How much does FXAA take from you? A little tests…(warninglots of pics)

Forceman said:
I think we need to give post-process AA some time to mature. They have been working to improve AF since the 90s, so we should expect there to have been some pretty good performance/quality improvements in that time. Remember when they used to have to do AF comparisons because the card implementations were different and it was actually something you had to think about?
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There is always a possibility of improvement but as things stand now post AA does not cut it for me on anything but the lowest setting to supplement MSAA and that is only in BF3 and if 8XMSAA was available or if i had a 7xxx card i would not use the FXAA at all..
 
I'm assuming, then, that you have a fondness for shader aliasing. That's fine, but not everyone holds to your particular ideals with respect to rendering.
 
wonderfield said:
I'm assuming, then, that you have a fondness for shader aliasing. That's fine, but not everyone holds to your particular ideals with respect to rendering.
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They don't have to, as long as i have the option to use what i like.
 
boxleitnerb said:
Thanks for the screenshots. Now we can see what a blurry mess FXAA is. In every one of the examples details are lost, looks like someone smeared butter all over my glasses.
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It's not a blurry mess... it's inherently a compromise. It's impossible to smooth edges in SCREEN SPACE (not 3D space) without blurring some texture details. The shader can't discern the difference between a high contrast edge of geometry that leads to jaggies and valid variance in texture detail. It is logically impossible to do in screen space.

But the fact that it's just a shader in screen space is *exactly* why it's so cheap to use (good performance).
 
Final8ty said:
They don't have to, as long as i have the option to use what i like.
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They're not mutually exclusive. A developer will put in what they want based on how much work it takes and cost/benefit analysis. If they put in FXAA but not MSAA into a deferred renderer, it's because FXAA is a simple shader and you're done. The alternative is not necessarily MSAA support... it's *no AA at all*.

MSAA support in a deferred renderer is not trivial to implement and has a different set of compromises/drawbacks, and that's why most devs don't implement it. Had FXAA/SMAA/MLAA not come around, you'd currently have *NO* AA in your favorite UE3/deferred games. No dev is skipping on MSAA because of FXAA.

This whole notion of "damn you for doing something different than what I want because it keeps what I want from being done" is ridiculous. People make the same arguments against PhysX... without it and it's GPU effects, you'd have *no* fancy physics effects.... not fancy physics effects on OpenCL running on AMD and NVIDIA. This is not an either or. It's a value-adding addition that is completely optional. If you don't like it, pretend like your game didn't come with it and disable it and you're no worse off than you would've been anyway... it wasn't put in in lieu of anything else.
 
Brent_Justice said:
I like to think of it like this, we are in 2012, why should AA cost me any performance with modern video cards. It's just like Anisotropic filtering, that is pretty much a given now. It doesn't cost a dime on performance, yet there use to be a day when we worried about AF levels because it reduced performance, now, 16X AF is just a given in every game, we don't even have to think about it. The only way to get there with AA is to use shader based algorithms.
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Why even use 16x AF if you're just going to slap FXAA on top of it and blur those textures anyways? You really don't see those lines crawling in motion with any post process aa? You don't notice the awful blurring evident in the screenshots in the op? FXAA has some drawbacks that a lot of people aren't willing to deal with. It doesn't look better than what I've been using for years now. I don't know how you can just say that it looks as good as 8x msaa. It doesn't even do as good of a job as 4x msaa at the aliasing that msaa takes care of.

I have gpu horsepower to spare in a lot of games. I don't mind spending it on better image quality that fxaa doesn't come close to offering.
 
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BababooeyHTJ said:
Why even use 16x AF if you're just going to slap FXAA on top of it and blur those textures anyways? You really don't see those lines crawling in motion with any post process aa? You don't notice the awful blurring evident in the screenshots in the op? FXAA has some drawbacks that a lot of people aren't willing to deal with. It doesn't look better than what I've been using for years now. I don't know how you can just say that it looks as good as 8x msaa. It doesn't even do as good of a job as 4x msaa at the aliasing that msaa takes care of.

