the responses.



RARE is saying they are using no AA on PDZ (not even 2X)? Does the motion blur RARE is employing use the exact same resources that AA would?
I guess I am just confused because it seemed that much of the GPU chip logic was designed for the specific task of AA and yet a first party AAA title is possibly opting not to use it. Thoughts?
Click to expand...

Using AA requires using tiling which requires your rendering engine to support it in some reasonable fashion. It isn't just a turn it on and it works thing, and as has been mentioned it is not completly free.

I think it was probably considered a significant risk by some early titles since you couldn't measure the impact until final kits were available so they chose to avoid it. There are more than enough risks with launch titles as it is without adding to them.
 
ERP said:
Using AA requires using tiling which requires your rendering engine to support it in some reasonable fashion. It isn't just a turn it on and it works thing, and as has been mentioned it is not completly free.

I think it was probably considered a significant risk by some early titles since you couldn't measure the impact until final kits were available so they chose to avoid it. There are more than enough risks with launch titles as it is without adding to them.
Click to expand...

thanks for the explanation
 
I would LOVE to see how many people will notice the difference between a game with 2X AA and one without on a HDTV at a 3m distance. Unless the game has VERY high contrasting colours, which seems to be out of fashion these days of "realistic" grey dark and grim games.
I'm not even sure i'd notice the difference, and i have VERY bitchy eyes that pick up lots of flaws.
 
Very high contrasted colours look about as jaggie with 2x AA as no AA. Take a black edge on white background for example. Without AA you get a step of black pixel to white pixel. With 2x AA you get a region of 50% grey between black and white. But it's about as contrasted as the black and white. There's certainly no gradation which is what AA of jaggies really needs, and the visible difference between black and 50% grey on a moderately lit screen is pretty small. I would guess that you need at least 4 levels of colour blending to achieve anything that looks like AA on the worst jaggies. On minor jaggies you can get away with less, but then in motion they're not very noticeable anyway.

If anyone ever finds 'before and after' pics of AA in XB360 games PLEASE link to them! Until I start to see evidence otherwise I'm thinking 2xAA is pretty much a waste of time and the resources are better spent elsewhere. At the moment I feel the AA capabilities are bordering on the uselessly gimmicky sales-point rather than a decent IQ enhancement. And I was SO looking forward to jaggie-free gaming.

Actually on SDTV wha'do I care? My jaggies will be downsampled away anyway :D
 
Shifty Geezer said:
Very high contrasted colours look about as jaggie with 2x AA as no AA.
Click to expand...
Well, actually 2XRGMSAA is OK, it does a diference, not as much as 6XRGMSAA or 2x2SSAA, but it's better than nothing, really.
It's true that it doesn't do any miracle, but it helps the IQ a bit. So, why not...

Shifty Geezer said:
Until I start to see evidence otherwise I'm thinking 2xAA is pretty much a waste of time and the resources are better spent elsewhere.
Click to expand...
Just like any other hardwired feature, one could argue. :p

It's true that 2XRGMSAA is not the be all end all, but what would you have liked to see be done with the ~20M transistors, in the daughter die, budget used for this AA?
Honestly, there's not much you could do. Well, not much that I could imagine, anyway.
 
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