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Hardocp SSAA review

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eric66

Gawd
Joined
Sep 16, 2007
Messages
920
I wonder if folks at Hard are planning to do review of this new (or old :p) AA method. After reading pcgameshardware preview i really got excited but didn't see anyone besides them doing image comparison so i ask if you guys are planning to do aything similar but with more games of course :)
 
HardOCP has already been there, done that, and discovered that SSAA reduces texture quality:

Supersampling AA definitely works in reducing aliasing, on all textures, polygons and even eliminates shader aliasing. However, as you can see above in all three screenshot comparisons, enabling Supersampling AA also causes a reduction in texture quality. By enabling even the lowest 2X Supersampling AA we found that textures started to look blurry, losing their detail and crispness. This, unfortunately, is the nature of Supersampling AA. It literally is a full screen AA method that eliminates jaggies on EVERYTHING, but at the same time degrades texture quality.

Therefore, this AA setting will have to be used at your own discretion, and we think it will have limited use in most games. It degrades image quality, and it is a burden on the GPU, a big one. However, there may be some applications or older games, where this could be of benefit. Some games, such as Ghostbusters, suffer from heavy shader aliasing, and Supersampling AA will eliminate this. At least AMD is giving us the option to use it or not. Supersampling AA is a feature of the Radeon HD 5800 series only, and will not be supported on previous generation video cards.
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http://www.hardocp.com/article/2009/09/22/amds_ati_radeon_hd_5870_video_card_review/6
 
I hear through the grapevine that this will be fixed in drivers, it's just a small change to the LOD setting that's no longer accessible via the CCC control panel.
 
What i meant was more games testing with SS/AA not how it works i already know that. i would love to see is in what games it works and how much performance it eats.
 
psyside said:
What i meant was more games testing with SS/AA not how it works i already know that. i would love to see is in what games it works and how much performance it eats.
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It's SSAA, so the algorithm works by rendering at a higher resolution, and then downsampling. 2xAA should cut performance to 1/2, 4xAA to 1/4, and 8xAA to 1/8, assuming you aren't CPU limited or bandwidth limited.

You don't really have to benchmark this. But if you want, Anandtech already did it for you.

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3643&p=15
 
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Definitely can attest to SSAA reducing texture quality in Batman.
 
eric66 said:
thats weird have u checked pcgameshardware review they clearly showed ssaa to be superior one
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I think I speak for most on this forum when I say that I consider HardOCP reviews to be more reputable.
 
Who cares who is more reputable?

If you have the videocard, you can try it for yourself and see which one you prefer.
 
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