Your opinions on AA and deferred rendering/deferred shading?

[Anarchist420]

FXAA and OGSS suck and MSAA is good, but it's not as good as SGSSAA, especially with a very slight left shift in texture LOD bias.

I wish that driver-forced SGSSAA worked with every game or that every game offered ingame 4x SGSSAA (RGSS) as the only option.

Deferred rendering/deferred shading is stupid... plenty of games used traditional forward rendering in the past and they looked better for their time than most deferred rendering/shaded games do now.

Your opinions?

 

[boxleitnerb]

I agree. In many current games, even if MSAA is implemented, it fails more often than not by skipping polygon edges. Nothing comes close to the quality of perfect driver enforced DX9 SGSSAA with appropriate LOD bias shift.

On a side note:
If a game supports MSAA, SGSSAA can be used as well - always. Problem is, if the underlying MSAA is bad, the SGSSAA won't smooth all edges either. Hitman Absolution and Max Payne 3 DX11 are good examples of this. May I point to my thread about a petition for DX11 AA bits?
http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2320936&highlight=

 

[BrightCandle]

The advantage of deferred rendering is the ability to use a shader program for what was normally fixed function, the most common use is better lighting. Deferred rendering makes the lighting a lot better, HDR and global illumination techniques are the two big wins we get from using deferred rendering. Of course we loose the hardware AA and have to replace it with a shader program, but in general its a useful trade off in actual image quality.

 

[BFG10K]

I wish that driver-forced SGSSAA worked with every game or that every game offered ingame 4x SGSSAA (RGSS) as the only option.

The bolded part is a terrible idea. 4xSSAA is only usable @ 2560x1600 on a Titan in games from about 2004/2005 or earlier. It's not acceptable to expect people to wait nine years to get AA, not when FXAA can be enabled in even extremely taxing games and offer a very visible benefit.

Deferred rendering/deferred shading is stupid... plenty of games used traditional forward rendering in the past and they looked better for their time than most deferred rendering/shaded games do now.

Deferred rendering engines can have some really nice lighting & shadowing. In fact many have a distinct style so that you can tell that's how they render. Something like Timeshift looks really good even today.

 

[futurefields]

sometimes I like how FXAA looks.

for example I think GTA4 really benefits from FXAA.

 

[Gryz]

My favorite form of AA nowadays is SMAA.

Either the standalone version: http://mrhaandi.blogspot.nl/p/injectsmaa.html

Or when included in SweetFX: http://www.guru3d.com/files_details/sweetfx_shader_suite_download.html

I've not been able to get SGSSAA to work in any game I've played over the last year. MSAA is good against jaggies when you stand still. But when you are moving, or when the camera is moving, MSAA often gives "pixel creep". Therefor I prefer to use MSAA and SMAA in combination. That makes e.g. Skyrim look the best. And SMAA uses very little compute power, so MSAA+SMAA gives almost the same frames/sec as just MSAA.