The Improtance of Aniso and Antialiasing filters in the next generation of games

[Regs]

With graphic engines in games progressively getting better (like Doom3 and half life 2), will video card filters like Anisotropic and Antialiasing play a smaller role?

The question I ask is, Why would someone limit the performance ability by enabling these filters on such high detailed games such as Half life 2?

I think video card customers put entirely to much emphasis on video card eye candy then the actual game eye candy. I highly doubt a video game programmer cares about AA or AF, but more on how the video card hardware renders and computes instructions.

So if you are planning to run Doom 3 with 8x AA/AF on a 1600x1200 screen, I recommend a eye exam. These new generation games have state of the art graphic engines, enabling AA/AF will only insult the creators and ultimately give you a sluggish framerate on any video card made.

 

[oldfart]

I dont understand your point.

I think video card customers put entirely to much emphasis on video card eye candy then the actual game eye candy

?? AA/AF ARE part of game visuals. A properly coded game will have the ability to turn on AA/AF via the game options. Many dont, so the video card drivers can "force the issue". Most visual settings can be controlled by game options or video card options. It just a matter of how you enable the feature.

So if you are planning to run Doom 3 with 8x AA/AF on a 1600x1200 screen, I recommend a eye exam. These new generation games have state of the art graphic engines, enabling AA/AF will only insult the creators.

That is so wrong on all points I dont even know where to begin.

Do you actually understand what AA and AF are?

 

[Harabecw]

AA adds to EVERYTHING unless you really, really don't care for jaggies. As oldfart said, its a PART of the in-game visuals.
AF is a must have IMO, adds all the missing detail you won't normally see.

Shiny water and all that are only one part of the visuals. making everything as smooth as possible and seeing everything you're suposed to see is another.

Plus, the era of sluggish AA/AF is pretty much over.

 

[Pete]

Originally posted by: Regs
I think video card customers put entirely to much emphasis on video card eye candy then the actual game eye candy. I highly doubt a video game programmer cares about AA or AF, but more on how the video card hardware renders and computes instructions.

So if you are planning to run Doom 3 with 8x AA/AF on a 1600x1200 screen, I recommend a eye exam. These new generation games have state of the art graphic engines, enabling AA/AF will only insult the creators and ultimately give you a sluggish framerate on any video card made.

Doom 3 was first demoed using AA. The only difference between its Medium and High Quality modes is the addition of (wait for it) anisotropic filtering. Serious Sam also has an AF option in the game setting. I'm sure there are more games with AF and possibly even AA toggles within their own settings menu. That number will only increase now that the cheapest cards from both ATi and nVidia can apply AF very cheaply.

So I think developers have caught on to this AA/AF fad. In fact, you'd be doing both the artists and yourself a disservice by not applying AF to their high-res textures.

Just as people snapped up Radeon 9700's and 9800's to play all current games at 12x10 or 16x12 w/4xAA + 16xAF, so I believe future graphics cards will be purchased down the line to play Doom 3 and newer games at those same settings.

 

[BenSkywalker]

Why would someone limit the performance ability by enabling these filters on such high detailed games such as Half life 2?

Because there is no perfect display device. The 3D world that Valve is building for HL2, or Carmack is building for Doom3, have for lack of a better word limitless resolution. Unfortunately for all of us, no display can quite handle that. Due to these factors, enabling AF and AA are simply providing a better representation of what the game could look like if we weren't limited by display technology.

AA and AF are not a disservice to the top tier games by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, you could make a fairly strong argument for not using them being a disservice to id and Valve as having them enabled gives a better representation of what they ultimately want us to see from their creations.

 

[Harabecw]

Listen to the Jedi.


A related question...is anyone researching display tech not using pixels or relatives of them? (meaning, no "resolution", just the picture you need)

 

[Regs]

I see. Then I've made a severe mis-judgment then.

As you see I am a novice to pc hardware and I out speak myself on things im not very educated at.

I know some of you are not getting paid on the forums to educate people, but I would like to be enlightened on exactly what role AA/AF play on a video card. Today I found out even if AS/AF is turned off, they are still what make up the in-game visuals .

 

[MercenaryForHire]

Originally posted by: Regs
As you see I am a novice to pc hardware and I out speak myself on things im not very educated at.

Next time you're about to post, remember this.

It is better to remain silent and look the fool than open your mouth and extinguish all doubt.

- M4H

 

[Richdog]

Originally posted by: oldfart
I dont understand your point.

I think video card customers put entirely to much emphasis on video card eye candy then the actual game eye candy

?? AA/AF ARE part of game visuals. A properly coded game will have the ability to turn on AA/AF via the game options. Many dont, so the video card drivers can "force the issue". Most visual settings can be controlled by game options or video card options. It just a matter of how you enable the feature.

