• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

Free AA at last?

S

Stoly

Supreme [H]ardness
Joined
Jul 26, 2005
Messages
6,713
Ever since AA was first offered by 3dFX, there's the promise of free AA.

An antialising mode that can give 4x MSAA quality with 2xMSAA performance

IIRC the first attempt was Quincunx AA with nvidia, which was pretty close to 4xMSAA but with blurred textures. Back then that was not that big of a deal for me because textures were not very detailed anyway.

As time passed new AA modes came and went but 4xMSAA is still the defacto "standard", because its the best in quality/performance.

I had high hopes for FXAA and TXAA but both blur the full scene ( or like nvidia says "gives them a cinematic look")

The newest mode is MFAA, which again promises better IQ and faster performance than MSAA.

Is this the holy grail of AA? will we finally have 2xAA speed and better than 4xMSAA quality with no blurred textures?
 
You forgot SMAA, which I think works pretty well in certain situations.

I don't know that MFAA is going to be "free" but hopefully it will be better.
 
MavericK96 said:
You forgot SMAA, which I think works pretty well in certain situations.

I don't know that MFAA is going to be "free" but hopefully it will be better.
Click to expand...

I did not forget,. I skipped it because its not officially supported by nvidia nor AMD. But its probably the best mode to date.
 
MFAA is not free, but it costs half the power of MSAA for the same quality
 
4X MFAA will cost the same performance as 2X MSAA in a game, 8X MFAA will perform as 4X MSAA in said game. The performance cost of 2X MSAA and 4X MSAA is dependent on the game.
 
supposedly, its game independent and isnt hampered by deferred rendering
 
Either use MSAA/SSAA or don't use antialiasing. These cookie-cutter antialiasing schemes do nothing but blur the image.
 
I hate games (Metro) that force you to use their shitty blurry AA and not allowing you to disable AA at all.
 
This already happened years ago:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/2556/10

"Free" (aka less than 10% performance hit) 4xMSAA on the HD 4870. The only reason this was not good enough was because (in DX9) MSAA does not smooth edges of shader effects or shadows, or smooths NOTHING if you were using deferred rendering.

But it may be more capable in DX10/11.
 
Last edited:
Sorry for the bad news, but temporal AA like in UE4 is at least going to be the best option in the immediate future for AA.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNQ47MY-Eo0

UE4 uses noisy SSR or screen space reflections that needs noise reduction to look good, and temporal AA fixes a lot of other issues with AA.

Look at how much better TXAA looks on the foliage in Black Flag, no more shimmering pixels or swimming pixels.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2vm-Hm5dP0

To me TXAA gives you a much more "pre-rendered" experience.
 
PcZac said:
Sorry for the bad news, but temporal AA like in UE4 is at least going to be the best option in the immediate future for AA.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNQ47MY-Eo0

UE4 uses noisy SSR or screen space reflections that needs noise reduction to look good, and temporal AA fixes a lot of other issues with AA.

Look at how much better TXAA looks on the foliage in Black Flag, no more shimmering pixels or swimming pixels.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2vm-Hm5dP0

To me TXAA gives you a much more "pre-rendered" experience.
Click to expand...

txaa is great if you enjoy fxaa levels of blur. smaa is the only good aa.
 
rabidz7 said:
Either use MSAA/SSAA or don't use antialiasing. These cookie-cutter antialiasing schemes do nothing but blur the image.
Click to expand...
The mechanisms of the so-called 'cookie-cutter' antialiasing schemes are the same as MSAA. The difference is in their implementation, and the implementations of shader-based AA can address a lot more image noise than MSAA. The caveat is that they require a lot of tuning and often take some shortcuts for the sake of performance as part of their goals to trounce MSAA performance.

SSAA isn't without its shortcomings either. You can get a lot of frame-to-frame jittering of polygons that appear very thin with supersampling. Typically not a problem with shader-based AA methods.

The Mac said:
MFAA is not free, but it costs half the power of MSAA for the same quality
Click to expand...
Sort of. MFAA can fall below 2xMSAA quality in some cases, but achieve greater than 4xMSAA quality in others. MFAA really has to be compared to MSAA in motion, which makes it difficult to determine exactly what kind of quality you're getting from it from any given sequence of frames.

socK said:
I'm guessing MFAA will be like the temporal AA in Unreal Engine 4?

https://de45xmedrsdbp.cloudfront.net/Resources/files/TemporalAA_small-59732822.pdf
Click to expand...
Hard to tell based on this presentation, but I think so. MFAA essentially just takes two samples of adjacent pixels in frame N, then another two in a different pattern in frame N + 1, then assumes the result is a weighted average of those samples. NVIDIA probably uses some similar techniques as Epic to ensure that motion doesn't cause too many artifacts.
 
Not sure what the OP recalls, but I am quite sure that 3dfx or even NVidia never promised AA for free back then. It incurred a very hefty performance penalty to use it even at 16-bit color.

Still, it's a great thing that has caught on, and has become a very useful, for some even a mandatory feature especially for fixed resolution LCD panels. I look forward to the day when we can flip it on for ZERO performance cost, which will, IMO, is still off in the horizon
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top