TXAA Anti-Aliasing Makes Its Debut In Latest Update For The Secret World

[blackened23]

Diablo 3 has MSAA but its just not obvious because the options don't spell it out for you. You can't force SSAA unless the game has native MSAA, things have been this way as long as I can rememeber. Anyway....generally speaking, if a game doesn't support MSAA that means it is using deferred renderer which as I understand it is not compatible with MSAA or SSAA. Most drivers force SGSSAA through converting MSAA anyway, so MSAA has to be baseline to use SSAA.

 

[railven]

Diablo 3 has MSAA but its just not obvious because the options don't spell it out for you. You can't force SSAA unless the game has native MSAA, things have been this way as long as I can rememeber. Anyway....generally speaking, if a game doesn't support MSAA that means it is using deferred renderer which as I understand it is not compatible with MSAA or SSAA. Most drivers force SGSSAA through converting MSAA anyway, so MSAA has to be baseline to use SSAA.

What D3 use I can only go by the options to enable it, which I believe was FXAA. Eitherway, you couldn't enable any form of forced AA through CCC until AMD made a driver with it (or you use the tool I used which acts sort of like Inspector.)

The Secret World doesn't seem to have MSAA, but it also not deferred rendered as far as I can tell, and that seems deliberate on the end of the devs. FXAA HQ does a decent job on this tittle, not even sure it would run *good* enough with MSAA. I'm not even 100% sure why the game is so taxing when frankly the graphics/environments aren't that stunning.

London has cobblestone roads that are tessellation and of course performance tanks there on both rigs (dropping to half FPS). Oh wells.

 

[TimothyLottes]

MSAA can be used with deferred rendering. Killzone 2 on the PS3 was 2xMSAA with deferred rendering for example. Just many developers choose not to support MSAA when they have a deferred engine. Also driver enabled RGSSAA (or SGSSAA) might not work because many deferred engines have logic to reduce to force shading to one sample/pixel for non-edge pixels, and the driver cannot override this. The only option in that case is OGSSAA which can be used on anything.

One way to tell if a game has a deferred lighting engine (the most expensive kind of deferred engine in this case) is to see if it has an unusually big hit from either tessellation and MSAA or TXAA. Deferred lighting requires rendering the view twice (expensive with tessellation), and the lighting once. First pass is depth+normal+specPower, second is lighting, third is render scene again and shade (sampling lighting). Typically one can optimize the lighting pass by breaking into complex (think important edge) and simple (non-edge) pixels with MSAA or TXAA. However the last shading pass with MSAA or TXAA and tessellation gets no benefit of traditional deferred rendering because all tessellated triangle edges get over-shaded. With traditional deferred rendering there is only one pass on the geometry (faster), and g-buffer gets shaded instead of triangles (so one can limit over-shading).

 

[railven]

MSAA can be used with deferred rendering. Killzone 2 on the PS3 was 2xMSAA with deferred rendering for example. Just many developers choose not to support MSAA when they have a deferred engine. Also driver enabled RGSSAA (or SGSSAA) might not work because many deferred engines have logic to reduce to force shading to one sample/pixel for non-edge pixels, and the driver cannot override this. The only option in that case is OGSSAA which can be used on anything.

One way to tell if a game has a deferred lighting engine (the most expensive kind of deferred engine in this case) is to see if it has an unusually big hit from either tessellation and MSAA or TXAA. Deferred lighting requires rendering the view twice (expensive with tessellation), and the lighting once. First pass is depth+normal+specPower, second is lighting, third is render scene again and shade (sampling lighting). Typically one can optimize the lighting pass by breaking into complex (think important edge) and simple (non-edge) pixels with MSAA or TXAA. However the last shading pass with MSAA or TXAA and tessellation gets no benefit of traditional deferred rendering because all tessellated triangle edges get over-shaded. With traditional deferred rendering there is only one pass on the geometry (faster), and g-buffer gets shaded instead of triangles (so one can limit over-shading).

This game takes it in the face with Tessellation on. I admit I didn't try HBAO off + Tess On, or any other combination but everything on.

