ATi and their AA is dying...need SSAA.

[MonarchX]

AA used to replace higher resolution, but I was just playing HL2, and Chronicles of Riddick and I noticed that there are so many cool effects and alpha textures in DX9 games that MSAA has very little effect (only like models are AAed, the rest of the environment isn't).

It seems that higher resolution is the way to go to get rid of jaggies. AA is dying...for ATi! nVidia has SSAA...

Soon MSAA or no MSAA will make no difference, but give a performance hit.

[jolle]

actually..
http://www.gaminggroove.com/article.php?id=27

Question 6: Do you think the differences in the approaches ATI and NVIDIA use for AA and anisotropic filtering are of any consequence in actual gameplay?

Tim: I see anisotropic filtering as clearly worthwhile and uncontroversial in all gaming, since it's inexpensive on average, and it improves the worst-case blurring of stretched textures significantly.

But I remain somewhat of a skeptic on the various forms of multisample antialiasing. These techniques are costly, often cause visual anomalies when enabled on an application without its knowledge. And in next-generation games, it's not clear that it is worthwhile to focus so much hardware on solving the edge-aliasing problem when the interior-aliasing problem is at least as significant. Once you move to next-generation per-pixel lighting models, the lighting equations (such as exponential specular lighting) are nonlinear, such that texture mipmap filtering doesn't avoid aliasing as is the case with linear diffuse lighting.

Tho SSAA is pretty heavy stuff, specially on higher resolutions.

[Alkali]

I agree - I hope to high heaven that the R520 (or a refresh of it) has an 8xFSAA mode which is SSAA....

[bhz9294]

Aren't you supposed to use the built-in AA over the driver based AA if the game supports it? Does not HL2 have one? Yep, yep.

Although I don't see why ATI wouldn't just toss it in there. Surely it can't be too difficult. My lonely Geforce DDR could do it via drivers.

[sireric]

SSAA has always been done via drivers, mostly. ATI does not wish to support SSAA at this time on PCs due to the effort of validation, support, design and performace (not due to lack of hardware support).

We feel that our current MSAA is superior to any other solution currently available, both in terms of quality and performance. There's no new hardware required to support SSAA -- Just a massive amount of SW work. The solution will be no better in terms of real AA, and it will be a massive performance hit. It might improve some cases of procedural textures or plain bad textures, but those are still pretty rare -- And if a game designer really wants SSAA, he can certainly design it into his game for those areas that require it. It's generally agreed that the current API for MSAA is somewhat broken, but that can be fixed.

As for the future, lots of possible different things can happen.

[Alkali]

So you are saying its the developers job to do textures in such a way they dont look awfully aliased?

A perfect example of very nice textures which look yukky (just with AF and MSAA) is Chronicles of Riddick. The crates look basically identical with 0xFSAA and 6xFSAA, and the problem only gets less the higher the resolution (2048x1536 looks good, but its too high performance hit).

SSAA would gives the choice to consumers to have lovely looking textures at lower resolutions, as far as I understand the technology. If ATi dont go down this route, I may end up having to go for the 6800's in SLi to try and run in 8xFSAA in these types of titles.

[sireric]

Yes, it is up to the developers to deal with a lot of issues. Non-procedural textures should not have any serious issues, if the developer uses a high quality filtering such as anisotropic or even tri-linear. Only alpha-test might show some issues, but there are other non-SSAA solutions that are much better for that; stay tuned.

I haven't seen CofR, but games such as UT2004 have good quality textures and I don't remember anybody complaining about them with AF. I'm not sure what you mean by "these types of titles" -- I haven't heard much about low quality textures in any recent application, except for a few items.

Developers can make a huge difference by how they use the resources that they have.

As for picking other solutions, you should pick the one that works best for you, whatever metric you use. I've seen Halo, Hl2 and a few other apps running on competitive solutions and I would much rather run it on one of our boards, but that's me.

[tEd]

Originally Posted by sireric

Only alpha-test might show some issues, but there are other non-SSAA solutions that are much better for that; stay tuned.
.

what are you hinting at....

new driver,new hardware,new API or on any of those in combination?

