Defining terms in Display Settings

[Excelynne]

I play on PC and I thought that we needed a thread that compiles the definition about these settings but I'd like to emphasize on:
Runtime Tessellation
Anisotropic Filtering
Trilinear Filtering
Anti-Aliasing - FXAA and SMAA

I would appreciate it if these were explained in simple terms since I don't understand technical things much.
Also, if you could at least cite an example as well :D

If you can help define everything in the display settings, that would be great too.

PS: I think it would be great if DE would add definitions whenever a player hovers their cursor on those settings.

[Renathy]

Runtime Tessellation: Improves performance by reducing strain on CPU while creating objects.

Anisotropic Filtering: Enhances textures at further distances.

Trilinear Filtering: It's a weaker version of Anisotropic Filtering.¹

Anti-Aliasing FXAA: This is the less demanding and generally the worst looking option. (It tries to smooth edges so they don't look as jagged by blurring them.)

Anti-Aliasing SMAA: It basically looks better compared to FXAA, that's for sure. People will always tell you that any other Anti-Aliasing option is always better than FXAA in terms of quality. (Take in account that this option is more demanding.)²

 

Check out this Wikia page for more information on the game's graphical settings. If you have any more questions about any of these, let me know.

Edited July 8, 2016 by JRMC

[-Apple-Pie-]

BTW, if i enable AF and TF at the same time, does it make visual difference?

[Renathy]

4 minutes ago, mobilehacker said:

BTW, if i enable AF and TF at the same time, does it make visual difference?

Unfortunately, I cannot tell you why the Trilinear Filtering is a separate option. It might make a difference, if they allowed them to be separate from one another, but I wouldn't know since I never tested it thoroughly.

[-Apple-Pie-]

Just now, JRMC said:

Unfortunately, I cannot tell you why the Trilinear Filtering is a separate option. It might make a difference, if they allowed them to be separate from one another, but I wouldn't know since I never tested it thoroughly.

Yeah, in the most games this setting is TF/afx2/x4/x8/x16, thats pretty unclear in Warframe.

[Excelynne]

42 minutes ago, JRMC said:

Runtime Tessellation: Improves performance by reducing strain on CPU while creating objects.

Anisotropic Filtering: Enhances textures at further distances.

Trilinear Filtering: It's a weaker version of Anisotropic Filtering.¹

Anti-Aliasing FXAA: This is the less demanding and generally the worst looking option. (It tries to smooth edges so they don't look as jagged by blurring them.)

Anti-Aliasing SMAA: It basically looks better compared to FXAA, that's for sure. People will always tell you that any other Anti-Aliasing option is always better than FXAA in terms of quality. (Take in account that this option is more demanding.)²

 

Check out this Wikia page for more information on the game's graphical settings. If you have any more questions about any of these, let me know.

So the runtime tessellation is like what I usually see as blurry/pixelated objects that gradually turns into the intended quality?
and thanks for the wiki as well

[MillbrookWest]

36 minutes ago, EVANTRIAS said:

Runtime Tessellation
Anisotropic Filtering
Trilinear Filtering
Anti-Aliasing - FXAA and SMAA

Runtime Tessellation: Every object in a game is made up of lots of triangles, collectively called a mesh. Runtime tessellation is the act of sub-dividing these triangles in real time to produce high quality meshes. Whereas a base mesh may have a few thousand triangles, a tessellated mesh can have a few million. This setting can have quite a heavy performance penalty for lower end hardware, and depending on how objects are tessellated in-game. In Warframe, I believe tessellation is reserved for meshes that represent organic life - Trees on Earth, Infested tumours etc. (Heavy performance cost for low end hardware)

Anisotropic Filtering: This setting determines the visual clarity of textures when viewed at oblique angles. The higher the sample rate(4x, 8x, 16x), the greater the angle you can view objects without the texture becoming a blurry mess. For most modern GPU's, this setting can be run at 16x with minimal performance hit (~2FPS)

Trilinear Filtering: Inferior to Anisotropic filtering. To describe it in a crude fashion, the technique blurs the point at which i high quality texture, and a low quality texture meet. So to your eye, you are merely looking at one texture. This is a crude way to describe it, but it's the best i got.