Tess on World + Ground Off to On - HD 7970 in London went from 75 FPS to 35FPS, GTX 680 went from 84 FPS to 44 FPS. The tess was clearly visible on the cobblestone floor, and I could see some tess on lamps, but woof did it hit hard. Oddly enough Tess Ground Only didn't affect the Cobblestone road.

Trial is over, if you are going to play this game TXAA vs FXAA, I'd take TXAA as it does produce a better Image, but the blurring is more severe than FXAA. Hopefully they can fix the blurring side affect.

It makes me think back at that Epic demo, TXAA didn't look any where as blurry in the Good Samaritan Demo as it does in The Secret World, might be more to it.

 

[SomeoneSimple]

It makes me think back at that Epic demo, TXAA didn't look any where as blurry in the Good Samaritan Demo as it does in The Secret World, might be more to it.

There wasn't any TXAA in that demo, at least, not as far as I know.

The first UE3 Samaritan demo, which was shown on 3 GTX580's in SLI, was using MSAA, the optimized single-GTX680 version of the demo was using FXAA.

 

[railven]

There wasn't any TXAA in that demo, at least, not as far as I know.

The first UE3 Samaritan demo, which was shown on 3 GTX580's in SLI, was using MSAA, the optimized single-GTX680 version of the demo was using FXAA.

Oh I need to check back then. I remember it using TXAA (at least that was what they were hyping at the time.

My apologies if I'm wrong.

 

[TimothyLottes]

TXAA has been only in TSW so far.

 

[SirPauly]

I can totally understand and respect this view:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6159/the-geforce-gtx-660-ti-review/6

On the whole, what NVIDIA is trying to accomplish here is to implement movie-like anti-aliasing at a reasonable performance cost. Traditionally SSAA would be the solution here (just like it is to most other image aliasing problems), but of course SSAA is much too expensive most of the time. At its lower setting it is just 2x MSAA plus the temporal component, which makes the process rather cheap.

Unfortunately by gaming standards it’s also really blurry. This is due to the combination of the wide tent MSAA samples – which if you remember your history, ATI tried at one time – and the temporal filter blending data from multiple frames. TXAA does a completely fantastic job of eliminating temporal and other forms of aliasing, but it does so at a notable cost to image clarity.

To that end, TXAA is unquestionably an interesting technology and worth keeping an eye on in the future, but practically speaking AMD’s efforts to implement complex lighting cheaply on a forward renderer (and thereby making MSAA cheap and effective) are probably more relevant to improving the state of AA. But this is by no means the final word, and we’ll certainly revisit TXAA in detail in the future once it’s enabled on a game that offers a more deterministic way of testing image quality.

 

[railven]

TXAA has been only in TSW so far.

Well there is the confirmation, thanks.

I can totally understand and respect this view:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6159/the-geforce-gtx-660-ti-review/6

I've yet to sample the Leo Demo or Dirt Showdown, but if the new lighting system improves IQ while not taking a huge performance penalty - I'm all for it. Maybe I should download the Leo Demo when I get home.

TXAA is confirmed to be in BL2, right? Are there any demo/screen shots of it yet? Just curious, perhaps it would look better on a Cell Shading engine.

I think what hurts TSW + TXAA is, the game didn't even look that impressive to start off with. Add a little blur and it just made it look worse. Least that's how I felt. I don't think MMO's are a good place to stress graphic features, since most people will be toning down settings to play in an area with 100+ people, and at least judging from the WoW crowd I know - most aren't running high end rigs let alone mid-range hardware to begin with.

 

[SirPauly]

I think it is mentioned but I have no idea if it is confirmed.

I hang out at Rage3d and a gamer shared their first hand view of TXAA:

Looks about the same as 4x SSAA on my old ATI card would (when it would work)... maybe juuuust a touch blurrier. The loss of detail is a shame, but the antialiasing is so much better than FXAA HD it's not even funny. I had a girl wearing thin framed glasses. With FXAA, it's lacking AA, and the wires at pts vanish as she turns her head, etc. With TXAAx2 they're solid, like they should be. Similar effects with power lines, fence edging, etc, etc.