[Gandalfthewhite]

he talking on a programmer dev level ted

[ThereIsASpoon]

SIRERIC

how about doing an "edge-only" AA.

like matrox.

seeing as how the reason I and most others turn on AA is for the edges only.

i've never heard anyone complain that the pixels inside polygons/textures need "anti-aliasing"

1/50th the performance degradation and much better looking results.

then you could turn on 16/32X EAA and never have to turn it off.

seems to me that ATi could really take the cake if they were to surprise everyone by having this feature in their next gen cards.

ah who am i kidding...

Plz don't bring in other issues not related to the topic - Trunks0

[Alkali]

Originally Posted by sireric

Yes, it is up to the developers to deal with a lot of issues. Non-procedural textures should not have any serious issues, if the developer uses a high quality filtering such as anisotropic or even tri-linear. Only alpha-test might show some issues, but there are other non-SSAA solutions that are much better for that; stay tuned.

I haven't seen CofR, but games such as UT2004 have good quality textures and I don't remember anybody complaining about them with AF. I'm not sure what you mean by "these types of titles" -- I haven't heard much about low quality textures in any recent application, except for a few items.

Developers can make a huge difference by how they use the resources that they have.

As for picking other solutions, you should pick the one that works best for you, whatever metric you use. I've seen Halo, Hl2 and a few other apps running on competitive solutions and I would much rather run it on one of our boards, but that's me.

What I mean by 'these types of titles' is that some games use textures that appear to have geometry, or there is an abundance of geometry used in a model (eg. modelled 3D logo on crate) - and these areas are all aliased badly. MSAA doesnt address any of the issues and for these titles you might as well not use it, instead changing to high resolution. From the limited screenshots I have seen of SSAA, it does the same job as MSAA, but does it for all these other things too, therefore making the whole scene anti-aliased, not just the edges. It has a much more useful effect as far as I can see.

Don't get me wrong, my choice in 3D card is really hard this January - I want SLi, but I dont know if the X850's will work (in ATis version of SLi) in an SLi mobo; I want a 512MB card so I can go >1600x1200 @ 6xfsaa; I want SSAA; I wouldnt mind having PS3.0; I want 3Dc. That is quite a headache, I am just hoping I can justify holding off by the R520 if it does/has most these things.

[sireric]

ThereIsASpoon, please read up on MSAA -- You'll see that it does what you ask of it already, if desired.

Alkali, I'm sorry but I still don't understand what you mean by "textures that appear to have geometry" -- If you mean textures that have lots of holes in them, such as fences or grates, then that's the alpha-test textures I was talking about. There are other solutions for those than SSAA; and SSAA doesn't even do a great solution on that, unless you have very high number of samples (see all the issues that the fences on HL2 do to competitive solutions).

As for cards, again, you have to use what metric that's important to you. We try to deliver the highest quality and performance, accross the board. New products will be better than old products; that's the mantra of the industry.

[jolle]

A MSAA variant that can detect the "edges" in Alphablended textures sounds like it would be the ideal thing here.
Looking at a game like "Far Cry" where you got tons of foilage made up by transparent textures, SSAA would greatly help the visuals by eliminating the edge aliasing in the grass, bushes, leaves textures, but the game is pretty taxing as it is, and SSAA is prolly too expensive (havent tried it myself).

Or could texture filtering metods help that?
Would it perhaps be less edgy if you had a small gradient transition (2-5 pixels wide perhaps) into transparent in the textures? might just make leaves and such appear blurry tho.
The traditional alpha channel is 8bit so it should allow 0-255 steps of transparancy right?

Cause as things gets better, and looks better, the more obvious "artifacts" become, like edge aliasing.
You run a stunning looking game with say 4x MSAA and it all looks great, then you come up to a tree and you got the crawling going on all over it.
Had you not used AA to begin with, it wouldnt be that obvious.

SSAA is obviously a simpler, more efficient (qualitywise) overall way of going, but also very expensive..
rendering the image x times larger and downsampling it, so the higher the resolution the more dramatic the speed impact.
(instead of just sampling at pure polygon edges and appling AA there)
The way I understand it, 800x600 with 4 subpixel accuracy is rendered in 1600x1200, am I right in this? 1pixel contains the blended data from 4 pixels.
Maybe in the future generations when fillrate is alot higher? as it sounds (from Tim Sweeny atleat) like MSAA variants will become increasingly more of a hassle as the rendering evolves.