So if you are planning to run Doom 3 with 8x AA/AF on a 1600x1200 screen, I recommend a eye exam. These new generation games have state of the art graphic engines, enabling AA/AF will only insult the creators.

That is so wrong on all points I dont even know where to begin.

Do you actually understand what AA and AF are?

Rudely answered, as a lot of people seem to do on here. Even if you dont agree, you can at least understand where hes coming from. As games are getting incredibly more detailed, AA and AF are going to become less of a craze than they are now as they simply wont be needed as much. Who cares about AA and AF when youre running an insanely detailed game at 1600*1200 anyway. In the very near future were going to see more games that are so well written and coded they wont 'NEED' AA anf AF to cover up the blotches and make up for bad graphics or less detailed graphics, especially with the performance hits they incur at high resolutions. So before you stick your head even further up your arse, think about whats being said, and even if you dont agree (and although I see where hes coming from, I like to use AA and AF), refrain from making yourself look like a rude and ungracious sod and use your brain a little.

 

[MercenaryForHire]

Like mentioned above, not using AF is a disrespect to the original texture artist. Crank up the resolution all you like, but without aniso filtering it's still going to look like crap. See here (edit - 250K PNG image - 56kers click here for a JPG) for a little slice of what Q3A looks like with bilinear/trilinear/2x/4x/8x aniso. Diminishing returns set in at 4X performance-wise, but even 2XAF is a huge improvement over conventional filtering methods.

- M4H

 

[oldfart]

Originally posted by: Richdog

Originally posted by: oldfart
I dont understand your point.

I think video card customers put entirely to much emphasis on video card eye candy then the actual game eye candy

?? AA/AF ARE part of game visuals. A properly coded game will have the ability to turn on AA/AF via the game options. Many dont, so the video card drivers can "force the issue". Most visual settings can be controlled by game options or video card options. It just a matter of how you enable the feature.

So if you are planning to run Doom 3 with 8x AA/AF on a 1600x1200 screen, I recommend a eye exam. These new generation games have state of the art graphic engines, enabling AA/AF will only insult the creators.

That is so wrong on all points I dont even know where to begin.

Do you actually understand what AA and AF are?

Rudely answered, as a lot of people seem to do on here. Even if you dont agree, you can at least understand where hes coming from. As games are getting incredibly more detailed, AA and AF are going to become less of a craze than they are now as they simply wont be needed as much. Who cares about AA and AF when youre running an insanely detailed game at 1600*1200 anyway. In the very near future were going to see more games that are so well written and coded they wont 'NEED' AA anf AF to cover up the blotches and make up for bad graphics or less detailed graphics, especially with the performance hits they incur at high resolutions. So before you stick your head even further up your arse, think about whats being said, and even if you dont agree (and although I see where hes coming from, I like to use AA and AF), refrain from making yourself look like a rude and ungracious sod and use your brain a little.

Heh. Thanks for pointing out my rude answer. Its not my normal style really. The video forum does seem to bring that out in people somehow. I guess I deserved your even ruder reply.

My apologies to anyone I offended.

BTW, you should read up on AA and AF. High res can help to eliminate the need for AA, but not AF.

 

[Pete]

Richdog, for someone telling people to stick their heads up their ass, you're surprisingly uneducated about AA/AF yourself. You should be waiting in line behind Reg for an explanation of AA/AF and why its likely future cards will have even better methods of AA/AF (possibly enabled by default).

 

[Smilin]

Originally posted by: Regs
I see. Then I've made a severe mis-judgment then.

As you see I am a novice to pc hardware and I out speak myself on things im not very educated at.

I know some of you are not getting paid on the forums to educate people, but I would like to be enlightened on exactly what role AA/AF play on a video card. Today I found out even if AS/AF is turned off, they are still what make up the in-game visuals .

The best way to understand AA and AF is to see them in action.

AA is IMHO rather optional. If you're running at 1600x1200 it doesn't make a huge difference. Anything below and it's great. I find a game at 1280x1024 (or 960) with 4xAA looks much better than 1600x1200 without. At very low resolutions like 800x600 AA might remove the jaggies but you're better off smearing vasaline all over your monitor for what it does to everything else. Down at 8x6 and 10x7 it's better to crank up the resolution than to enable AA (this is all very subjective - others may disagree)

AF is a different story - I can't live without it cranked up. The best way to see it is go into a 3d shooter and move your guy until your 'shoulder' us up against a wall and you're in a parallel facing. Look at the textures on the wall as it goes away from you. When you get about 1/2 down the wall the textures have basically turned into a big blured patch about the same color as the texture. Now, go turn on 16xQuality AF. The texture will maintain it's look all the way down the wall. In this example you're very close to the wall and the lack of AF is obvious. If you have it completely disabled then nearly everything will get this "blur in the distance" look - especially floors. Cranking it up to at least a medium setting like 8xperformance will make everything except the extremes look good.