I have gpu horsepower to spare in a lot of games. I don't mind spending it on better image quality that fxaa doesn't come close to offering.
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Your opinion is as valid as anyone's elses as long as you don't state it as a fact. The fact is though, beauty is in the eye of the beholder and what looks good to you may or may not look the same to someone else. I have no problem with developers offering both methods of AA or just being able to force it through the driver panel for your card, but I've seen games already that look better in my eyes with one method of AA or another and its not always the same. So with that being said, I'm not going to make a blanket statement that one method is better than another even if it is my opinion. In Max Payne 3, my eyes prefer FXAA, in Battlefield 3, my eyes prefer MSAA. I have no problem with someone preferring one method over another because who am I to say what looks best to their eyes? But just as I am not stating as a fact that one is superior to another, you or anyone else has no justification to do so either.
 
InternationalHat said:
FXAA just wrecks the detail in Skyrim. I don't bother using it anywhere after having seen that.
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I still like to use the FXAA injector with Skyrim though to adjust the gamma and do some color tweaking. Since the injector lets you adjust the sharpening parameters in both post and pre-FXAA I don't think the detail loss is really bad in Skyrim with some adjustment.
 
Blkout said:
Your opinion is as valid as anyone's elses as long as you don't state it as a fact. The fact is though, beauty is in the eye of the beholder and what looks good to you may or may not look the same to someone else. I have no problem with developers offering both methods of AA or just being able to force it through the driver panel for your card, but I've seen games already that look better in my eyes with one method of AA or another and its not always the same. So with that being said, I'm not going to make a blanket statement that one method is better than another even if it is my opinion. In Max Payne 3, my eyes prefer FXAA, in Battlefield 3, my eyes prefer MSAA. I have no problem with someone preferring one method over another because who am I to say what looks best to their eyes? But just as I am not stating as a fact that one is superior to another, you or anyone else has no justification to do so either.
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Thats just it, my problem is the blanket statement made in several [H] articles about FXAA looking better than MSAA or it being equivalent to 8x MSAA. I don't see how you can justify those statements and what bothers me about that is game developers might read that and take it like its the opinion of the majority of people which from what I've seen on the forums is not the case.

Last, traditional AA methods do a pretty good job of removing aliasing. In fact they do a better job than FXAA which is obvious in motion. Not only do they do a better job with aliasing they do it with a minimal or even non-existent impact on image quality, that is a fact.

I don't play BF3, so I can't speak on that one. I do know that SGSSAA works in BF3 and if you have the hardware to pull it off I'm sure that it looks very good.
 
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Its true that there are minimal negative side effects to MSAA from an image quality standpoint unless its related to a driver bug, however its certainly debatable how much it helps too. Some games simply don't respond well to MSAA leaving a lot of aliasing. While its technically causing the image to be any worse than no aliasing at all, its not improving it a great deal either. FXAA can soften the image some and it varies wildly depending on the game from what I've seen. Its not a cure-all for aliasing by any means, however its an option for anyone that prefers what they see while using it. Sometimes, just post processing effects in a game can give softer images as well and that isn't AA related, its just a choice of how the developer chooses to use post processing shader hardware. Some prefer a sharper image, some prefer a softer image. Every image doesn't have be razor sharp though in order to be pleasing to the eye. Detail lost through blurring is a different animal, I don't believe anyone really likes that effect.
 
Heavy aliasing on tree leaves and other alpha-blended foliage is reduced with FXAA. Not reduced with MSAA.
 
wonderfield said:
Heavy aliasing on tree leaves and other alpha-blended foliage is reduced with FXAA. Not reduced with MSAA.
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Why not use transparency AA in the Nvidia control panel? It works fine in Skyrim. I'm sure that does with AMD too.

It'll do a better job without the blur.
 
BababooeyHTJ said:
Why not use transparency AA in the Nvidia control panel? It works fine in Skyrim. I'm sure that does with AMD too.

It'll do a better job without the blur.
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It still misses shader aliasing. With game makers using ever increasing shader effects, something else is needed, likely in combination with MSAA (SSAA works, but the performance hit means it's not usable in most new games at high resolution). Given more time, post AA like FXAA, MLAA, and SMAA will figure out how to minimize blurring where it's not wanted.
 
