Is SG-SSAA the way to go in the future?

[Anarchist420]

I was wondering what everyone else thought. I think that MSAA should be done away with to save transistors regardless of the performance hit SG-SSAA causes, so long as the texture LOD bias is so it's not blurry and so there's no texture aliasing.

 

[taltamir]

1. MSAA doesn't take all that many extra transistors.
2. SSAA has a huge performance penalty
3. MSAA has a small performance penalty.

MSAA is not going anywhere... SSAA is an ancient tech, it was abandoned for a lower quality MSAA because of the cost (performance-wise)... we are a long way away from having so much excess performance that MSAA would be abandoned altogether... for many people running lower end hardware ANY form of AA is too costly (in performance) to the point that they do without it...

so the suggestion is utterly misplaced.

 

[JAG87]

I have to agree with you. I can't take my eyes off games with 4x SG SSAA. There is too much shader aliasing nowadays, I will gladly put up with a little blurring to get rid of all aliasing (even though I put up a big argument in the SSAA thread about blurring, I was merely trying to make a point).

I think that the highest end GPUs from nvidia and ati should focus on making SG SSAA as playable as possible, and that means massive buffers (2GB+), massive memory bandwith, and adding ROPs. Fermi is pretty successful actually, it handles 2x SG SSAA easily even on new games, and 4x is possible too sometimes. All depends how much VRAM the particular game chews up.

Instead we are going backwards adding more and faster shaders, while not increasing memory/bandwith/ROPs as much. It seems people would rather look at a horribly aliased image full of pretty shader effects. I guess this has a lot to do with the fact that most games are direct console ports, so the developer considers aliasing not to be a big issue.

 

[taltamir]

ugh, I hate console ports 🙁

but yes, a focus on SSAA in the high end would be a good thing.

 

[BFG10K]

JAG87, great post there mate! :thumbsup:

It's true, once you get used to RGSS/SGSS, there's no going back. When it works properly the image quality it generates is impeccable.

Even just 2xSS can make a huge impact to image quality if the game has a lot of shader and/or texture aliasing. Older games like Doom 3 and Call of Duty 1 also look great with SSAA.

 

[Patrick Wolf]

What's RG and SG? I know SS = Supersampling.

 

[JAG87]

What's RG and SG? I know SS = Supersampling.

RG= rotated grid
SG= sparse grid

What's funny as you probably know is that older games don't need it as much as the new ones! Like BC2 with just 2xSS looks way better than 16xCSAA

btw BFG, have you noticed how hot fermi gets with SSAA...

 

[taltamir]

JAG87, great post there mate! :thumbsup:

It's true, once you get used to RGSS/SGSS, there's no going back. When it works properly the image quality it generates is impeccable.

Even just 2xSS can make a huge impact to image quality if the game has a lot of shader and/or texture aliasing. Older games like Doom 3 and Call of Duty 1 also look great with SSAA.

it is simply mind shattering how AMAZING old games look if you can somehow force them to run in a modern resolution... take a game whose default resolution is 640x480 or even 800x600 and get it running in 1920x1200 and it will stun you at how sharp everything looks.

If you can add some AA to it, then its just gravy... there are also the hq2x, hq3x and hq4x scaling techniques which works wonders.

 

[Sylvanas]

I put this to you all.

If Tessellation does indeed take off in the next few years and we get rid off all 2D sprites for distant objects and instead they are replaced by a scaled down displacement map of the original object. Then MSAA should be all we need right? Seeing as it will be applied to everything in a scene and there will be no need for Gather4 or Alpha to coverage. So perhaps SSAA will be left as a legacy mode just for older games. This would require a massive shift on the part of developers and also require Nvidia and ATI to expand their geometry capability like they have done shading throughput in the past.

 

[BFG10K]

btw BFG, have you noticed how hot fermi gets with SSAA...

I haven't really checked temps with SSAA, but I'd imagine they’d be higher than MSAA/CSAA because all parts of the card are being stressed more, not just ROPs and bandwidth.

 

[BFG10K]

If Tessellation does indeed take off in the next few years and we get rid off all 2D sprites for distant objects and instead they are replaced by a scaled down displacement map of the original object. Then MSAA should be all we need right?

The biggest problem with games these days is shader aliasing, not texture aliasing. Tessellation does not affect shader aliasing in any way, all it does is generate more polygons.