AMD's Morphological Anti-Aliasing

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Tamlin_WSGF

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Saw this on THG and were pretty intrigued by it:
With morphological AA enabled, we fired up Battlefield Bad Company 2. The post-processing filter didn’t seem to make any difference at all. Careful checking verified that, indeed, it does not seem to work with this title. So much for automatic compatibility with all DirectX 9 to 11 games.


This brings us to StarCraft 2, a title in which we're quite interested due to the fact that Radeons are currently known for slow AA performance in this game. With morphological AA enabled, the results are visually obvious, and yet performance remains almost as fast as it is with the feature turned off (roughly twice as fast as it is with 4x multi-sampling, and about four times as fast as 4x super-sampling). This is a much more impressive result.
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morphological%20aa.png

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-hd-6870-radeon-hd-6850-barts,2776-4.html

It obviously doesn't work with all titles (like SSAA), but when it first works it looks great it seems. Finally it made sense to enable AA in Starcraft 2! Could people post here when they see more games tested with this? I am very interested in the results! :D
 
Doesn't Morphological Anti-Aliasing just blur the crap out of edges instead of making them sharp?
 
Rossi~ said:
Doesn't Morphological Anti-Aliasing just blur the crap out of edges instead of making them sharp?
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Read the link :) :

Morphological anti-aliasing (AA) is an all-new option for the Radeon HD 6000-series cards. It presents a different approach to the aliasing problem in that it needs no insight into the makeup of the scene’s geometry; morphological AA is a post-process filtering technique, accelerated with DirectCompute and compatible with any application from DirectX 9 to 11 (in theory). After a frame is rendered, it is passed through the morphological AA shader that looks for high-contrast edges and patterns consistent with aliasing. It then blends the colors of adjacent pixels to approximate a smooth transition along a line instead of aliased steps. This means that the smoothing effect isn’t limited to the edges of geometry or alpha textures like CFAA; it applies to all of the pixels in the scene.


Conceptually, this method promises results similar to super-sampling, but with performance comparable to edge-detect AA. AMD suggests that some applications will look better than others, and that the technique is not ideal for all scenes and games.
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I see.. I'm a bit sceptical about this at the moment, but i think you need to see it in place/play with it to really see what it's like.
Maybe i will get the cheaper card and see for myself.
 
Rossi~ said:
I see.. I'm a bit sceptical about this at the moment, but i think you need to see it in place/play with it to really see what it's like.
Maybe i will get the cheaper card and see for myself.
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Its very game dependent and the effect seems (and is advertised) like SSAA. I've noticed that in some games, 2X SSAA is preferred to MSAA, but if I increase SSAA too much it becomes worse. Here you can see FS SSAA illustrated in one of BFG's excellent articles:

http://alienbabeltech.com/main/?p=21497&page=5
 
Since it is a post processing filter i hope to see it included as an option for the 5000's and maybe even for the 4000 users.

Also i wonder if Nvidia won't copy it or do their own version...
 
Revdarian said:
Since it is a post processing filter i hope to see it included as an option for the 5000's and maybe even for the 4000 users.

Also i wonder if Nvidia won't copy it or do their own version...
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It gave almost free AA in Starcraft 2 and the results were nice according to the pictures at least. I really hope it can be backported to 5000 series and also that Nvidia cards gets something similar. Cost effective AA is always good to have. :D
 
it should be backported since its directcompute based.. 5k and 6k series both use directcompute 5 so it should at least work on that generation as well.. not sure about the 4k series though..
 
sirmonkey1985 said:
it should be backported since its directcompute based.. 5k and 6k series both use directcompute 5 so it should at least work on that generation as well.. not sure about the 4k series though..
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I hope so. :) I wonder if this makes it easier to use AA in high Eyefinity resolutions :D Since its compute based, it might not suffer the same limitations in those res.
 
HardOCP will be doing a full article on this new MorphAA. We will look at it in-depth for you guys soon. It deserves and article of its own rather than it being buried inside a review. We have only had a MorphAA driver that worked for a couple of days now.
 
Morph AA looks more like a big blur filter and it will hit everything 2D interface included. Not that interesting to me.
 
so with Morpho AA enabled you are not supposed to use any other filtering methods such as Edge Detect AA or Super-Sampling?...doing so will result in decreased performance?...so Box AA and Adaptive AA is all we can use with Morph enabled?
 
polonyc2 said:
so with Morpho AA enabled you are not supposed to use any other filtering methods such as Edge Detect AA or Super-Sampling?...doing so will result in decreased performance?...so Box AA and Adaptive AA is all we can use with Morph enabled?
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It works independent of AA. Thats the beauty of it. From the link in OP:

Morphological anti-aliasing works independent of regular anti-aliasing settings, so controlling it might seem confusing at first. Even with the “Use application settings” checkbox enabled, the feature should work, so long as it’s enabled. It can even be used in conjunction with regular AA modes, if you want.
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Tamlin_WSGF said:
It works independent of AA. Thats the beauty of it. From the link in OP:
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that's cool...was reading another article which talked about how it might affect other filtering methods so that's what got me thinking about performance penalties

"Using other AA enhancements with MLAA is supported, but may be redundant; setting 24xEDAA with SSAA mode and enabling MLAA could be suboptimal for performance and offer little return on the GPU time invested, compared to traditional box MSAA and Adaptive Anti-Aliasing"

"AMD estimates that the performance hit is similar to enabling their Custom Filtering Edge Detect mode, but working on all surfaces, edges and textures. If you've used EDAA then you'll know that it's not a small performance hit in some titles, but the increase in visual quality might be worth the performance cost as it should be better than applied EDAA - every edge will be smoothed"
 
Revdarian said:
Since it is a post processing filter i hope to see it included as an option for the 5000's and maybe even for the 4000 users.

