Anti-Aliasing in a Nutshell - Odyssey

[Morbad]

Probably most players who are familiar with modern video game graphics recognize that ED's anti-aliasing is bad.

I don't think the average video game consumer knows what anti-aliasing is and suspect that even if it were explained to them in detail, with irrefutable examples cited, most still wouldn't care very much.

A poll about anti-aliasing in the ED subreddit would most likely show that a far majority thinks its bad.

Not in dispute.

However, the ED subreddit is likely not representative of the player/customer base as a whole. Even if it were almost any poll about anti-aliasing would be implicitly biased toward those who know what it is and have a problem with the current implementation.

If anti-aliasing was not important then they wouldn't have fixed it for Planet Zoo and Jurassic World Evolution which are also powered by the Cobra Engine.

Different games almost certainly built on a different (and newer) branch of Cobra. Putting good AA in Planet Zoo and JWE was likely much, much, easier than fixing the AA in ED will be.

TAA has been the standard for the last ten years and TAA makes integration off all those temporal derivatives (DLSS/DLAA, FSR 2.x+, XeSS, etc) trivial. The version of Cobra ED is based on just missed this boat. Development was well underway in 2012, if not earlier, and neither Horizons, Beyond, nor Odyssey seem to have been entirely new engines, nor branches as advanced as what were used in games that started development later. No doubt if development of ED started in, say, 2015 or 2016 it would always have had significantly better AA.

Anti-aliasing is hugely important and I've never impled otherwise. However, it's evidently not important enough to devote the resources required to fix it, for all the reasons I've pointed out here and elsewhere.

Porting the game over to a newer version of Cobra is not going to be easy, otherwise it would have been done by now, as it would fix a huge number of issues, not just AA. Look at all the problems they've had with, and aspirations they've had for, graphics since Beyond and all the effort that has been spent on reworking them...all of that could likely have been solved by porting the game over to a branch of Cobra that already has these features, but they didn't do it. It's either beyond the practical technical capabilities of the Elite: Dangerous team, or they do not believe it will result in a favorable return on the investment required.

The question isn't how many people think jaggies in Odyssey are relatively bad, it's how many people will refrain from buying Arx because they are relatively bad. I think this has to be a pretty small figure for nothing meaningful to have been done in three years.

 

[Cosmo]

The question isn't how many people think jaggies in Odyssey are relatively bad, it's how many people will refrain from buying Arx because they are relatively bad. I think this has to be a pretty small figure for nothing meaningful to have been done in three years.

ED is pretty if you use settings such as supersampling which reduces performance and jagged edges. Overall, ED lags behind current gen graphics standards. Some Unreal Engine 5 powered games are close to photorealism due to upscaling, nanite-tessellation, path tracing etc. The colors / lighting in the environments of ED look cartoony. Some old assets have too low polygon count. This could be improve with e.g. ray-tracing, path-tracing, better anti-aliasing and a higher level of detail across the board.

ED's dated graphics have resulted in reduced sales and less active players, because many people want higher immersion (including ship interiors) with realistic graphical fidelity. There is a clear discrepancy of annual revenue between ED and other space games which acquired larger market shares. What keeps ED afloat is the unique gameplay features (1:1 galaxy scale, unrivalled freedom to explore and do careers, realistic constellations, star systems, cool factions, lore, great sound and music, good gameplay and ship controls except the grind and basic tutorials). So ED does a lot (very) well, yet the graphics are not up to scratch.

The cancellation of console development is good, because the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One have very outdated hardware. A PC only version means Fdev can implement graphic upgrades and settings that are possible on high-end gaming PCs.

So it is worth upgrading ED to a newer Cobra version, because this helps to keep ED competitive for another 5-10 years. The engine upgrade could coincide with a DLC that adds new planet types with thicker, Earth-like atmospheres, oceans, weather effects, forests.

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

AA downgrades the quality, blurs countours and costs performance. I rather have jagged edges than smeary countours. That is my overall experience with AA. It rarely improves the presentation.

 

[Northpin]

ED's dated graphics have resulted in reduced sales and less active players,

I seriously doubt that.
IMO ED graphics are quite nice even by today' standards (even tho the AA is quite bad)

Reduced sales and less active players are due to other factors (a kinda too big scope, steep learning curve, lack of handholding and a general direction, sandbox - to list just few, in an absolutely random order - even tho some of these factors is what makes ED THE GAME for me)

And ship interiors... come on - ED was at its peak way before it had even legs

 

[Planewalker]

AA downgrades the quality, blurs countours and costs performance. I rather have jagged edges than smeary countours. That is my overall experience with AA. It rarely improves the presentation.

A well implemented AA solution should not impact performance at all, or minimally at worst.

That being said i am also one who does not care much about anti-aliasing; i've a friend who "can't play" elite due to aliasing.
-all it goes to show is that people care about different things and some people don't even understand AA. xD

 

[Morbad]

AA downgrades the quality, blurs countours and costs performance. I rather have jagged edges than smeary countours. That is my overall experience with AA. It rarely improves the presentation.

Most modern (past decade or so) games don't even allow you to disable AA, at least not without jumping through hoops.

IMO ED graphics are quite nice even by today' standards (even tho the AA is quite bad)

I have fewer complaints about the game's graphics quality than I do with most other aspects of it.

