Anti-aliasing options in BF3

J

jhokie

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jan 23, 2005
Messages
262
BF3 beta currently offers options of both:

Post-processing AA, at low - med - high settings (I assume this is FXAA or MLAA?)
Deferred AA at MSAA 2X - 4X - 8X

Any thoughts as to what may offer the best blend of image quality and performance? I know that each individual form of AA will not properly attend to every type of effect/object in a game, so it is likely optimal to use both.

I've been too annoyed with the way the video settings are configured to play with it too much, but so far I've been using 4X MSAA and high post-processing. I thought the game did look sharp and really didn't notice any aliasing. I did try dropping it down to 2X MSAA and post medium. It did seem to be slightly less sharp but nothing really too quantifiable.
 
I've just been using Medium post-processing and no deferred (for performance reasons) and haven't noticed any aliasing at all. So I'm probably going to stick with those settings.
 
I honestly wouldn't bother with it until the retail game is out, the beta is bugged beyond belief and apparently doesn't carry the full sweep of what is offered in terms of graphics either.
 
I turn off deferred AA since it has such a large performance penalty(as MSAA does on all deferred rendering engines) and turn Post AA to high. Blends out all of the noticeable jaggies with only a modest hit in framerates. Turning on MSAA(2x) didn't improve the image quality enough to make it visible during gameplay, and I think you'd be better serve to use the headroom you save from disabling it to up other settings.
 
I'm using deferred 2X MSAA and post-processing low at 1920x1200 (everything else on "high" presets). Runs well enough considering my old CPU.
 
Is there any reason to run both? Seems like one or the other is a better option.
 
i love how this game feels. i think it should be a natural progression of the battlefield games/series i've played all my life. i'm having a good time despite the bugs and glitches in this, the BETA release to the MASS public. I've been playing on gameservers.com exclusively for the best experience. i took the advice of another member in another forum and these servers have been excellent. I SUPPORT DICE. You guys have never failed to amaze me! I will be patient while you patch it up. You guys are AMAZING!
 
SicKlown42012 said:
Here's some slides by DICE who talked about DX11 rendering in Frostbite 2.0, with one section dealing specifically with the different types of AA they use and why.
Click to expand...

I saw that before, but I still don't understand why you'd want to run both types at the same time. In other games it is always run either MSAA or MLAA/FXAA, so why would you run both here? FXAA/MLAA, and presumably SRAA, are going to AA the whole image anyway, so why bother running the MSAA first?
 
MSAA at 4x/8x does a better job on visible polygon edges than a post-processing AA, but doesn't work on the whole image. That's where FXAA/MLAA comes into play. The combination of MSAA/FXAA gives you the best I.Q. outside of SSAA, but with a smaller hit.

Edit: Here's a link to a post by a Dice employee explaining it better than I did since he's actually working on the engine. http://forum.beyond3d.com/showpost.php?p=1586489&postcount=995
Repi said:
The MSAA resolve is part of the tonemapping because of performance, rendering pipeline complexity and that compute shader UAVs can't write to MSAA surfaces. So in some cases even though you have 4x MSAA and the gbuffer samples are nicely unique on an edge and the per-sample lighting does its thing you may still not fully see the antialiasing going on due if the HDR difference is too high as 1 bright sample would dominate the other dark ones.

This is the main reason we support both MSAA (linear gamma, pre-tonemap) and post-process based AA (sRGB gamma, post-tonemap). They nicely complement each other
Click to expand...
 
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