Anti-Aliasing does not function

Insomnia

Insomnia
Im new here. Hey! :p

While Im no graphics guru, Im pretty sure Frontier uses deffered rendering in Elite. Deffered rendering offers high quality effects with the loss of hardware anti aliasing like MSAA. This forces developers to use post AA only. More and more games uses Deffered Rendering just because they see the enormous potential in high quality ambient occlusion or screen space reflections.
The aliasing in Elite is pretty obvious but not that bad. There are other games that are much worse.

To Frontier: Please implement Temporal SMAA or TXAA.
 

Aleksej

Aleksej
CMDR Brock Samson said:
Terrible AA implementation, I wonder why.
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It is a post-processing AA and this was already explained in this thread.

Leak said:
Elite is using deferred rendering (as do most games these days) to get cheap and good looking lighting/shading, but that also means that all hardware-antialiasing that's currently provided by graphics cards is unusable with the game, hence the need to do shader-based antialiasing. (If they weren't using deferred rendering the lights and shadows in the game would suck, so there'd also be complaining; probably even more than about the AA...)

Shader-based antialiasing is analysing the final image to find high contrast edges and smooth them, but since the game has many thin edges and surfaces that are one pixel or less thick when rendered at a shallow angle or from afar (like the mailbox grates) the rendered image itself contains discontinuities between parts of a single triangle/quad, and there's no shader-AA-algorithm that would be able to re-connect parts of a line that is broken up for several pixels.

Hardware based anti-aliasing knows where the edges of the geometry are (since it can be applied while the hardware is actually rendering the triangles) and can try to compensate for something like this, but shader-based AA doesn't have that luxury; the best mitigation you can currently have is upping the render resolution so the likelihood of features becoming too thin is lower.

So if there's less aliasing in other games it's either because they use hardware-anti-aliasing (though that's getting rarer) or because their geometry consists of less thin triangles and/or softer lighting with less stark brightness changes (like you'll usually get where there is an atmosphere, i.e. not in outer space).
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Ben Parry said:
^^^ Basically everything Leak just said.

The only thing Leak doesn't mention there is that (a) hardware multisampling data can be used in deferred shading if you write the extra code, sadly if you want efficient GPU scheduling you probably want tile-based deferred rendering (like wot Frostbite does) and (b) some games temporally antialias their environments because their environments aren't constantly moving. I believe Black Flag doesn't apply temporal AA to its characters for exactly that reason but I may be wrong. (c) Whatever Maiakaat described may be an art bug rather than a tech limitation.

Oculus specific: There's a distortion applied after scene rendering to make things the right shape for Oculus, naturally this is going to magnify some areas of the screen and minify others, it doesn't surprise me that any aliasing we have would be more visible in the magnified areas. Downsampling is probably going to be the best solution to this, in hand-wavey terms one could imagine a multi-res system that only oversamples in areas that it knows will be enlarged, but I'm talking off the top of my head here.
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Dannyc

Dannyc
All post processing AA has this problem.. The AA does work to a point but leaves thi horrible shimmering effect on straight lines (so the stations look rubbish).. One work around though is to set a res dbl the size of the sceen then reduce it down.

combine this with the supersampling available now in the beta and things should be better
 
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V3teran

V3teran
What we need is a custom AA flag for Nvidia Inspector, this will increase AA 200%. Thing is i cannot make one because of the 3D engine, i need help from the Devs.
Ive already said this 3 times in other threads.
 

Benny Mac

Benny Mac
Hi. I've got a GTX 970 and am playing with High settings at 2560x1440.

Unfortunately the aliasing bothers me quite a lot. Even the rotating station on the menu screen flickers / shimmers pretty bad.

I'm willing to compromise other settings to reduce the aliasing. My questions are:
1. What should I choose / do to reduce aliasing?
2. What settings should I scale back to free up the extra GPU cycles needed to beat the shimmering.

Many thanks!
 

Aleksej

Aleksej
Benny Mac said:
Hi. I've got a GTX 970 and am playing with High settings at 2560x1440.

Unfortunately the aliasing bothers me quite a lot. Even the rotating station on the menu screen flickers / shimmers pretty bad.

I'm willing to compromise other settings to reduce the aliasing. My questions are:
1. What should I choose / do to reduce aliasing?
2. What settings should I scale back to free up the extra GPU cycles needed to beat the shimmering.

Many thanks!
Click to expand...

There's probably nothing that can be done without significant reduction of the frame rate as you play at 2560x1440. Using DSR hit pretty bad the performance if such resolution is used.
 

tseward

T
Poor AA/LOD

I've noticed that AA is quite poor when using SMAA + Supersample of 1 (greater than 1 tanks my framerate). LOD is also pretty poor. Given this is space, texture pops/increasing details is very noticeable as there is no fog for the developer to cover it up.

Any suggestions for visual quality improvements that don't involve increasing the supersample level? Running i7-2600 w/ GTX 980 4GB w/ 32GB RAM.
 

tseward

T
I've tried that too. Framerate just isn't that good (native res is 1080p). And that of course doesn't help with the texture pops.
 

RipperJack

RipperJack
Your graphic card should run though settings effortless?

Similair to mentioned before, you should turn off SMAA and increase it via super sampling and brute force it better but by tanking fps do you mean sub 60 or like real down low? There has been quite a few threads recently with 980s and stutter and suchlike.
 

Bishop Aers

B
I was looking for an answer for what I noticed about AA on this game, but everytime I found someone complaining about it, a moderator says "there is no problem". That's because this game simply don't works with any kind of AA and you are ok with that?

Those are my proofs with ultra quality, switching between AA modes.

AA OFF
AA_OFF.jpg
AA FXAA
AA_FXAA.jpg
AA MLAAX2
AA_MLAAX2.jpg
AA MLAAX4
AA_MLAAX4.jpg
AA SMAA
AA_SMAA.jpg

If you do an effort you will see some kind of difference but.. is that an acceptable anti aliasing?
I see sawtooths everywhere I look. How can you say there is no problem there? Are you blind?
 
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