Partial Scene AA

[noninterleaved]

Everyone goes crazy about FSAA... how about AA only on portions of the screen that actually need it??? Like checking the z-buffer to see if the object is close, and if so then AA the sucker...

You wouldn't get to play tricks like supersampling the whole scene, or using a buffer to collect a couple of renderings render them at a subpixel difference from each other....

Instead you would have to render a couple copies of the same object, and then do the same sub-pixel rendering trick that 3dfx did.

I think it would actually work really well on the Kyro cards... since tile based rendering deals mostly with the objects in a mathematical space anyways, and then renders them out... rather than trying to rasterize the whole field first, then figure out what is viewable, like raytracing/z-buffer.

just a thought... i dunno how hard this would be to implement in hardware.

 

[DaveB3D]

Distant stuff needs AA just as bad as near objects. NV20 only AA's triangle edges and intersections though. They still need to write and store 4x the data though. There are other implementations that can just do edges as well. Efficiency just depends on the implementation and the architecture.

 

[noninterleaved]

I was thinking more along the lines of AA textures, and not edges... I think in a year or two we won't even need AA for edges since resolution will be so high. Even now playing at 1600x1200 you only really see jaggies when something holds still for a bit. Textures on the other hand can look like crap when you get up close sometimes... this way we don't need vid cards with 128mb of ram... can AA the textures.

 

[DaveB3D]

You'll need at least 4000x4000 before you consider not using AA.

As for textures, GF3 doesn't AA textures at all from the anti-aliasing hardware. Texture filtering does that exclusively.