I see little-to-no-improvement for TXAAx4, and a little more blur. TXAAx2 is preferable, and my current choice for this game.

http://www.rage3d.com/board/showpost.php?p=1337018746&postcount=6220

Personally appreciate gamers that share their first hand accounts - pros or cons.

 

[SomeoneSimple]

TXAA is confirmed to be in BL2, right?

Correct. From the GTX680 whitepaper:
"The following games and game engines/developers have committed to offering TXAA support so far:
MechWarrior Online, Secret World, Eve Online, Borderlands 2, Unreal 4 Engine, BitSquid, Slant Six Games, and Crytek."

I think what hurts TSW + TXAA is, the game didn't even look that impressive to start off with.

Its probably not the graphics per se, but I think the problem lies within its presentation. TSW being a MMO, is generally played with a fairly large camera-distance, so you'd have a bigger overview. Because of this, nearly all details (objects/textures) are very small, so any loss of sharpness directly results in a large loss of detail.

I can imagine, that a game like Borderlands 2 has less issues with TXAA, because objects and details take up more screen space compared to TSW, since everything is seen from a first-person point-of-view. There's still a loss of sharpness, but only a minimal loss of detail.

This is obviously all speculation though, since we only have TSW as a reference.

 

[SirPauly]

I don't mean to be a nit-picker but a few titles had initial commitments for GPU PhysX but when launched the title didn't offer the ability. Not saying this will happen with BL2 and TXAA, but there is a difference between committed and confirmation when released.

 

[railven]

Its probably not the graphics per se, but I think the problem lies within its presentation. TSW being a MMO, is generally played with a fairly large camera-distance, so you'd have a bigger overview. Because of this, nearly all details (objects/textures) are very small, so any loss of sharpness directly results in a large loss of detail.

I can imagine, that a game like Borderlands 2 has less issues with TXAA, because objects and details take up more screen space compared to TSW, since everything is seen from a first-person point-of-view. There's still a loss of sharpness, but only a minimal loss of detail.

This is obviously all speculation though, since we only have TSW as a reference.

I can agree with your point of view here. After witnessing TXAA first hand I'm not as against as I was those stills. Granted, the blurry is awful (well as SirPauly's other reference, for 4xTXAA) 2xTXAA (which is what we settled for with Tess on) wasn't as bad as FXAA HQ.

I don't mean to be a nit-picker but a few titles had initial commitments for GPU PhysX but when launched the title didn't offer the ability. Not saying this will happen with BL2 and TXAA, but there is a difference between committed and confirmation when released.

I do hope TXAA is featured in BL2 (and hopefully not at the expense of traditional AA options for non-Vidia users). I'd give it a whirl on the GTX 680.

More features are always a plus, just wish they'd compliment existing features versus blocking features to promote specific stuff.

Oh well, dog eat dog.

 

[RussianSensation]

FXAA was very well implemented in MP3. It's possible that TXAA implementation can improve in future games. If so, it will show a lot of promise. Based on current results, there is a lot of improvement that needs to be made. In the Leo Save the Day Demo, AMD has shown that you can maintain MSAA without the performance hit with multiple complex render targets and have a global illumination model in place via Compute Shaders. If GK110 builds upon GPGPU compute functions of GF100/110, maybe NV and AMD can start working towards pushing forward rendering game engines and MSAA.

Although with next generation of consoles likely to continue to be severely underpowered, I can definitely see another reason for the popularity of the less GPU performance intensive FXAA/MLAA/TXAA methods.

 

[TimothyLottes]

No TXAA in BL2. There is a core problem in that without DX10.1 or later, there is no support for texture fetch from an MSAA surface, which means any DX9 based game doing cell shading, will be appling the cell shading in a post process using the resolved depth buffer, and effectively adding back all the aliasing. So in the future for a cell shaded title, one would need to do the cell shading post process before resolving the MSAA buffer.

 

[SomeoneSimple]

Thank you for sharing that information. :thumbsup:

I am a bit disappointed to hear that though; I was really looking forward to playing BL2 with TXAA.

