temporal AA?

[Sylvanas]

well alot of people are mentioning this temporal aa coming soon or even in the next catalyst drivers... what exactly is it and what does it do?

 

[SmuvMoney]

Temporal AA is a way for ATi to allow antialiasing "for free" so to speak, i.e., little or no performance hit. What it does is that it takes different, programmable samples for AA and varies them by frame. As you may know, most MSAA (multisample antialiasing) techniques are based on one sample pattern based on the level (2x, 4x, 6x). What temporal AA does is use a slightly different sample for each frame (2 or 3 samples). Since it changes each frame, it should not be noticeable if your frames/sec is high enough - more on this in the next paragraph. The next result is that you can use regular AA with temporal AA to achieve much greater levels of AA with only the frame rate hit of non-programmable/standard AA.

There are some drawbacks to temporal AA:

* Vsync is required to be on, or should I say, is forced on if you enable temporal AA. For some users, this may be a problem.

* A relatively high frame rate is required to avoid flickering (>= 60 frames/sec). On the flip side, you can set a frame rate threshold. If the frame rate drops below the chosen rate, temporal AA turns itself off.

* It is only present in D3D as of Catalyst 4.6, but it should be available in OpenGL when it is formally released in 4.7. You can activate with 3rd party tools such as Radlinker.

I hope this gives you a good overview of temporal AA. I'm sure I missed a few things, but those are the basics.

 

[Sylvanas]

thanks Smuv very imformative :thumbsup:

 

[AnnoyedGrunt]

My understanding of the Vsync situation is that the temporal AA will use the frames above 60 to generate the alternate AA patterns, so once your FPS drops below 60, you will no longer be able to use the temporal AA. For this reason, I think the feature is less useful since in most games there are frequently dips below the 60Hz level, even though the average FPS might be quite a bit higher. I don't know exactly what it's doing, but my understanding was that you needed more than 60FPS for the temporal AA to work.

Now, what happens if you run @ 85Hz refresh. Does that mean you need more than 85FPS to take advantage of the feature?

-D'oh!

 

[Yanagi]

Originally posted by: AnnoyedGrunt
My understanding of the Vsync situation is that the temporal AA will use the frames above 60 to generate the alternate AA patterns, so once your FPS drops below 60, you will no longer be able to use the temporal AA. For this reason, I think the feature is less useful since in most games there are frequently dips below the 60Hz level, even though the average FPS might be quite a bit higher. I don't know exactly what it's doing, but my understanding was that you needed more than 60FPS for the temporal AA to work.

Now, what happens if you run @ 85Hz refresh. Does that mean you need more than 85FPS to take advantage of the feature?

-D'oh!

NO, should be 60FPS AFAIK

 

[GeneralGrievous]

Now, what happens if you run @ 85Hz refresh. Does that mean you need more than 85FPS to take advantage of the feature?

No. I don't see what the required 60 fps means (I have tried this out with the cats 4.7 betas and it looked like it was working at lower fps). The problem is that with an 85 Hz monitor, when the framerate goes below 85 it automatically hits 42, which sucks. You really need 100 Hz to use it, which means playing at 1280x1024.

 

[Avalon]

Just tried Temporal AA with the 4.7 Omegas...honestly, I couldn't "see" a difference, but for some reason the option wasn't playing very nicely with my game, Natural Selection. I had vsync forced on at 85hz, and was never going below 85fps 99% of the time. However, my game was chugging...it felt super choppy, almost like I was lagging. I exited my game, turned off the Temporal AA, went back into my game, and was smooth as butter. Maybe it's just buggy, or I didn't try it out enough. Hmm... *shrug*

Did I do anything wrong?
I didn't have the TAA option in my control panel, I had to turn it on from this thing Omega includes called the Temporal AA Switch. Perhaps that is the culprit. Aside from that, I was forcing 6xAA and 16x AF quality in my control panel.