Does Anti-Aliasing actually do anything?

[fennster]

Just read this...

"Anti-Aliasing Not Working Correctly: Some changes will go in Update 7 or 8, with significant improvements, but a full anti-aliasing system is slated for later this year."

Been a long time bugbear of mine, so quite excited to see the results.

Elite Dangerous Issue Report - 10/08/2021

Greetings Commanders! I'd like to introduce you to something new. Below is our first Top 20 Issues table, summarising the highest voted issues on the Issue Tracker. As part of being open and honest about the game's development, we'll be regularly posting updated versions of this table and...

forums.frontier.co.uk

 

[nanite2000]

Just read this...

"Anti-Aliasing Not Working Correctly: Some changes will go in Update 7 or 8, with significant improvements, but a full anti-aliasing system is slated for later this year."

Been a long time bugbear of mine, so quite excited to see the results.

Elite Dangerous Issue Report - 10/08/2021

Greetings Commanders! I'd like to introduce you to something new. Below is our first Top 20 Issues table, summarising the highest voted issues on the Issue Tracker. As part of being open and honest about the game's development, we'll be regularly posting updated versions of this table and...

forums.frontier.co.uk

Very excited to read that!

 

[jojon]

Actually other way around, or so I was told. After upscaling apply AA. Besides its Post Process AA stil we have no MSAA or TAA implemented in ED.

No - FSR upscaling is said to outright rely on its input images being rendered with as high quality antialiasing as possible.

The post-processing that you are recommended to defer until after FSR is "screen effects", such as film grain and chromatic abberration.

MSAA is ostensibly so not-trivial in a deferred rendering pipeline, that nobody is even earnestly trying to find a way to make it work, and TAA is also post-processing AA.

 

[Úlfhéðnar]

MSAA is ostensibly so not-trivial in a deferred rendering pipeline, that nobody is even earnestly trying to find a way to make it work, and TAA is also post-processing AA.

Strange for all I know and read TAA is working in the regions of MSAA and TXAA the Nvidia Temporal Anti Aliasing is a mix of Post processing and MSAA. Basically combined AA so not really post processing.

MSAA is super sampling and well it's actually industry standard as I understood it.

For the FSR somehow that might be tho. Although you can never be sure if it's applicable for you until it's tested both ways. That being said we literally don't know when AA is applied in the pipeline of the ED render so it might be applied AFTER FSR and then make it look bad or it looks bad because applied before and the engine being a mess. Only FDev can answer that question

 

[Mogen Teras]

Very excited to read that!

We live in a world where people are excited that anti aliasing is confirmed to not be working.

 

[nanite2000]

We live in a world where people are excited that anti aliasing is confirmed to not be working.

The first step to fixing a problem is acknowledging that there is a problem. And Zac said anti-aliasing would be improved in Update 7, with a proper long-term fix planned for later in the year.

 

[rootsrat]

Remember to enable AA in global gfx windows settings. It's off by default

If you try that in NVidia's control panel, it's greyed out for Elite Dangerous because it says it's unsupported.

Isnt that only a thing for Nvidia? If yes well I dont use Nvidia

HUH ?!?

"global gfx windows settings", what is that, and does it matter in a game?

Don't worry - you're not missing anything. It doesn't work anyway:

Not sure if this was mentioned, as I've not read the whole thread, but setting this in drivers will OVERRIDE any application's AA with the one from nVidia built in driver's AA.

It is usually worse than 99% of the games own implementation.

One thing they do better than some of the games is anisotropy and often it's better to use 16x anisotropy filtering from nV drivers.

Tl;dr This will NOT enable or disable AA in any game. It will OVERWRITE game's engine AA with nV's.

 

[nanite2000]

Not sure if this was mentioned, as I've not read the whole thread, but setting this in drivers will OVERRIDE any application's AA with the one from nVidia built in driver's AA.

Can you show us a screenshot of what you’re referring to here @rootsrat ? Not sure where you access the ‘drivers’ settings from.

 

[rootsrat]

Can you show us a screenshot of what you’re referring to here @rootsrat ? Not sure where you access the ‘drivers’ settings from.

The screenshot is in one of the quotes. I'm not at my PC currently.

It's nVidia Control Panel.