Anandtech has some 1/2 way decent faq's on this stuff.

You're always free to ask a dumb question here at Anandtech - do so politely and you'll get a good answer no matter how dumb the question. Spout off at the mouth tho and you'll get it pretty quick as you've seen.

I think you'll find future games will use AA and AF almost completely and it will be expected. Games without it will be viewed the way most folks view vertex lighting compared to lightmaps today (and lightmaps are gonna start looking dumb next to realtime lighting soon)

 

[BenSkywalker]

BTW, you should read up on AA and AF. High res can help to eliminate the need for AA, but not AF.

Higher res won't eliminate the need for AF in current games, but if we did have limitless resolution and the boards to drive it in an adequate fashion we could eliminate mip mapping which would somewhat negate the need for AF. Of course, that wouldn't help people for all the games they own now

Anandtech has some 1/2 way decent faq's on this stuff.

You think perhaps they are getting a bit outdated? Maybe they should be updated/expanded.

 

[oldfart]

There are quite a few decent AA/AF articles around. I dont have them bookmarked and am too lazy too search them out. Can you link to a couple of them?

 

[Jeff7181]

Originally posted by: oldfart
There are quite a few decent AA/AF articles around. I dont have them bookmarked and am too lazy too search them out. Can you link to a couple of them?

Anandtech has more than just message boards! =)

And to the person who said AF and AA will be phased out as resolutions get higher... I strongly disagree... the hardware manufacturers are going to great lengths to make AA and AF processing more efficient and create less of a performance drop. Plus, you'd need resolutions of 2048x1536 and higher to eliminate "jaggies" unless a new technology comes along that isn't limited by resolutions and perfect circles or triangles can be drawn on the screen.

A while ago I heard about something they were thinking about for movies that involves "3D Pixels" ... it would be true 3D, with resolutions like 1600x1200x1200... and each pixel would be a "cube" on the screen... the only problem with that is EVERY cube has to be assigned a color... they thought they could use that in movies to create individual strands of hair... and once the hardware can handle drawing EVERY single 3D pixel... increasing the detail of the characters by just pixels wouldn't be any more work... cause it's either clear or colored, the video card doesn't care, it has to think about it either way.

 

[Harabecw]

This

This

And this

All on filtering.

On AA

The FSAA article is IMO a bit outdated. Should get a new revision.

 

[Mingon]

I think he just meant that as frame rates slow back down, due to complexity of game engines, the use of AA and AF will again be restricted to low(er) resolutions. It all depends on what you call an acceptable frame rate - those people who think 30fps is Ok will no doubt turn up AF - personally I like to be sure I get a minimum of 50-60fps when in the thick of the action before I start to tweak the eye candy.

 

[BenSkywalker]

Jeff-

Anandtech has more than just message boards! =)

I really do like AnandTech quite a bit, and admire all that Anand has accomplished, but that particular explenation that you link to is an example I use of major sites completely screwing up on explaining out a feature. Anand is looking at LOD Bias throughout all of those screenshots. Using that same technique a company could come along utilize -3 LOD bias and run no anisotropic filtering at all and come out far ahead of both ATi and nVidia. Adjusting the LOD is a benefit of running AF, it is not what AF is.

And to the person who said AF and AA will be phased out as resolutions get higher... I strongly disagree... the hardware manufacturers are going to great lengths to make AA and AF processing more efficient and create less of a performance drop. Plus, you'd need resolutions of 2048x1536 and higher to eliminate "jaggies" unless a new technology comes along that isn't limited by resolutions and perfect circles or triangles can be drawn on the screen.

I'm talking resolution around 16,000x12,000(actually, higher then that but that is a good baseline to use ), 2048x1536 isn't close to enough to negate their need. Obviously it will be a very long time before we see anything close to that, which is why the techniques are well suited for current display resolutions.

A while ago I heard about something they were thinking about for movies that involves "3D Pixels" ... it would be true 3D, with resolutions like 1600x1200x1200... and each pixel would be a "cube" on the screen... the only problem with that is EVERY cube has to be assigned a color... they thought they could use that in movies to create individual strands of hair... and once the hardware can handle drawing EVERY single 3D pixel... increasing the detail of the characters by just pixels wouldn't be any more work... cause it's either clear or colored, the video card doesn't care, it has to think about it either way.

