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

[Jeff7181]

Another comment on whoever hinted that companies are slacking off and relying on AA and AF to make thier game look good. I think that's a good thing... if they can decrease the size of the texture, or decrease the polygon count or whatever, and rely on a hardware rendering optimization to get the same visual quality without a significant performance impact, I'm all for it. ATI started a good thing... a move towards "free" AA and AF... if they can create GPU's powerful enough, and instructions efficient enough to do this on the fly without a performance impact, that's an extremely good thing. It will allow game makers to create either the same quality images and boost game performance, or create higher quality images with the same game performance.

 

[PCHPlayer]

Imagine you're a cute little alien taking a drink from a pool of water. Suddenly, *BLAM*, your head gets blown off. Do you friggin' care whether the shotgun that just blew your head off has jaggies???? (Abreviated/modified speech given by Marissa Tomei in My Cousin Vinny)
I don't care whether I have AA or AF. Give me a fun game that I can play at a decent frame rate and I'm happy. Perhaps that is why my old AIW 7500 is just fine with me.

 

[Jeff7181]

Originally posted by: PCHPlayer
Imagine you're a cute little alien taking a drink from a pool of water. Suddenly, *BLAM*, your head gets blown off. Do you friggin' care whether the shotgun that just blew your head off has jaggies???? (Abreviated/modified speech given by Marissa Tomei in My Cousin Vinny)
I don't care whether I have AA or AF. Give me a fun game that I can play at a decent frame rate and I'm happy. Perhaps that is why my old AIW 7500 is just fine with me.

LOL... that movie's funny... anyway...

Very true... but the benefits of AA aren't just reduced jaggies... for example, find a game that has a radio antenna off in the distance, then walk forward just to either side of it... you'll see it flickering, which can be distracting... AA reduces that flickering effect. Most of the time 2X AA is enough to reduce the flickering enough so that it's not distracting, but either way... if new cards can give you 4X AA and 8X AF with a 10% performance hit, that's a wonderful thing.

 

[Harabecw]

Originally posted by: PCHPlayer
Imagine you're a cute little alien taking a drink from a pool of water. Suddenly, *BLAM*, your head gets blown off. Do you friggin' care whether the shotgun that just blew your head off has jaggies???? (Abreviated/modified speech given by Marissa Tomei in My Cousin Vinny)
I don't care whether I have AA or AF. Give me a fun game that I can play at a decent frame rate and I'm happy. Perhaps that is why my old AIW 7500 is just fine with me.

Maybe you don't care, but others do. I can't play without it. games just look UGLY.

No one's forcing you

 

[BFG10K]

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?

No and in fact they'll probably play a higher role. As the detail levels increase you'll need high resolution, AA and AF to keep them looking like they're supposed to. Basically if you increase the detail on the source artwork then you also need more physical pixels and rendering accuracy to output it how it was meant to be seen.

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?

(1) Because high-end cards can handle it.
(2) Because AF is essentially free on Radeon chipsets.

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

Huh? The two actually go hand in hand. The highest polygon models in the world look far better at high resolution than they do at low resolution.

I highly doubt a video game programmer cares about AA or AF,

Actually they do. No developer wants to put an incredible amount of work into the graphics only to have their customers running it at a low resolution mush. In fact to truly experience games like they were meant to be enjoyed you're pretty much required to crank up the eye candy, not lower it like you're suggesting.

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

What on earth are you talking about? If anything you'll insult them by running their carefully crafted games at butt ugly settings.

and ultimately give you a sluggish framerate on any video card made.

That's why people will upgrade if they need it and fortunately the R360 is just around the corner. It should help games to run even better than they do now.

 

[BoomAM]

Until out display devices stop using pixels, it doesnt matter what resolution we have, there will always be jagged egdes in them. Its just the nature that all video cards render at. It does`nt matter how good an engine can look, cos it`ll look like crap at 640x480. FSAA eliminates alot of jagged edges, which depending on level of FSAA, can help a game look more "natural" looking. Real-life cars, fences and road edges arnt jagged, they are smooth, and thats why in games like Vice City, FSAA helps alot to portray a realistic city. Less jaggys just seems more realistic and "naturel" to me.