I don't even notice this "shader aliasing". I do on the other hand notice the blurring. I do notice the crawling lines that these post-process aa methods don't clear up as well.
 
BababooeyHTJ said:
Why not use transparency AA in the Nvidia control panel? It works fine in Skyrim. I'm sure that does with AMD too.
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Yes, that's an option. He asked a specific question, though, so I answered it.

BababooeyHTJ said:
It'll do a better job without the blur.
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This depends on how you define "better job". The performance cost involved in transparency multisampling can be pretty prohibitive.

BababooeyHTJ said:
I don't even notice this "shader aliasing".
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It's pretty common not to notice flaws in something until you've had an opportunity to see the same thing without those flaws. After that, one's level of sensitivity to those flaws is variable.

Play Doom 3 with and without FXAA if you want to see what effect post-process AA can have on shader aliasing.
 
BababooeyHTJ said:
I don't even notice this "shader aliasing". I do on the other hand notice the blurring. I do notice the crawling lines that these post-process aa methods don't clear up as well.
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There's no sub pixel information to work from if it's operating exactly on a 1:1 resolution. SMAA should combat this, hence the S in the name.
 
wonderfield said:
This depends on how you define "better job". The performance cost involved in transparency multisampling can be pretty prohibitive.
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I don't see the problem. The performance hit generally isn't much. Its well worth it for the IQ gain.

It's pretty common not to notice flaws in something until you've had an opportunity to see the same thing without those flaws. After that, one's level of sensitivity to those flaws is variable.
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IDK, its not like I don't play games that use heavy shaders. Let me just put it like this there is a reason that not one site has done a comarison with this shader aliasing like several have done for AF, transparency aa, etc. It can't be that much of an issue.

Play Doom 3 with and without FXAA if you want to see what effect post-process AA can have on shader aliasing.
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Every time that I've played Doom 3 its the transparency aliasing that really annoys me.
 
HardOCP has done a big article on fxaa, mlaa and how they fix up shader aliasing. I notice it like crazy in games, but sometimes shader aliasing is an on-purpose effect to sell certain types of surfaces. Also, due to the nature of shaders, higher screen resolutions decrease shader aliasing. Lower res textures often reduce SA as well.

Also, the whole idea of FXAA is not to replace 4x or even 2x MSAA, but rather to act as a baseline AA method for those who don't have the graphics horsepower to spare, or for those who prefer to use their power for other things. I use FXAA and MLAA in games because it looks tons better than noAA and it doesent exponentially increase in resource requirement as resolutions go up. I run a baseline eyefinity setup, and using anything more than 2x MSAA just kills my 6950's framebuffer. FXAA and MLAA are saviors in this sense.
 
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I can run 8xMSAA in Max Payne 3 if I want to, I have the power to do so, but I still prefer FXAA in this game so its not always just about graphics power savings.
 
KazeoHin said:
Also, the whole idea of FXAA is not to replace 4x or even 2x MSAA, but rather to act as a baseline AA method for those who don't have the graphics horsepower to spare, or for those who prefer to use their power for other things. I use FXAA and MLAA in games because it looks tons better than noAA and it doesent exponentially increase in resource requirement as resolutions go up. I run a baseline eyefinity setup, and using anything more than 2x MSAA just kills my 6950's framebuffer. FXAA and MLAA are saviors in this sense.
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I run FXAA due to system limitations as well. It's great tech to help image quality for those with less than super rigs. I'm looking forward to more advances in AA that can improve image quality over FXAA with a similiar or lesser hit to performance.
 
wonderfield said:
Are you opposed to trying it with FXAA?
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No, like I said the transparency aliasing annoyed the shit out of me the last time that I played. Its not like FXAA has been around forever.

Given the option I would rather have real transparency SSAA or SMAA, though.
 
That's amazing walkingdog. SMAA does indeed have a noticable difference. I did a quick google search and got this site http://www.iryoku.com/smaa/ There is even a better video of SMAA with their high quality video at their site. This is the first time I am actually hearing about SMAA. I was impressed by FXAA in Deus ex human revoltion. But wow SMAA is indeed much better. Thanks for the comparison screen shots.
 
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