BF4 - Antialiasing Post - Yay or Nay - Vote and Discuss

Do you use Post AA (FXAA) in BF4?

  • I enable Post AA (any level) (or leave it enabled as the default setting)

    Votes: 62 30.1%

  • I disable Post AA

    Votes: 144 69.9%
  • Total voters
    206
B

Brent_Justice

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Joined
Apr 17, 2000
Messages
17,755
We have begun our BF4 Evaluation. I spent time last night playing BF4 Multiplayer, and one of the first things I noticed is the image quality of the game. I thought, wow, those textures look low quality. I thought the game wasn't living up to looking like a Frostbite 3 engine game. Then I looked into the graphics options, and I disable "Antialiasing Post" which is inherently FXAA. I turned that off, and all of the sudden the textures and texture fidelity looked way better to me. Crisper, better quality. I realized AA Post was adding a blur to everything.

There are two thoughts to using AA Post:
A.) Users that like to disable it, for the improved texture quality, and because they hate the blur.
B.) Users that enable it because it reduces aliasing on everything, including the trees and vegetation, which regular 2X and 4X MSAA can't do. Note that enabled is the default setting.

My question is for our gamers here, what settings do you use to play BF4 as it relates to Post AA? Do you turn on Post AA (any level), or do you disable Post AA?

I know how I'm going to game on BF4 personally, with settings, I have a strong opinion, I won't post it here, don't want to influence the results, but my feedback will be in our evaluation.

Your votes and discussion will be included in our evaluation, so here is your chance to be heard. Thanks for all your freedback!
 
I never use FXAA due to the situation you describe. In BF3 I used MSAA 4x with Post AA off -- I'll do the same for BF4. For what it's worth the only post AA I use is SMAA/sweetfx which does not suffer from blurring.
 
I always disable it because it's like smearing vaseline all over your monitor.
 
Things in game look way to soft with post AA on, sort of like blurred textures and makes things really hard to see at a distance. I don't really get any sort of an FPS hit, I just prefer it off.
 
RangerXML said:
and makes things really hard to see at a distance.
Click to expand...

This is a good point, being able to see into the distance as far as possible is very important in a multiplayer game like this. So whichever setting helps you to do that, is important for gameplay.
 
Brent_Justice said:
We have begun our BF4 Evaluation. I spent time last night playing BF4 Multiplayer, and one of the first things I noticed is the image quality of the game. I thought, wow, those textures look low quality. I thought the game wasn't living up to looking like a Frostbite 3 engine game. Then I looked into the graphics options, and I disable "Antialiasing Post" which is inherently FXAA. I turned that off, and all of the sudden the textures and texture fidelity looked way better to me. Crisper, better quality. I realized AA Post was adding a blur to everything.

There are two thoughts to using AA Post:
A.) Users that like to disable it, for the improved texture quality, and because they hate the blur.
B.) Users that enable it because it reduces aliasing on everything, including the trees and vegetation, which regular 2X and 4X MSAA can't do. Note that enabled is the default setting.

My question is for our gamers here, what settings do you use to play BF4 as it relates to Post AA? Do you turn on Post AA (any level), or do you disable Post AA?

I know how I'm going to game on BF4 personally, with settings, I have a strong opinion, I won't post it here, don't want to influence the results, but my feedback will be in our evaluation.

Your votes and discussion will be included in our evaluation, so here is your chance to be heard. Thanks for all your freedback!
Click to expand...

This was the same issue I had with BF3. I can't stand the blur, I much prefer a crisp image. I trid to explain this to several friends and they had no idea what I was getting at. A google search on 'bf3 blurry' I believe is what got me some answers.

Dat post AA man, do not want.
 
Thanks for the heads up today Brent. I spent about an hour this morning playing and didn't get to tweaking the settings. I'll definitely be turning this off.
 
Ever since I found out what FXAA did with GTA4, I stopped using it. It does add a horrible blur fliter to everything.
 
lol, I thought it was the latest driver that made my BF4 run in low resolution even when the game and my monitor states that its running under 1920x1200 resolution

thanks Brent.
 
I enable it. It makes a good "anti-static" filter.
Though I haven't played bf4 since beta.

MSAA is a waste of resources and it is nice to have something take the edge off.
 
I disable that shit. If I wanted to play a blurry game, I'd take my contact lenses out.
 
I'm really conflicted on the issue - I don't like that PostAA blurs textures, but (especially on tree-full levels) the vegetation is distractingly "speckled" with it disabled. See this comparison:

MSAA Only: http://i1.minus.com/iEawSz6FZIJJ3.png (trees' leaves look ugly and distracting)
FXAA Only: http://i1.minus.com/ibdbooD24xkn4P.png (vegetation is much nicer, but slightly blurrier ground/gun textures)

I've decided that I prefer the image quality (smooth transparency and shader aliasing) and performance boost (~70 FPS instead of ~55 on my 120Hz monitor) of PostAA. I was really hoping DICE would add native SMAA, Crysis 3 style, which seems to be the best of both worlds (good performance, great image quality, doesn't blur textures).
 
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Frostbite 3's post AA solution is literally the fucking worst, it's awful. I always left it disabled in BF3 and instead opted to inject SMAA. The injector however didn't seem to work in the beta, if it doesn't work in the full release I'll need to find something else.

It's a real shame with all the work they put in they couldn't take the time to update the post solution, Crysis 3 is a master class in excellent shader based AA implementation.
 