As for AF, as with FSAA, becuase of the way that all video cards render stuff, the further away a texture is, the more blurred it gets, and yet again, walls and floors dont get blurred in real life, so AF is a nessisity really. More so than FSAA imo. Why should a texture artist spend days and weeks designing complex floor texures, if your not going to be able to really see them as they were ment to be seen, unless you are standing on top of them and looking down. They might as well not bother making complex textures if they arnt going to be seen propely. Which is why AF is going to get more and more importent as games get more visually complex.

FSAA and AF is essential in both past, present and future games imo. And the need for them and higher levels of each one will grow as games get more visually complex and textures get to the point of true photo quality.

Just my opinion.

 

[BenSkywalker]

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.

You can adjust the LOD bias on a Voodoo5 to give far sharper textures then anything currently available with a minimal performance hit(quite a bit less percentage wise then any of the current boards running AF). Adjusting the LOD bias to a setting that is too agressive for your filtering implementation results in texture aliasing, the more out of balanced the more severe. Using the V5 example, setting it to its most agressive LOD bias adjustment it looks absoultely horrible, massive shimmering covering the majority of the screen(the same would be true of any board, I used the V5 as it is the most recent I can think of without AF support). Anyone who claims to be a major supporter of AA, which reduces edge crawling/shimmering for ~2% of the screen on the high end, but is willing to introduce shimmering on ~50% of the screen on the low end has a very odd take on things.

Until out display devices stop using pixels, it doesnt matter what resolution we have, there will always be jagged egdes in them.

Not quite true. If pixel density is high enough then it will be beyond the eyes ability to see the edges. Weren't you saying in another thread that you don't notice textures with a completely different LOD selection placed next to others? Because of your perception you don't see it. When resolution gets high enough the human eye won't be able to discern the edges of the pixels. With the progression of display technology however, that could be several decades away.

 

[FluxCap]

I am finally getting a card that I can run AA and AF on. What would you recommend Boom or Ben? 4xAA and 8xAF? This will be on a 9800 Pro with the below system.

 

[BenSkywalker]

What's a bigger annoyance to you- edge aliasing or texture aliasing/blurriness. If it is the former, you can try 6x AA with 4x or 8x AF(performance if you don't notice the mip banding, quality if you do). If the latter bothers you more, run 2x or 4x AA with 16x quality AF(obviously which game/what resolution you are using will impact what exact settings you will want to use for performance's sake).

 

[Harabecw]

Flux, x16 Performance AF looks (to many. see reviews to compare. I think anand's 5900U review has it) nearly as good as x16 Quality and the performance loss is negligible.
As for AA, you have to see for yourself, as some people don't need more than x2, while others like x4.

 

[BoomAM]

Originally posted by: FluxCap
I am finally getting a card that I can run AA and AF on. What would you recommend Boom or Ben? 4xAA and 8xAF? This will be on a 9800 Pro with the below system.

I`d say either a 9700pro or a 9800pro. Both are more than capible of both. The 5900Ultra is also good, but is vastly overpriced, and only offer around the same performance of a 9800pro. Sometimes a little faster.

Not quite true. If pixel density is high enough then it will be beyond the eyes ability to see the edges. Weren't you saying in another thread that you don't notice textures with a completely different LOD selection placed next to others? Because of your perception you don't see it. When resolution gets high enough the human eye won't be able to discern the edges of the pixels. With the progression of display technology however, that could be several decades away.