Anti-Aliasing: All AA in Warframe are post process Techniques. Meaning they occur after the rendering process. They aren't a part of the rendering pipeline itself like a Multi-sampled approach would be. Anti-aliasing is the act of fixing pixels that are represented by too many colours. Since Pixels can display only a single colour at a time, AA algorithms find these contested areas, and sample the pixel to determine a value that best describes that region.

FXAA: Fast Approximate Anti-aliasing. The "Approximate" in the name itself should give an indication of the quality of the technique. This is a low cost technique that does a decent job of smoothing jagged edges, a by product of all the approximation is the image gets quite blurry. (Low Performance cost)

SMAA: Sub-pixel Morphological Anti-aliasing. Like FXAA, but as the "Sub-pixel" in the name implies, has much better recognition of edges, and subsequent produces better smoothing of edges, with less blur to the overall image. (Low Performance cost - Higher than FXAA though)

TAA: (Upcoming) Temporal Anti-aliasing. Uses previously rendered frames for sample data. Then re-projects them forward into an upcoming frame. Arguably the best post process solution. (Low Performance cost - Heavier than both FXAA, and SMAA). 

[Excelynne]

4 minutes ago, MillbrookWest said:

Runtime Tessellation: Every object in a game is made up of lots of triangles, collectively called a mesh. Runtime tessellation is the act of sub-dividing these triangles in real time to produce high quality meshes. Whereas a base mesh may have a few thousand triangles, a tessellated mesh can have a few million. This setting can have quite a heavy performance penalty for lower end hardware, and depending on how objects are tessellated in-game. In Warframe, I believe tessellation is reserved for meshes that represent organic life - Trees on Earth, Infested tumours etc. (Heavy performance cost for low end hardware)

Anisotropic Filtering: This setting determines the visual clarity of textures when viewed at oblique angles. The higher the sample rate(4x, 8x, 16x), the greater the angle you can view objects without the texture becoming a blurry mess. For most modern GPU's, this setting can be run at 16x with minimal performance hit (~2FPS)

Trilinear Filtering: Inferior to Anisotropic filtering. To describe it in a crude fashion, the technique blurs the point at which i high quality texture, and a low quality texture meet. So to your eye, you are merely looking at one texture. This is a crude way to describe it, but it's the best i got.

Anti-Aliasing: All AA in Warframe are post process Techniques. Meaning they occur after the rendering process. They aren't a part of the rendering pipeline itself like a Multi-sampled approach would be. Anti-aliasing is the act of fixing pixels that are represented by too many colours. Since Pixels can display only a single colour at a time, AA algorithms find these contested areas, and sample the pixel to determine a value that best describes that region.

FXAA: Fast Approximate Anti-aliasing. The "Approximate" in the name itself should give an indication of the quality of the technique. This is a low cost technique that does a decent job of smoothing jagged edges, a by product of all the approximation is the image gets quite blurry. (Low Performance cost)

SMAA: Sub-pixel Morphological Anti-aliasing. Like FXAA, but as the "Sub-pixel" in the name implies, has much better recognition of edges, and subsequent produces better smoothing of edges, with less blur to the overall image. (Low Performance cost - Higher than FXAA though)

TAA: (Upcoming) Temporal Anti-aliasing. Uses previously rendered frames for sample data. Then re-projects them forward into an upcoming frame. Arguably the best post process solution. (Low Performance cost - Heavier than both FXAA, and SMAA). 

Thanks a lot, now I can leave my Warframe settings to max :D
But I'm still puzzled why would they have an option that you can turn both Anisotropic Filtering and Trilinear on...knowing Anisotropic is better or you can disable it and use Trilinear

[MillbrookWest]

2 minutes ago, EVANTRIAS said:

Thanks a lot, now I can leave my Warframe settings to max :D
But I'm still puzzled why would they have an option that you can turn both Anisotropic Filtering and Trilinear on...knowing Anisotropic is better or you can disable it and use Trilinear

Don't quote me on this, but as i recall, the name "Evolution Engine" is derived from the fact the game engine that powers warframe was an "Evolution" of one of the old Unreal engines - Since DE used to work with Epic on unreal titles. Up until Unreal 3, Epic were doing things with real-time streaming of mip-maps. It could be a quirk of the way the engine handles data.