[noko]

Having a choice would be very nice if ATI would offer it. Yes 6x AA I love very much but at times SSAA would be very nice as well, as in flight simulators, older games, etc.. I have to say 8xS is hard to beat and it does look very good in the game Mafia, better then ATI's 6x from my standpoint. Plus using 8xS in CoD is also very playable just makes the game come alive from the visual standpoint, each leave, grass etc. is truely AAed. ATI's stance that MSAA is all you need could be improved upon, having an option to also do SSAA in cases where it truely benefits would be very smart and that would support the ATI user base better, a mixed mode would be cool as well.

[tahrikmili]

Why would you want SSAA in flight simulations? It's not like youa ctually see any alphablended textures there? MSAA is good enough for sim games IMO..

[Alkali]

Whatever the case, I hope ATi at least provide an 8xFSAA mode with R520 - if not more...

[Sasquach]

Originally Posted by tahrikmili

Why would you want SSAA in flight simulations? It's not like youa ctually see any alphablended textures there? MSAA is good enough for sim games IMO..

If its there, they can see it......

Thats the mentality of the graphics whore.

[mgdbottled]

Why would you want SSAA in flight simulations? It's not like youa ctually see any alphablended textures there? MSAA is good enough for sim games IMO..
________________________________________________________________

Trees, radio towers, etc. don't get properly alaised with ATI cards. I just might go with an Nvidia Card next time around too; do to ATI's lack of care in this area. Also, being able to increase or change color depth is very important in flight sims. Nvidia cards give the user the choice. ATI doesn't. Enough said.

[tahrikmili]

Originally Posted by mgdbottled

Why would you want SSAA in flight simulations? It's not like youa ctually see any alphablended textures there? MSAA is good enough for sim games IMO..
________________________________________________________________

Trees, radio towers, etc. don't get properly alaised with ATI cards. I just might go with an Nvidia Card next time around too; do to ATI's lack of care in this area. Also, being able to increase or change color depth is very important in flight sims. Nvidia cards give the user the choice. ATI doesn't. Enough said.

Unless you're flying a fixed wing sim you hardly ever see trees and radio towers long enough to actually notice the aliasing.. aliasing on aircraft/ground vehicle models and the cockpit is 10000x more noticable than trees.

Complaining about trees in a flight sim is like complaining about clouds in Doom 3..

[mgdbottled]

Trees outnumber other objects by 50 to 1 in FS9. Unless you fly over the ocean:

[tahrikmili]

Originally Posted by mgdbottled

Trees outnumber other objects by 50 to 1 in FS9. Unless you fly over the ocean:

Oh yeah? How often do you take a plunge into the ground in a flight sim? at 200ft+ trees are barely visible How much time do you spend at 0 altitude in an F/A-18, please do tell me. *sigh*

[Someonefromhell]

It should be more effective performance-wise to make msaa work with RTT/alpha textures than go back to using supersampling and I guess that's the route IHVs are going to take.

[A2597]

Originally Posted by tahrikmili

Oh yeah? How often do you take a plunge into the ground in a flight sim? at 200ft+ trees are barely visible How much time do you spend at 0 altitude in an F/A-18, please do tell me. *sigh*

a hell of alot actually...

only it's an F16.

I fly for the skin dancing. 400mph, 10-50ft.

[Dred]

LOL, Until you have a monitor that does 2000+ rez at 85Hz FSAA is going to help. If you don't like FSAA don't use it. Some people like jaggies.

Alpha textures are a problem and SSAA will help. SSAA is a huge bandwidth hog. ATIs approach is best in most games.

Originally Posted by MonarchX

AA used to replace higher resolution, but I was just playing HL2, and Chronicles of Riddick and I noticed that there are so many cool effects and alpha textures in DX9 games that MSAA has very little effect (only like models are AAed, the rest of the environment isn't).

It seems that higher resolution is the way to go to get rid of jaggies. AA is dying...for ATi! nVidia has SSAA...