NickJames said:
Ever since I found out what FXAA did with GTA4, I stopped using it. It does add a horrible blur fliter to everything.
Click to expand...

Thing is that FXAA is improving over time as Nvidia keeps working on it. The FXAA option in the new Batman game for instance looks significantly better than the garbage they have in Battlefield.
 
In BF3, it looked fine as long as I ran it on the lowest setting (2x I believe). However, I was also running on medium graphics settings on a 560ti. I did the same thing in BF4 MP last night and it looked much better and gave me a couple fps also.

I believe the higher you set the graphics, the lower the setting on post AA. If you have even more GPU power, start enabling the MSAA and the supersampling.

I can't remember the setting offhand, but there is a sampling setting in BF4 which wasn't there in BF3. Raising it above 100% makes the textures for higher resolutions then downsamples them (supersampling) but at the expense of GPU power.
 
I already discovered this during the beta.

The game looked WAY better by disabling the POSTAA / POSTFX and moving the oversample slider up to 150%. It produces a better result at AA without the annoying super blurry and soft appearance to the entire scene. It's like playing through a layer of gauze. You constantly feel like you need to clean your monitor or your glasses or something.
 
If the implementation is of dubious quality, i turn it off...

And that is why some of us still use SweetFX's injector or similar to add SMAA (better than FXAA) and if required a bit of extra sharpening :p :)... i know, i know, injectors aren't proper for the tests here, but well, that is my "best of both worlds" solution since quite some time :)
 
Using ultra presets and it's much smoother than beta. Newest nvidia drivers as well. I have not messed with anything yet, but I will
 
wow, my 560ti craps out in open maps due to low ram of 1gb at 1080p and medium settings.

that's insane.

I should have bought the 7950, lol.

now I have to buy a new video card, im just waiting for that BF4 benchmark review.
 
I really don't prefer FXAA.

I'll take jaggies over blurriness any day of the week.
 
I Have found the best results for me is to run BF4 with PostAA set to off and MSAA on 2x.
This enables my experience to run at a playable 70FPS at 1440p.

Setting postAA to high and dropping MSAA down to 2x results in a faster 75-85 FPS, but a little too blurry for me.

2x MSAA and no Post is fine for me as at 1440p, There is no need really for extra AA.
 
I have yet to get my copy it seems 31st is the launch date here. If the post AA takes more cpu time and it looks worse why bother ;) .
 
AceCR42 said:
I always disable it because it's like smearing vaseline all over your monitor.
Click to expand...

NickJames said:
Ever since I found out what FXAA did with GTA4, I stopped using it. It does add a horrible blur fliter to everything.
Click to expand...

Kor said:
Thing is that FXAA is improving over time as Nvidia keeps working on it. The FXAA option in the new Batman game for instance looks significantly better than the garbage they have in Battlefield.
Click to expand...


Well, the issue here is that FXAA does not ALWAYS cause this issue in every game and that is the reason we are pointing this out. It depends on how "aggressively" the developer scales the FXAA. We have seen good implementations of FXAA, and as noted above, horrible executions of FXAA on a game by game basis.
 
Kor said:
I'd actually be curious to see what would happen if Nvidia enabled driver level FXAA support for the game. There might be a lot of potential there for them to improve on DICE's sloppy work.
Click to expand...

Actually FXAA works better if optimized per object. But you can guess what kind of work that will take.
 
TroyX said:
wow, my 560ti craps out in open maps due to low ram of 1gb at 1080p and medium settings.

that's insane.

I should have bought the 7950, lol.

now I have to buy a new video card, im just waiting for that BF4 benchmark review.
Click to expand...

It's just not that...

For some reason even my Titan is stuttering all over the places..... :(
 
I disable it.. but I disable everything possible all the time. (every option to low + config options if possible)

So I don't know if the vote counts.
 
I wonder if this is why the PS4 version doesn't look as "sharp" as the XB1 version?
 
I have grown to love FXAA. I hardly ever use MSAA anymore when I don't have to, yet for BF3 and BF4 - for some reason, their FXAA implementation is downright awful. I don't get it. I've played other games with FXAA and they look fine (eg crysis 3 and many others) but Frostbite 3 may be using an older version of FXAA. I don't know.

Specifically for BF3 and BF4 I use MSAA. Because it just looks way better than their FXAA implementation. I guess it's really game specfic? I should also add, that FXAA injector often looks better than some in-game FXAA implementations as well.

To summarize: I use MSAA for:

1) Games that have a poor FXAA implementation
2) Old games where I can use SGSSAA - you *must* use MSAA for SGSSAA to work
3) Games without an FXAA option

I use FXAA for

1) Demanding games that use a good FXAA implementation (crysis 3 is a good example)
2) Almost everything when I can. I use FXAA more than MSAA these days.
 
runudownquick said:
[H]ard work? :p
Maybe Dice will fix it....maybe not. For now I have to use Fxaa for performance reasons.
Click to expand...

You could always try FXAA injector. Sometimes it can be better than the in-game FXAA implementation. And for BF4, i'm betting it is. Do note that there are several revisions of the FXAA "specification" from Timothy Lottes (he created it for nvidia) and some games are using older versions of FXAA. Which look worse.
 
bpmurrGT said:
I wonder if this is why the PS4 version doesn't look as "sharp" as the XB1 version?
Click to expand...

Isn't it you know... the opposite? The Xbox version is running at 1280x720 while the PS4 is running at 1600x900?
 
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