What you are talking about is 3D textures, to let you know one 1600x1200x1200 texture using FP32 color would take up ~34.33GBs, it will be a little while yet before we see graphics cards that can handle that

Oldfart-

I don't have any links to any off hand. Anyone know if Andy can get images into the FAQs? I have some spare time for the next couple of days and looking them over I really should rewrite them(even the ones that are still relevant are a bit clunky to read).

Harabecw-

You think the filtering FAQs hold up well? At the time I wrote those the plan was to have them off site just to remove seeing the same questions over and over again on the forums, I guess Anand liked Andy's idea and it ended up as part of AT(Jukka-jpprod, RoboTECH and myself were recruited to handle the vid FAQs, haven't updated them in a long time).

 

[Lonyo]

I think AA/AF are going to become MORE important with future games and incorporated by the developers to make the games look nicer.

Sure, so 1600x1200 might not be too bad for jaggies, but 1280x960/1024 isn't that great, is it?

The market is moving towards LCD's, and they have set resolutions, and about 17" gives you 1280x1024 as your resolution. Now, set that yo 1600x1200 and the image will suck quite a lot because the monitor isn't designed for it.
So, your limited to 1280x1024, what can you do to help get rid of the jaggies if you can't up the res? Why, you have to use AA, that helps nicely.
Now you've used AA, those textures look slightly worse than before, so lets use AF too, that's much nicer, even better than the very start.

AA will be more important unless we get LCD's with very high resolutions on a small screen size, because they have physical limits to the resolution.
AA/AF will be the only way to up the quality of the graphics if you have a set resolution (apart from the usual other options), and also the game won't be as sluggish as you'll only be using 1280 rather than 1600.

 

[Shalmanese]

I imagine effective lossy or even lossless compression could bring that 34Gb down to something more reasonable.

 

[Richdog]

Originally posted by: oldfart

Originally posted by: Richdog

Originally posted by: oldfart
I dont understand your point.

I think video card customers put entirely to much emphasis on video card eye candy then the actual game eye candy

?? AA/AF ARE part of game visuals. A properly coded game will have the ability to turn on AA/AF via the game options. Many dont, so the video card drivers can "force the issue". Most visual settings can be controlled by game options or video card options. It just a matter of how you enable the feature.

So if you are planning to run Doom 3 with 8x AA/AF on a 1600x1200 screen, I recommend a eye exam. These new generation games have state of the art graphic engines, enabling AA/AF will only insult the creators.

That is so wrong on all points I dont even know where to begin.

Do you actually understand what AA and AF are?

Rudely answered, as a lot of people seem to do on here. Even if you dont agree, you can at least understand where hes coming from. As games are getting incredibly more detailed, AA and AF are going to become less of a craze than they are now as they simply wont be needed as much. Who cares about AA and AF when youre running an insanely detailed game at 1600*1200 anyway. In the very near future were going to see more games that are so well written and coded they wont 'NEED' AA anf AF to cover up the blotches and make up for bad graphics or less detailed graphics, especially with the performance hits they incur at high resolutions. So before you stick your head even further up your arse, think about whats being said, and even if you dont agree (and although I see where hes coming from, I like to use AA and AF), refrain from making yourself look like a rude and ungracious sod and use your brain a little.

Heh. Thanks for pointing out my rude answer. Its not my normal style really. The video forum does seem to bring that out in people somehow. I guess I deserved your even ruder reply.

My apologies to anyone I offended.

BTW, you should read up on AA and AF. High res can help to eliminate the need for AA, but not AF.

heh, my apologies for my ruder answer to your rude answer, and yes I know AF is still useful at high res, but I was talking about the performance hits on some machines it would incur for the not considerable increase in visual quality youd see in the game. Although if unlike me youve got a bad-ass system youre laughing and sitting pretty! Another point is, when youre into a game and involved playing it, you tend not to notice the jaggies etc as much as long as the game has decent graphics anyway. IMHO, others will likely disagree.

 

[oldfart]

I actually do have a Fairly decent system. I can crank everything up without too much of a framerate hit. I recently went to a LCD panel, so I tend to run games @ the native 1280 x 1024. I agree about the jaggies. They dont bother me all that much, but I hate the blurry textures without AF. I'd rather have lots of AF Vs AA if I have to make the choice. It depends on the game and personal preference really.

 

[Harabecw]

Ben, I believe the AF FAQ itself, should be updated (anyone up for it?) to reflect the fact that new cards can do it with barely any slowdown. AA still slows things down, although not nearly as much as last generation's cards did.

 

[Jeff7181]

Adjusting the LOD is a benefit of running AF, it is not what AF is.

What it is isn't important to 98% of gamers. The results it creates is important. The noticeable result is better image quality at distance.