AA Techniques

[Qianna]

Are we ever going to see a better anti-aliasing technique than SMAA+TAA? Say, MSAA, or support for MFAA? With everything I could enable I still very clearly notice jaggies, even at 4K sometimes. Jagged edges are all over the place @ FHD/QHD.
If we could have support for a better anti-aliasing method (preferably the one that doesn't blur the scene (*cough* temporal *cough)) for those of us who with hardware that can afford the performance hit.

Please?

[Extroah]

Or you could add AA through Nvidia Inspector or whatever program AMD is using. Even goes up to 128x if you are running SLi.

Also, i've been using temporal ever since it got added, and i either got used to it and dont see any blur, or they just improved on it a lot.

[MillbrookWest]

27 minutes ago, Qianna said:

Are we ever going to see a better anti-aliasing technique than SMAA+TAA? Say, MSAA, or support for MFAA? With everything I could enable I still very clearly notice jaggies, even at 4K sometimes. Jagged edges are all over the place @ FHD/QHD.
If we could have support for a better anti-aliasing method (preferably the one that doesn't blur the scene (*cough* temporal *cough)) for those of us who with hardware that can afford the performance hit.

Please?

TAA is the preferred AA method amongst most studio's since it's quite cheap, and when paired with the abundance of Shader effects, has great coverage.

MSAA on the other hand only really works on polygonal edges, and has a massive performance, and memory footprint, but does not work on transparencies and alpha effects. 
This, in addition to the fact that an MSAA pass may happen quite early in the render process, means that you end up putting jaggies back into the image when doing your lighting passes towards the end (at least with a deferred renderer which is another preferred method amongst most studio's). Rendering the MSAA pass useless, and a waste of time.

If you want real good AA, go with SSAA. It has all the benefits of MSAA, and it will address all its shortcomings, but with a much heavier performance footprint.

Edited December 2, 2016 by MillbrookWest

[Qianna]

4 hours ago, Extroah said:

Or you could add AA through Nvidia Inspector or whatever program AMD is using. Even goes up to 128x if you are running SLi.

Also, i've been using temporal ever since it got added, and i either got used to it and dont see any blur, or they just improved on it a lot.

I have tried that, but it didn't work for me.

 

4 hours ago, MillbrookWest said:

TAA is the preferred AA method amongst most studio's since it's quite cheap, and when paired with the abundance of Shader effects, has great coverage.

MSAA on the other hand only really works on polygonal edges, and has a massive performance, and memory footprint, but does not work on transparencies and alpha effects. 
This, in addition to the fact that an MSAA pass may happen quite early in the render process, means that you end up putting jaggies back into the image when doing your lighting passes towards the end (at least with a deferred renderer which is another preferred method amongst most studio's). Rendering the MSAA pass useless, and a waste of time.

If you want real good AA, go with SSAA. It has all the benefits of MSAA, and it will address all its shortcomings, but with a much heavier performance footprint.

If you look closely, I haven't even mentioned supersampling, because MSAA offers almost all of it's benefits at a lower cost. As per alpha textures, no one canceled TXAA as a bonus. If I wouldn't care about performance altogether - SSAA hands down. But I do, I therefore proposed MSAA and/or MFAA, so all can enjoy both worlds (performance and image quality).


 

[bubbabenali]

8 hours ago, Qianna said:

Are we ever going to see a better anti-aliasing technique than SMAA+TAA? Say, MSAA, or support for MFAA? With everything I could enable I still very clearly notice jaggies, even at 4K sometimes. Jagged edges are all over the place @ FHD/QHD.
If we could have support for a better anti-aliasing method (preferably the one that doesn't blur the scene (*cough* temporal *cough)) for those of us who with hardware that can afford the performance hit.

Please?

If you realy have hardware that can afford that performance hit, why not just use virtual resolutions? It's the purest AA solution there wont be a better AA system for that picture quality.

[Qianna]

6 hours ago, bubbabenali said:

If you realy have hardware that can afford that performance hit, why not just use virtual resolutions? It's the purest AA solution there wont be a better AA system for that picture quality.

DSR scales down the HUD so much it's barely noticeable. Same applies to chat, arsenal, etc.. Only reason I'm playing at FHD is because my monitor is relatively old.
Plus, I prefer native support over third-party.

Edited December 3, 2016 by Qianna

[MillbrookWest]

12 hours ago, Qianna said:

If you look closely, I haven't even mentioned supersampling, because MSAA offers almost all of it's benefits at a lower cost. As per alpha textures, no one canceled TXAA as a bonus. If I wouldn't care about performance altogether - SSAA hands down. But I do, I therefore proposed MSAA and/or MFAA, so all can enjoy both worlds (performance and image quality).

TXAA, and MFAA are Nvidia proprietary technologies. This means the manner in which they generate their samples are exclusive. More to the point, they aren't even supported across the entirety of Nvidia's own GPU lineup, starting with the 600 series and higher. There is already a stink kicked up up with regards to Physx, the last thing DE needs (as a company that needs a large userbase) is to segment, or alienate, their userbase.
An additional note... The 'T' in 'TXAA' stands for Temporal, the same 'T' in 'TAA'. The 'x' is Nvidia's other methods to determine their samples - using MSAA, and HQfxaa filters where a TAA pass would merely use information from previous frames.

So with those proprietary software's pretty much unavailable, this makes MSAA kinda useless. As i said above, MSAA is only really useful in a Forward renderer. Most games nowadays use a deferred renderer. You can implement an MSAA pass, but it means moving things about in the render process to facilitate the fact you will do your lighting pass last (which as i said above will put back jaggies). So it is a pain in the &#! to get right, and if done wrong, you end up with horrid performance (worse than SSAA).

DE's best bet for AA is to figure out a way to get their HUD drawn at a much later stage in the process, this way they can work on allowing native SSAA support with an internal resolution slider - People can choose their poison. SSAA is far superior to all AA techniques. It may well be a 2x SSAA pass, with an SMAA filter could be a good spot for performance vs visual quality.
NOTE: DSR is just SSAA, merely resolved on the GPU before being sent to the screen.