EDIT - it's actually your screenshot

 

[nanite2000]

The screenshot is in one of the quotes. I'm not at my PC currently.

It's nVidia Control Panel.

EDIT - it's actually your screenshot

But my screenshot shows that the option is unsupported, and therefore disabled, for Elite Dangerous.

is there a different area you were referring to enable that feature?

 

[rootsrat]

But my screenshot shows that the option is unsupported, and therefore disabled, for Elite Dangerous.

is there a different area you were referring to enable that feature?

Did you have AA on in Elite at that time? Maybe ED engine doesn't support nvidia AA? I don't know exactly how it's processed in a game when enabled.

For other options like anisotropic filtering you need to turn it off in the game and then enable it in the driver (nv control panel)

 

[FutronBob]

Nice to hear the news that Odyssey's AA will soon be fixed (and confirming our suspicions that it was broken ), but what I'm really looking forward to is that "full anti-aliasing system slated for later this year."

Elite's been plagued by a very bad case of the jaggies since its inception, with only brute force super-sampling able to overcome it. I can't wait to see what Frontier has up their sleeve to finally address this longstanding issue.

 

[Úlfhéðnar]

Not sure if this was mentioned, as I've not read the whole thread, but setting this in drivers will OVERRIDE any application's AA with the one from nVidia built in driver's AA.

It is usually worse than 99% of the games own implementation.

One thing they do better than some of the games is anisotropy and often it's better to use 16x anisotropy filtering from nV drivers.

Tl;dr This will NOT enable or disable AA in any game. It will OVERWRITE game's engine AA with nV's.

The AA thing also exists for amd btw but amd explicitly states it will not work on anything besides dx9 titles and somehow I don't thing Nvidia is any different here sadly

 

[nanite2000]

Did you have AA on in Elite at that time? Maybe ED engine doesn't support nvidia AA? I don't know exactly how it's processed in a game when enabled.

For other options like anisotropic filtering you need to turn it off in the game and then enable it in the driver (nv control panel)

To be honest, now that Zac has confirmed that antialiasing will be improved in the next update and over the coming months, I’m content to not waste any more time on this until I see what FDev come up with.

I’ll revisit your suggestion if FDev’s solution is below expectations.

 

[Sakashiro]

I haven't really noticed any difference in AA between Horizons (or pre-Horizons) and EDO, except that EDO now has FSR enabled by default and FSR compounds aliasing issues.

Turn on night vision in EDO. The jaggies are awful. EDH never looked that bad.

 

[jojon]

MSAA is super sampling and well it's actually industry standard as I understood it.

Well, it WAS industry standard, until almost everybody switched to deferred rendering.

Before TAA became more commonplace, a ton of titles built on Unreal Engine 4, and using its deferred renderer (I'm fairly sure it still had forward as an option), came with "antialiasing" that was little more than hideous blur, that was way worse than the jaggies it tried to hide were in the first place.

(Mind you: What ever long-wished-for AA solution FDev presents later in the year; No AA technique that is mostly out to reduce jaggies - even MSAA ("multi" sampling aa - for polygon edges), is going to produce something that is as accurate a rendering of the scene as full-screen supersampling (SSAA... which we can do right now, but is performance-costly as hell) .

 

[CMDR Sophie Joanne]

The best anti-aliasing is Supersampling above 1 (with the amd thing turned off)

 

[Prof Horatio Hafnaugels]

Yes the shimmer is bad at times. No settings appear to affect it for me. Never noticed it bad before patch 6.

Same here: shimmering is not always present, but when it is there's literally no way to make it disappear, except supersampling which obviously kills performance.
Was fine with patch 5.

 

[B1rdy]

For the FSR somehow that might be tho. Although you can never be sure if it's applicable for you until it's tested both ways. That being said we literally don't know when AA is applied in the pipeline of the ED render so it might be applied AFTER FSR and then make it look bad or it looks bad because applied before and the engine being a mess. Only FDev can answer that question

WRT best image quality it does not matter, as long as FSR remains a simple (but quite decent) upscaler. Native res or SS will look superior.

 

[Smcbri1]

Will do tomorrow. Also, feel free to ignore what I say. You do not own this forum, and I have not broken any rules.

Oh, and here's your screenshot.

He wasn’t wrong though.