In more modern engines, if you enable Anisotropic Filtering, you automatically enable Bilinear, and Trilinear filtering. I can only guess that the reason Waframe has these as two individual settings is due to the roots of the game engine itself. Only the DE staff truly know.

[Renathy]

27 minutes ago, EVANTRIAS said:

So the runtime tessellation is like what I usually see as blurry/pixelated objects that gradually turns into the intended quality?

Yes, I believe so. Tessellation is basically the process of improving the quality of objects or textures by making them look more defined.¹

Runtime Tessellation, on the other hand, helps the game by not putting so much strain on the processor as it creates objects throughout the environment while you run the game.

Edited July 8, 2016 by JRMC

[PopGligor]

Tessellation - it's a process that "creates" more polygons on a mesh. It's akin to how LOD works in games, but tessellation can be used to render *more* detail through shaders, as opposed to LOD, which can only subtract detail. Every good looking game today uses lower poly models, then it "tessellates" them with a shader which adds more detail. It's much heavier than the previously popular bump mapping, but the advantage tessellation has is that it can change the silhouette, the geometry of a mesh which bump mapping can't do. It's not that heavy a process and if you can, enable it.

Anisotropic and trilinear filtering are methods to make textures look smoother. Anisotropic is better for filtering textures at an angle and in the distance. Trilinear filtering tends to lose level of detail in the distance, resulting in blurry distant textures. Crank that anisotropic filtering up if possible.

Anti-aliasing smooths the edges of objects to avoid them being jagged. FXAA and SMAA use different means to reach a similar goal and you should test which looks best for you. If I remember correctly, FXAA tends to be sharper than SMAA. Also, if you're playing on a monitor with high pixel density, you may not need any anti-aliasing at all. 

[KIREEK]

Trilinear filtering applies a filter to all texture stages.

When trying to represent the ground you use a mix of texture quality, mipmaps (and the quality of mipmaps) and Level of detail, sometimes these changes from one texture to the other are noticieable, so trilinear filtering can be used to make it less obvious.

Unlike what others say, trilinear can be used on Anisotropic Filtering and the same goes for the ammount of samples.

So there isn't exactly 2 things for you to choose from, such as "Anisotropic Filtering 16x" and "trilinear", both can be combined into a single thing, that makes it "Anisotropic Filtering with trilinear at 16x"

This option needs to be combined with mipmaps quality and level of detail carefully, so that you don't end up wasting resources to make things look good and then waste resources to make it look bad again.

[Tymerc]

Sorry if this is a dumb question, but which setting affects the screen flashes when like an assassin such as Stalker or when Sentients spawn? I want whatever associated option tuned appropriately so I can better distinguish who is who. 

[KIREEK]

36 minutes ago, Tymerc said:

Sorry if this is a dumb question, but which setting affects the screen flashes when like an assassin such as Stalker or when Sentients spawn? I want whatever associated option tuned appropriately so I can better distinguish who is who. 

G3 appear in grinner missions, yellow lights around you

Stalker appears anywhere, tipical screen flash

Zanuka appears on corpus, your warframe gets yellow circles and your warframe glows yellow

Sindicate death squads do the same thing as stalker, but you glow red

You can't see these effects?

[Tymerc]

1 minute ago, KIREEK said:

G3 appear in grinner missions, yellow lights around you

Stalker appears anywhere, tipical screen flash

Zanuka appears on corpus, your warframe gets yellow circles and your warframe glows yellow

Sindicate death squads do the same thing as stalker, but you glow red

You can't see these effects?

Well the screen usually turns a specific color but as my settings are right now all of them just give me a simple screen flash. As for the unique effects I don't really notice those that much either at the moment. 

[Renathy]

10 hours ago, Tymerc said:

Well the screen usually turns a specific color but as my settings are right now all of them just give me a simple screen flash. As for the unique effects I don't really notice those that much either at the moment. 

No graphical setting changes the flickering. They're all identical. The only effect that changes is the auras on your Warframe.

I'm not sure but the Particle System Quality setting might help with the visibility of those auras.