MSAA support dying?

desprado

Golden Member
Jul 16, 2013
1,645
0
0
All the new AAA games came out without the support of MSAA for example Call of Duty AW,Ryse, DeadRising 3, Shadow of Mordor, Evolve Alpha, alien isolation and Lords of Fallen.

Really i like MSAA but seems like SMAA is taking over now.
 

davie jambo

Senior member
Feb 13, 2014
380
1
0
I prefer the SMAA , I read somewhere a while ago that it's the most value on performance. That's why it's more common the MSAA now

I think
 

TypoFairy©

Member
Jul 29, 2003
77
36
91
I prefer SMAA myself over some other techniques. The FXAA in guild wars 2 is terrible, blurs the game textures like crazy. Sweetfx is almost mandatory in that game to add SMAA.
 

CakeMonster

Golden Member
Nov 22, 2012
1,642
821
136
I'm one of those who notice the edges and flickering to such a degree that the absence of MSAA is painful. I'm sure that my 30" 1600p monitor with relatively large pixels doesn't help either. But its frankly extremely annoying that something as noticeable as this is now becoming a bigger and bigger problem. Tech is improving, games are getting better fidelity, but the only AA mode that did a proper IQ job while still having acceptable performance is disappearing. WoW is one example, MSAA disappeared overnight and spotting things at a distance is extremely annoying.
 

Cerb

Elite Member
Aug 26, 2000
17,484
33
86
What are these, DX9? They should be able to transparently support MSAA, by now, if it's turned on in the driver.

Shader AA does not [yet] replace MSAA, but supplements it.
 

bystander36

Diamond Member
Apr 1, 2013
5,154
132
106
I'm one of those who notice the edges and flickering to such a degree that the absence of MSAA is painful. I'm sure that my 30" 1600p monitor with relatively large pixels doesn't help either. But its frankly extremely annoying that something as noticeable as this is now becoming a bigger and bigger problem. Tech is improving, games are getting better fidelity, but the only AA mode that did a proper IQ job while still having acceptable performance is disappearing. WoW is one example, MSAA disappeared overnight and spotting things at a distance is extremely annoying.

If you downsample, you can help a lot of your AA woes at a reasonable cost. It even fixes AA in textures and other things that MSAA doesn't. It's easy to do, and you don't have to pick a high end resolution for it to work. 1440p on a 1080p monitor can do a good job at fixing it.
 

f1sherman

Platinum Member
Apr 5, 2011
2,243
1
0
SMAA is infinitesimally better than FXAA, its a poor man's AA, but it's better than nothing especially considering low perf hit

temporal SMAA, ie SMAA T2X is much better, or at least I thought so

because SMAA T2X in Crysis 3 was wonderful, but in Watch Dogs and Alien Isolation it seems barely adequate

nature is easy to AA (Skyrim, Ethan Carter) because its round shaped,
but human-made objects, towns, buildings, roads etc are challenging to AA properly because of long straight vertical and horizontal lines that just love to pixel-crawl

I prefer MSAA in older games because I usually have enough GPU power to force supersampling,
but for todays games I'd take something like SMAA T2X if I had to choose

But pure SMAA is meh and laziness. I can do better than that myself with tweaked and injected FXAA/SMAA
(although there is UI/font problem with injected/driver version)
 

motsm

Golden Member
Jan 20, 2010
1,822
2
76
Yeah, post process AA is pretty awful, and the only alternatives require ridiculous amounts of horsepower. It's really unfortunate, as I find older games with actual AA look far better than current games filled with aliased eye candy.