Also i wonder if Nvidia won't copy it or do their own version...
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Morph AA:

@catalystmaker Is Morphological AA going to make it to the 5xxx series? Anandtech seems to think it is possible. http://bit.ly/cYZwBE
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@obiwantoby yes it will in the future
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polonyc2 said:
that's cool...was reading another article which talked about how it might affect other filtering methods so that's what got me thinking about performance penalties

"Using other AA enhancements with MLAA is supported, but may be redundant; setting 24xEDAA with SSAA mode and enabling MLAA could be suboptimal for performance and offer little return on the GPU time invested, compared to traditional box MSAA and Adaptive Anti-Aliasing"

"AMD estimates that the performance hit is similar to enabling their Custom Filtering Edge Detect mode, but working on all surfaces, edges and textures. If you've used EDAA then you'll know that it's not a small performance hit in some titles, but the increase in visual quality might be worth the performance cost as it should be better than applied EDAA - every edge will be smoothed"
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Nice! Do you have a link to that article? :D

Seems it might gives "free AA" in more titles then Starcraft 2 and might be used in Eyefinity (due to little bandwidth need). From AT:

MLAA is not a new AA method, but it is the first time we’re seeing it on a PC video card. It’s already in use on video game consoles, where it’s a cheap way to implement AA without requiring the kind of memory bandwidth MSAA requires. In fact it’s an all-around cheap way to perform AA, as it doesn’t require too much computational time either.
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http://www.anandtech.com/show/3987/...renewing-competition-in-the-midrange-market/3

I'm looking forward to [H]'s review to see what it actually can do in real gaming! :D
 
Terry Makedon has already posted on his twitter feed that "previous generations" will be receiving Morph AA in a future driver release. So 5xxx at the very least... maybe even 4xxx.
 
Statecraft 2 is dx9, right? It's deferred so there is no way to use regular msaa outside of driver hax in dx9

Msaa is always going to be expensive in deferred renderers, very cool that this works so well. Deferred aa problem officially solved? Being a post effect to it should scale well to, especially as shader power scales up. I think aa effects like this are the future.
 
One thing about Morpho AA that is going to present a challenge is since its a post-processing effect, you cannot take a screenshot of it in action. I'm going to have to figure out how to represent it to you guys, AMD offers a solution that I may have to use.

This is the official word about that from AMD, so if you guys have any other suggestions I'm all ears:

Since this filter is a post process, conventional image capture applications such as FRAPS will not be able to take a screen shot of the effect. Given this, alongside the Catalyst 10.10a driver for Morphological Anti-Aliasing I have made available on the press FTP a Morphological Anti-Aliasing filtering application (mlaa.exe) which uses the same driver code found in Catalyst 10.10a to enable you to construct image quality comparison images.
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MorphoAA. Whoever came up with such a lame name? :eek: ;)

As for showing it in action...hmm what about 'snipping tool'? Crude but won't that work?
 
I would like to know if this version of anti-aliasing will work on a few older titles such as:
Splinter Cell Chaos Theory
Stalker Shadow of Chernobyl
Rainbow Six Vegas (aa works but kills the framerate here)
 
Brent_Justice said:
One thing about Morpho AA that is going to present a challenge is since its a post-processing effect, you cannot take a screenshot of it in action. I'm going to have to figure out how to represent it to you guys, AMD offers a solution that I may have to use.

This is the official word about that from AMD, so if you guys have any other suggestions I'm all ears:
Click to expand...

I just did the hack for my 5870 and this thing is awesome in Stalker CS! Taking screenshots with AMD's tool seems fine to me (even better if you can get them to agree to release that tool, so we can post screenshots too). :D

mfaa.jpg
 
Brent_Justice said:
One thing about Morpho AA that is going to present a challenge is since its a post-processing effect, you cannot take a screenshot of it in action. I'm going to have to figure out how to represent it to you guys, AMD offers a solution that I may have to use.

This is the official word about that from AMD, so if you guys have any other suggestions I'm all ears:
Click to expand...

God, remember when you had to use HyperSnap to capture screen shots of the Voodoo 3 to get the "22-bit" post-processing in all it's glory?

