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SMAA is free AA and it looks better than MSAA

S

SickBeast

Lifer
I'm just doing this as a PSA, mods feel free to sticky it.

I have discovered that if you inject SMAA into your games using Radeon Pro, it gives you AA that is free from a performance standpoint so long as you leave it set to "medium". You can set it higher to get even more quality and the performance hit is very minimal.

I'm posting this because I was reading about people worried that they couldn't do AA at 1440p resolution on a high end card so I figured this was more useful than I thought.

I had been unable to use AA at all on my 6850 in modern games because I need all the FPS I can get.

Basically all you need to do is download Radeon Pro and create a profile in each of your games. In the AA section, find SMAA and set it to "medium" and you're done. Launch your games directly from Radeon Pro.

HardOCP article:

http://www.hardocp.com/article/2013/03/12/crysis_3_video_card_performance_iq_review/8#.UgEX920izfY
 
NICE didnt know. Thanks sickbeast. But one question. How do I get SMAA

I use 8x AA CSAA wats is SMAA do you have to fix it through nVidia Inspector ?
 
SMAA is not better than MSAA. All post-processing AA-methods are very very weak in motion. The advantage though is that they process almost anything. MSAA can be quite crappy, just look at Dirt Showdown or Max Payne 3 or Hitman Absolution. So both solutions can be quite poor.
Downsampling + SMAA/FXAA/MLAA or SGSSAA (depending on the game) is the way to go.
 
boxleitnerb said:
SMAA is not better than MSAA.
Click to expand...

This.

MSAA is better because it has more information. SMAA and FXAA and whatever alternatives are a poor man's alternative because of the (obvious) lower cost since it only applies a filter instead of gathering more actual information. So although MSAA does not support alpha textures and it uses more processing power, there is not good replacement that matches its quality.

I'm fine with people promoting these cheap techniques as long as we're honest about their severe limitations and their very real problems. Even MSAA and SSAA have some problems in motion, they're not perfect, but these cheap ones are far worse. Learn what they do and then decided how much you want to compromise.
 
SGSSAA is the only real AA in my books, but the performance hit is so large that I only ever use 2x or nothing at all at 1440p
 
CakeMonster said:


This.

MSAA is better because it has more information. SMAA and FXAA and whatever alternatives are a poor man's alternative because of the (obvious) lower cost since it only applies a filter instead of gathering more actual information. So although MSAA does not support alpha textures and it uses more processing power, there is not good replacement that matches its quality.

I'm fine with people promoting these cheap techniques as long as we're honest about their severe limitations and their very real problems. Even MSAA and SSAA have some problems in motion, they're not perfect, but these cheap ones are far worse. Learn what they do and then decided how much you want to compromise.
Click to expand...

Shows how little you actually know.

SMAA 2TX is morphological post + 2x temporal SSAA
SMAA 4X is morphological post + 2x temporal SSAA + 2x MSAA

So please explain how is MSAA alone better than a solution that covers 3 types of aliasing causes, INCLUDING geometry aliasing?
 
^ obviously he meant the normal SMAA (inject SMAA). That was 100 percent clear. The OP said the same thing (inject SMAA).
 
All I know is that SMAA set to "medium" in Radeon Pro looked as good to me if not better than 4xMSAA at 1080p in games. I did not see any jaggies and nothing looked overly blurred. It looked beautiful.

You can also enable SweetFX in games through Radeon Pro. I highly recommend that as well. It really amps up how the lighting and the colors look in games. I found the difference in Crysis to be night-and-day with all of this enabled and there was absolutely zero performance impact on a meager 6850.
 
Frankly, all forms of AA have weaknesses. SGSSAA can cause images to be a bit blurry, but so does SMAA, FXAA and MLAA, which are worse. MSAA can be great, but it doesn't fix aliasing within textures and transparencies, so you can see a lot of aliasing in some games.

In some games, MSAA seems all that is needed, in others some form of SSAA is needed, and at other times SSAA can make things look blurry. I only use SMAA or FXAA for games which don't have any other form of AA and need it badly, as they seem to be the weakest.
 
boxleitnerb said:
Pure post-process AA is rubbish imo.
Click to expand...

Personally been a vocal advocate for quality super-sampled choice since the Voodoo 5 and their VSA-100 but don't agree that post-process AA is rubbish based on it offers some quality(weakness with motion quality,) very compatible, performs very well, memory footprint and bandwith advantages and may work in conjunction with other methods.

I'm glad to see more choices and innovation here for gamers to decide what best fits their subjective needs, tastes, tolerances and thresholds!
 
You can also use FXAA tool or SweetFX, or, with a Geforce, the driver control panel, to do the same with FXAA (you need a Geforce to do it with DX10+ games, though).

IMO, MSAA or SGSSAA combined with FXAA or SMAA, do best. I prefer FXAA, but not all games work with it, while I can usually force SMAA. All PP AAs fuzz a bit, but that works well for objects in motion, and still benefits from other "true" AA methods. All the while, performance can be maintained without buying Titans, just for 4xSSAA.
 
Black Octagon said:
SGSSAA is the only real AA in my books, but the performance hit is so large that I only ever use 2x or nothing at all at 1440p
Click to expand...

I've used 4x on some games. Dishonored, Torchlight 2, Borderlands, Super Street Fighter IV, and Fallout New Vegas benefited from it in my experience and were very playable.
 
Ehh, seems to have a slightly lesser penalty when used in Deferred Shading engines compared to MSAA, but in most games, the nod goes to MSAA. I've a Mobility Radeon 5470 though, so shader power is a bit on the short side, possibly explaining the greater penalty of SMAA for me.
 
Cerb said:
You can also use FXAA tool or SweetFX, or, with a Geforce, the driver control panel, to do the same with FXAA (you need a Geforce to do it with DX10+ games, though).

IMO, MSAA or SGSSAA combined with FXAA or SMAA, do best. I prefer FXAA, but not all games work with it, while I can usually force SMAA. All PP AAs fuzz a bit, but that works well for objects in motion, and still benefits from other "true" AA methods. All the while, performance can be maintained without buying Titans, just for 4xSSAA.
Click to expand...

I use both, as per my rig. Radeon Pro's SMAA is very very good, near 4x MSAA quality but without performance hit. Minimal blurring, and this is the key difference.

NV's control panel FXAA blurs the hell out of the games i've tested.

Crysis 3 also implemented SMAA excellently, i used to hate post AA methods but this particular implementation is just awesome.
 
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