But the jaggys will still be there. And if we go off your comments in another thread then you`d still be able to see them

 

[BenSkywalker]

Well, based on your comments I'm surprised you see them at 640x480

Seriously though, typical human perception should have the resolution limit for perception to around 4,000x4,000 with more attuned eyes being capable of seeing aliasing up to 8000x8000. That is just for edge aliasing though, my example above talking about limitless resolution would also include eliminating texture aliasing which I would wager would take another order of magnitude give or take before we could use point filtering and have that be enough(before anyone laughs that off, you are sampling the same amount running point filtering @1280x960 that you are using bilinear filtering running 640x480 although obviously it doesn't look quite as good on the texture front, that is why I stated another order of magnitude would likely be in order ).

 

[BoomAM]

Good point there.
I think that the future of FSAA lie in Matrox`s approach. Fragment anti-aliasing. If i understood it correctly, it only anti-alias`s what needs to be anti-aliased, and not what doesnt, which could work to reduce the bandwidth requirements of anti-aliasing. And with that, prehaps even high AA levels, such as 32xAA. Oh and did a mention that matrox`s 16xFAA looks stunning!
For AF, a combination of nvidias and ATIs approach to it would be good. nVidia, like you said has slightly better AF than ATIs, but has a big performance drop compared to ATIs approach. So a combination of the two would be ideal. Prehaps a entirely new way of doing it, such as a fully hardware accelerated version, a specifically designed part of a VPU/GPU that could perform the AF automatically.

 

[Lonyo]

They could try making a tile based rendering, Fragment AA card with 32x AA and ATi's AF methods, that would rule, and it migt be able to do the tasks with some fairly nice level of speed.

 

[BoomAM]

Originally posted by: Lonyo
They could try making a tile based rendering, Fragment AA card with 32x AA and ATi's AF methods, that would rule, and it migt be able to do the tasks with some fairly nice level of speed.

Lets patent it! Then why nvidia and ATI come to their sences, we get loads of cash! LOL.
That would be one hell of a card though. Can you imagine how good games would look with that sort of card? Running at over 60fps as well. SWEET!

 

[rbV5]

You can adjust the LOD bias on a Voodoo5 to give far sharper textures then anything currently available with a minimal performance hit(quite a bit less percentage wise then any of the current boards running AF).

"Maybe" true, but a 5% hit on an unplayable 12 FPS means nothing compared to a 20% hit on 260 FPS. It may be sharper, but its a sharper slide show. Its the implementation that counts not necissarily the technology.

 

[Jeff7181]

Was it 3Dfx who used a method of AA that only looked at the edges of the objects? I thought I remembered one of the manufacturers a while ago using that as a selling point... that they didn't AA the whole screen, only the edges which is what the goal of AA is. Do all the manufacturers do that now? If not, that would probably allow 8x or 16x AA on current hardware with not much trouble.

 

[Pete]

Supersample AA: AA's the whole screen.
Multisample AA: AA's only polygon edges/intersections.
Fragment AA: AA's most (not all) polygon edges/intersections.

The V5 does SS. GF3+ does MS. Parhelia does FAA. Take a look at Anand's Parhelia review to see why FAA isn't perfect.

 

[BenSkywalker]

For AF, a combination of nvidias and ATIs approach to it would be good. nVidia, like you said has slightly better AF than ATIs, but has a big performance drop compared to ATIs approach.

Have you read any of the recent reviews? There were some issues with the FX line at launch, but currently they have performance hit comparable to ATi's(sometimes better, sometimes worse, most of the time they are quite close in % terms). Where you see the huge drop from the nV boards is when you enable on of the xS AA modes which do both MultiSampling and SuperSampling. For current games, it isn't anything you would likely want to use. Where it comes in handy are older titles that utilized a lot of alpha texture. With straight MSAA you end up with some fairly horrible looking edge aliasing, SSAA clears it up. I actually think that ATi should offer something comparable to xS mode, or straight SuperSampling, for use in games like CounterStrike(anyone with a R3X0 fire up the "Italy" map in particular, you can get sweet edge AA on the characters and most parts of the buildings, the railings look like @ss). If ATi did enable a SSAA mode you would see a drop comparable to what nVidia has now(SSAA is a lot more demanding on boards).