 

[SirPauly]

With the lastest drivers, released today, there are mentions of TXAA:

GeForce 310.54 Beta Drivers: An Essential Upgrade For All Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 & Assassin’s Creed III Players

http://www.geforce.com/whats-new/articles/nvidia-geforce-310-54-beta-drivers-released

Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 & Assassin’s Creed III TXAA Anti-Aliasing

At the launch of the GeForce GTX 680 last March we announced a new form of advanced anti-aliasing called TXAA, exclusive to Kepler-based GTX 600 series video cards. Utilizing a custom anti-aliasing resolve, a temporal filter, and Multisample hardware anti-aliasing, TXAA is designed to remove almost all aliasing from a scene, and eliminate temporal aliasing, the distracting movement of aliased lines when the player’s viewpoint is in motion in-game.

In July we launched the TXAA-enabled GeForce 304.79 beta drivers, and in August The Secret World, Funcom’s technologically-advanced MMO, became the first game to support the new anti-aliasing technique. Gamers and the independent press agreed that the result was super smooth, free of troublesome aliasing, but some felt the new TXAA-enhanced image was too soft. To that end, Timothy Lottes, NVIDIA’s FXAA and TXAA mastermind, has improved the technique, making it sharper and more defined.

With today’s 310.54 beta driver installed, Kepler GTX 600 series users will be able to evaluate the fruits of Tim’s labors for the first time, in Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 and Assassin’s Creed III, which both feature full in-game TXAA support.

For those without Black Ops 2 and/or a Kepler video card, we’ve put together an anti-aliasing comparison video that demonstrates the benefits of TXAA compared to the shooters’s other anti-aliasing options. For that, and more on Black Ops 2’s tech, check back tomorrow. As for Assassin’s Creed III, check back nearer November 20th for the full scoop on Ubisoft’s impressive and technologically-enhanced PC version.

Nice to see more titles and more refinements.

 

[Pottuvoi]

Nice to see more titles and more refinements.

yes, kind of hoping that there would be ability to refine the AA resolve for each game.
Currently it's very interesting time for all sorts of antialiasing methods.

 

[TheUnk]

So I tried BlackOps II with the new drivers and TXAAx2 and x4 and I just couldn't get over how blurry the whole game looked.. I guess Timothy Lottes hasn't improved it enough yet.

 

[SirPauly]

Can you share some screenshots of no aa and TXAA in BLack ops?

 

[TheUnk]

I will when I get home from work if nobody beats me to it.

 

[Grooveriding]

So I tried BlackOps II with the new drivers and TXAAx2 and x4 and I just couldn't get over how blurry the whole game looked.. I guess Timothy Lottes hasn't improved it enough yet.

Thanks for letting us know. I figured it would be because the blurriness is just inherent to any AA method using post-AA solely or as a part of it.

Wasn't interested in Call of Duty so couldn't check it out. Those Call of Duty console port DLC/sequels keep getting released every year and it's the same damn game as Call of Duty 4 from 2007 with a map pack tacked on, still using a modified Quake 3 engine. Game looks ancient at this point and they do nothing to innovate with it.

 

[RussianSensation]

So I tried BlackOps II with the new drivers and TXAAx2 and x4 and I just couldn't get over how blurry the whole game looked.. I guess Timothy Lottes hasn't improved it enough yet.

TXAA in BO2 is horrendous. It's like putting on a wrong set of prescription glasses. It washes out details, making the game look like a console game (that's exactly what you don't want after you spent $400+ on a modern GPU ). I noted this major deficiency of TXAA in TSW and it's even more clear in BO2 because that game has very simplistic textures/low-polygon models, which makes it even easier to see the blur city of TXAA.

8X MSAA

4x TXAA

TXAA is so bad, it's worse than MLAA/FXAA. I can't believe some people think MSAA is outdated tech and TXAA is supposed to the future? The current implementation of TXAA = the quickest way to "consolize" PC gaming graphics.

 

[SirPauly]

Thanks for that shot, with the frame-rate! Would need to see the shots in motion to look at them fairly.

 

[f1sherman]

Seeing how NV doesn't care about Fermi owners, I won't be promoting TXAA either. So fire away RS.

But 8xMSAA... please. 8xMSAA, 32xCSAA that's a noobs AA.