Soon MSAA or no MSAA will make no difference, but give a performance hit.

[Alkali]

Originally Posted by Dred

Alpha textures are a problem and SSAA will help. SSAA is a huge bandwidth hog. ATIs approach is best in most games.

1. I accept SSAA is a heavily hardware/bandwidth dependant thing. But surely with the power we are starting to have available in our cards now (eg. 2x 6800Ultra's or an X850XTPE) - we should be able to select something to increase the graphics quality by a large factor? Otherwise we would be 'limited' to 1600x1200 @ 4xFSAA/16xAF at 100+fps. Thats a lot of power waiting to be used in the persuit of graphical niceties!!!

2. ATi's approach has been fine of course - but games are starting to change (post-processing for example has the effect of removing most aliasing) - and anyway, the power of cards now is such that they are taking over the technology somewhat. Something surely has to be done (whether thats by adding 8xFSAA or mixed mode, or a SSAA mode).

[noko]

The point is giving the user a option, let us decide what we want instead telling us what we need. If the hardware is capable of it then what is the point in not using it? I can only conclude is that ATI's hardware maybe able to do SSAA but not as fast as Nvidia design, thus the MSAA is all you need stance. Once I use mix modes on my GT I really understand where many wish the same from ATI's hardware, it does make a very noticeable improvement in many games and certain conditions. Flightsims are one of the best places to use SSAA due to the fact in most cases you are so CPU bound that it doesn't even affect performance and it smooths all the textures, so why not use it?

[Trunks0]

Or how about a temporal SSAA mode?

[soylent]

The reason I believe ATi doesnt want to implement SSAA is fanboys.

I've seen fanboys claim that nVidia sucks at AA just because the only 6xAA mode they had was some SSAA mixed mode thing. Which was compaired to ATi with the conclusion that "holy ****, ATi is 3 times faster!!11".

Typical conversation:

-Yeah but SSAA is much higher quality and more expensive, is nice to have as an option when it can be afforded, especially in older games. It AA's alphatest rendered objects while MSAA won't.

-It's their fault if they use an older, innefficient and ugly AA mode, nV is teh suck!!!11

On a less depressing topic, is it possible to make an MSAA/SSAA mixed mode that switches to SSAA for alpha test and back to MSAA for everything else on the fly?

[Dred]

I agree, it would be nice to have an option of MS or SS FSAA. Its just a software trick ATI hardware can do it. I don't think they want to spend the time on it is my guess.

If you remember Nvidia started FSAA back when VooDoo5s were out. SS does not do squat for texture shimmer. VooDoos could do hardware jitter that Nvidias hardware did not support. Nvidia just has refined it in the drivers over the years. It would probably take some work to get it working as well on ATI hardware.

Originally Posted by noko

The point is giving the user a option, let us decide what we want instead telling us what we need. If the hardware is capable of it then what is the point in not using it? I can only conclude is that ATI's hardware maybe able to do SSAA but not as fast as Nvidia design, thus the MSAA is all you need stance. Once I use mix modes on my GT I really understand where many wish the same from ATI's hardware, it does make a very noticeable improvement in many games and certain conditions. Flightsims are one of the best places to use SSAA due to the fact in most cases you are so CPU bound that it doesn't even affect performance and it smooths all the textures, so why not use it?

[joker339]

Wow.. seems like been talking about MS AA for years... and me being a core supporter.

I think Noko hit it right on the head - the point is giving us a choice.

The nonsense about performance loss, incorrect comparisons with other products, etc is purely garbage/lousy excuses.

Also, without MSAA, u can't AA the stuff inside the textures!! someone brought this up already. Yes, high res textures WILL help, but it can't solve everything. I do agree with Sireric's point though that some games (good ones like UT2004) - u don't notice it much due to good work from the dev. Unfortunately.. not everyone is like that and some games have much more foliage.

Anyways, I just got myself a GT so can't complain much. AND the MSAA combo modes was actually a KEY FACTOR in my decision as I viewed performance to be close enough for the price. Didn't worry about XT PEs as they cost more than USD200 extra where I stay!! CRAZY