So what's going on with anti aliasing?

[Destroy]

I remember playing Deus Ex Human Revolution and gagging at the blur from the FXAA it offered. In general, at the time, the blur was ridiculous on anything with FXAA.

So here I am are today trying forcing FXAA in some older games again and you know what, it's pretty darn good.

It's like this is not your father's FXAA any more.

Did something change with FXAA and how it looks or works on games?

[acroig]

IIRC FXAA has been greatly improved over time and it could be implemented in engine by the dev or forced in driver CP.

[Crawdaddy79]

I never understood the claims that FXAA made things blurry. To be fair, by memory only KingRoLo said anything about it. I assumed he liked the sharpness of the jaggies.

[nutcrackr]

smaa was (is?) superior to fxaa, since it doesn't blur textures. Maybe they changed the implementation? Also got to keep in mind a lot of new games will look blurry because they use temporal AA which blends two frames together.

[Napoleonic]

isn't TAA the norm for AAA games now?

[KAC]

I don’t even know if AA is really a thing. Everyone these days has a decent implementation and once maxed out things look amazing. Mostly I am seeing SMAA T2X in games which I don’t fully know what it does.

[azalea]

CoD black ops needs DLSS to not have fuzzy pixels spilling everywhere. Those same pixels are always all over the place in RE Engine games (RE2, RE3 remakes). What's that about?

[Trunks0]

Originally Posted by Napoleonic

isn't TAA the norm for AAA games now?

TAA was the logical progression from FXAA/SMAA/MLAA. Allowing for the use of motion data to better figure out where edge are. Not all implementations are great though.

[Mangler]

Originally Posted by KAC

I don’t even know if AA is really a thing. Everyone these days has a decent implementation and once maxed out things look amazing. Mostly I am seeing SMAA T2X in games which I don’t fully know what it does.

It's the TAA form of smaa.

[Nagorak]

Originally Posted by Destroy

I remember playing Deus Ex Human Revolution and gagging at the blur from the FXAA it offered. In general, at the time, the blur was ridiculous on anything with FXAA.

So here I am are today trying forcing FXAA in some older games again and you know what, it's pretty darn good.

It's like this is not your father's FXAA any more.

Did something change with FXAA and how it looks or works on games?

Are you running on a higher res monitor? If so, maybe the higher overall detail doesn't fare as poorly with a little bit of blurring, making the negatives less noticeable?

[Seyiji]

Originally Posted by Nagorak

Are you running on a higher res monitor? If so, maybe the higher overall detail doesn't fare as poorly with a little bit of blurring, making the negatives less noticeable?

System specs indicate a 4k display.

Running FXAA at 4k is actually pretty tits :3 More info to work with and the blurriness is less noticeable imo. It's when you roll dick with it at lower resolutions is where the facade starts to chip away.

[Trunks0]

I usually just layer some Radeon Image Sharpening on top of games where the games shader based AA blurs things toooooo much. Doesn't always help of course.

[metroidfox]

Honestly, I don't mind the smoothed look.

[Drexion]

The R3D crowd skews older, so most people here will be familiar with MSAA from the good old days, which gave almost flawless AA results. This was possible because back then videogames were relatively simple in terms of polycounts and draw distance, so the forward rendering techniques used by games/video cards was fine.

As time went on and videogame scenery became more complex, most game engines switched over to deferred rendering which allowed better/faster techniques for drawing those hundreds of thousands of triangles/shaders on screen without performance issues.

The catch is that deferred rendering doesn't support "proper" techniques like MSAA, so post-process alternatives like fxaa and tmaa had to take it's place, but they aren't perfect and even though they've improved over the years - depending on the title there may still be drawbacks to enabling them.

Google for "deferred rendering vs forward rending" if this sort if thing interests you. It's a complex topic with some engines doing some interesting modifications of those.

[Trunks0]

Originally Posted by Drexion

The R3D crowd skews older, so most people here will be familiar with SMAA from the good old days, which gave almost flawless AA results. This was possible because back then videogames were relatively simple in terms of polycounts and draw distance, so the forward rendering techniques used by games/video cards was fine.

As time went on and videogame scenery became more complex, most game engines switched over to deferred rendering which allowed better/faster techniques for drawing those hundreds of thousands of triangles/shaders on screen without performance issues.

The catch is that deferred rendering doesn't support "proper" techniques like SMAA, so post-process alternatives like fxaa and tmaa had to take it's place, but they aren't perfect and even though they've improved over the years - depending on the title there may still be drawbacks to enabling them.

Google for "deferred rendering vs forward rending" if this sort if thing interests you. It's a complex topic with some engines doing some interesting modifications of those.

I think you flipped the S and M.

MSAA = Multi-Sampling AA. The AA method that swooped in after SuperSampling AA. Works pretty great for cleaning up the edges of geometry, but it doesn't clean up texture aliasing at all.

SMAA = Subpixel Morphological AA. This is another shader based post-processing AA method like FXAA and MLAA. How good it is, is completely dependant on how the developers tweak it.

[demo]

I've always found SMAA looks good in static images but is horrid in motion. SMAA x 2 improves on this and isn't too bad.

Never been a fan of FXAA but as resolution goes up it does indeed look better. Back when it was introduced most of us were on 1080p give or take, at which FXAA looks rather blurry. At 4k it's honestly not too bad.

I like TAA but most of the time it needs some sort of sharpening filter IMO.

[Drexion]

Originally Posted by Trunks0

I think you flipped the S and M.

Yep you're right I edited it now. Exactly why console gaming is always going to be popular, most people just want to hit the start button - no tinkering around with all the 'weird' settings that PC gamers tend to overthink.

[KAC]

I like S&M and T&A as well. I don’t like F&A because I am more a “knock the front door” man.

[Crawdaddy79]

Originally Posted by KAC

I like S&M and T&A as well. I don’t like F&A because I am more a “knock the front door” man.

Ah - so you're a D&B kinda guy.