When grabbing screenshots, keep in mind 3dfx has a unique way of converting data in the frame buffer before we send it to the screen to be displayed. As a result, we store "unfiltered" data in the frame buffer - and the filtering is performed at scan-out on the way to display. This improves the quality of the picture displayed on the monitor, but doesn't actually change the data in the frame buffer. Typically when you are doing a frame grab, you are just grabbing data directly from the frame buffer, which is "unfiltered" so the quality of raw images grabbed from the frame buffer is actually lower than what is actually displayed. HyperSnap, a frame grabbing utility, actually implements our filtering technique on their frame grabs, producing a more accurate representation of what the user would see on their display by actually running our filter on the data and writing out the filtered, instead of the "raw" data. Get HyperSnap at http://www.hyperionics.com/
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Man, I feel like I'm back in 1999 again :D

Can's wait for your in-depth MOO review!
 
biggles said:
I would like to know if this version of anti-aliasing will work on a few older titles such as:
Splinter Cell Chaos Theory
Stalker Shadow of Chernobyl
Rainbow Six Vegas (aa works but kills the framerate here)
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I'm not entirely familiar with those games but as long as the game supports dx9 and up it'll work on it. This from Anandtech's review.
 
Is this MLAA similar or identical to the MLAA that Sony's first party developers began implementing on some of their games? I know God of War 3 uses it, for example, and Killzone 3 will supposedly use it. I'm playing God of War 3 right now but I can't judge the efficacy of this AA technique just by looking at it since the resolution is already so low to begin with relative to PCs.
 
Morphy said:
I'm not entirely familiar with those games but as long as the game supports dx9 and up it'll work on it. This from Anandtech's review.
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YMMV:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-hd-6870-radeon-hd-6850-barts,2776-4.html

<<With morphological AA enabled, we fired up Battlefield Bad Company 2. The post-processing filter didn’t seem to make any difference at all. Careful checking verified that, indeed, it does not seem to work with this title. So much for automatic compatibility with all DirectX 9 to 11 games.>>
 
I posted a comment in the 10.10 thread. Just adding that I've got it working on my 5850 in HL2, Medieval Total War 2 and Borderlands. Don't have anymore time to continue farting around at this stage due to study.
 
I just installed the hacked driver, and finally AA in GTA IV and The Force Unleashed. It does offer great image quality when it works, but it's still hit and miss. Since it works after the image has already been in the frame buffer, taking screenshots with Fraps isn't capturing it.
 
So this is basically like a "smooth edges" filter in Photoshop :)

The algorithm looks for sharp or jaggy patterns of contrasting edges in the overall rendered picture and blurs them instead of working on the actual geometry.

Hopefully this will be a good thing for all those DX9 differed shading engine games (GTA IV, Unreal Engine, etc.) that have no AA support.
 
Spare-Flair said:
So this is basically like a "smooth edges" filter in Photoshop :)

The algorithm looks for sharp or jaggy patterns of contrasting edges in the overall rendered picture and blurs them instead of working on the actual geometry.

Hopefully this will be a good thing for all those DX9 differed shading engine games (GTA IV, Unreal Engine, etc.) that have no AA support.
Click to expand...

Its a bit like smooth edges filter. Kinda like a pixel blend effect. I did a quick test in Mass Effect 2, that have no AA support and I was positively suprised. Haven't tested the performance hit yet, but here's the MLAA effect (No AA in top picture):

me2comblarge.png
 
Brent_Justice said:
One thing about Morpho AA that is going to present a challenge is since its a post-processing effect, you cannot take a screenshot of it in action. I'm going to have to figure out how to represent it to you guys, AMD offers a solution that I may have to use.

This is the official word about that from AMD, so if you guys have any other suggestions I'm all ears:
Click to expand...

Got a hold of the tool and my source didn't mind I spread it, but neither of us have instructions in how to use it. Could you enlighten us?

Edit: Link removed. It seems this tool is still under NDA. I posted this tool at WSGF and AMD asked it to be removed, since its under NDA. As a courtesy, I'm also removing it elsewhere I've posted it.

On CMD, there are only options to select input/output directory.

Edit:
I figured it out.
Stored mlaa.exe in C:\mlaa
made a dir c:\mlaa\MLAA
I took screenshots with Fraps in PNG format
Put the screenshots in c:\mlaa
Entered via command line (cmd.exe) from within c:\MLAA:

mlaa -in c:\mlaa -out c:\mlaa\mlaa

the PNG were then processed and the processed images were stored in c:\mlaa\mlaa with a MLAA_ added to the name (MLAA_ME2.PNG). It seems to process any screenshot and apply MLAA to them, so anyone can check MLAA effect on existing screenshots. :)
 
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Tamlin_WSGF said:
Its a bit like smooth edges filter. Kinda like a pixel blend effect. I did a quick test in Mass Effect 2, that have no AA support and I was positively suprised. Haven't tested the performance hit yet, but here's the MLAA effect (No AA in top picture):

me2comblarge.png
Click to expand...

holyshit thats an incredible difference, and no performance hit?
awesome.

so this works like the HQ and Sai filters from MAME and ZSnes.... Genius.
Kinda make you wonder why anyone hasn't thought about this before...
 
It's definitely better than No AA for little to no performance hit but it's still quite far from the other AA methods. I'll take it though. :)
 
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