Still, the AA, shadow system, geometry LODs, and relative performance are frequently obtrusive.

A well implemented AA solution should not impact performance at all, or minimally at worst.

There is always some overhead. It can be hard to get comparisons because, as noted, many games don't allow one to completely turn off AA.

ED does, but it's base AA mechanisms are just post-process shaders, which are pretty light on modern hardware.

 

[Pigletslastand]

Can I just highlight a potential fix for the AA that is experienced by a lot of people here. I thought about creating a whole new thread but then realised it's been touched on before by many a person.

The other day I got so sick of seeing my game looking like poo, I eventually tried to do some more digging over the issue and found a post here on the forums about turning the game from windowed -borderless to fullscreen and then back again..

WELL BLOW ME DOWN IF IT DIDN'T ACTUALLY FIX IT!!

All my orbit lines - suddenly perfect! no more dashed and dotted lines in supercruise - FIXED
All the blurry text in the menus that had been screwing with my eyes for ages - FIXED
All the detail in the game, so much sharper and clearer than before - FIXED

Haven't had any AA issues since.. Hope this helps some people. And FDEV if you're listening maybe you could look into this too as a potential cause of many of your woes.

 

[Cosmo]

I seriously doubt that.
IMO ED graphics are quite nice even by today' standards (even tho the AA is quite bad)

It does frequently come up as a reason why they play the other game(s) that need no mention.

ED's lighting makes the colors quite cartoony. Ray tracing or path tracing could improve the colors and image quality. Path tracing creates much more realistic visuals, reflections with sharper details by tracing the lights for better rendering. Ray tracing is common for current-gen games and path-tracing will become the new standard. Ray and path tracing cost more computational power, but high end GPUs are powerful enough to do this with 30+ FPS.

Can I just highlight a potential fix for the AA that is experienced by a lot of people here. I thought about creating a whole new thread but then realised it's been touched on before by many a person.

The other day I got so sick of seeing my game looking like poo, I eventually tried to do some more digging over the issue and found a post here on the forums about turning the game from windowed -borderless to fullscreen and then back again..

WELL BLOW ME DOWN IF IT DIDN'T ACTUALLY FIX IT!!

All my orbit lines - suddenly perfect! no more dashed and dotted lines in supercruise - FIXED
All the blurry text in the menus that had been screwing with my eyes for ages - FIXED
All the detail in the game, so much sharper and clearer than before - FIXED

Haven't had any AA issues since.. Hope this helps some people. And FDEV if you're listening maybe you could look into this too as a potential cause of many of your woes.

Can you share before / after screenshots? Do you have to do this every time after starting the game? Which post is that? What are your graphics settings and PC specs?

 

[Morbad]

Can I just highlight a potential fix for the AA that is experienced by a lot of people here. I thought about creating a whole new thread but then realised it's been touched on before by many a person.

The other day I got so sick of seeing my game looking like poo, I eventually tried to do some more digging over the issue and found a post here on the forums about turning the game from windowed -borderless to fullscreen and then back again..

WELL BLOW ME DOWN IF IT DIDN'T ACTUALLY FIX IT!!

All my orbit lines - suddenly perfect! no more dashed and dotted lines in supercruise - FIXED
All the blurry text in the menus that had been screwing with my eyes for ages - FIXED
All the detail in the game, so much sharper and clearer than before - FIXED

Haven't had any AA issues since.. Hope this helps some people. And FDEV if you're listening maybe you could look into this too as a potential cause of many of your woes.

This did nothing on my systems and I'm not even sure how it could be producing the results you describe. Best guess is that you were unwittingly running the game at a non-native resolution and switching render modes also switched the game to the full native res of your display.

Also curious to see some screenshots.

 

[Pigletslastand]

It does frequently come up as a reason why they play the other game(s) that need no mention.

ED's lighting makes the colors quite cartoony. Ray tracing or path tracing could improve the colors and image quality. Path tracing creates much more realistic visuals, reflections with sharper details by tracing the lights for better rendering. Ray tracing is common for current-gen games and path-tracing will become the new standard. Ray and path tracing cost more computational power, but high end GPUs are powerful enough to do this with 30+ FPS.



Can you share before / after screenshots? Do you have to do this every time after starting the game? Which post is that? What are your graphics settings and PC specs?

ok so I don't have any before screenshots I'm afraid. But here is the afters.. showing the cleaned up orbit lines and the non blurry text in menus. It also is no longer blurry in the game menus outside of the game such as the loading screens that used to be horrid. I don't have to do this everytime as now it seems to be permanently fixed.
Graphics are set to everything Ultra and 1.0 on the upscaling as I don't need it.
Specs are an rx 7800xt and 5800x processor. More than enough.
Will go back and find the other post in a bit and edit in here later. Would like to give the other poster his due as he absolutely made the game 10 times better for me!!

Here it is:

Blurry ship console text FIXED

I was suffering from very blurry text on all the ship consoles (nav, chat, etc). This was fixed when I went into window mode, and then back to fullscreen mode. Not sure what was happening, but it corrected it. The extreme darkness and low fps are still issues, but at least I can play without...

forums.frontier.co.uk

 

[Pigletslastand]

This did nothing on my systems and I'm not even sure how it could be producing the results you describe. Best guess is that you were unwittingly running the game at a non-native resolution and switching render modes also switched the game to the full native res of your display.

Also curious to see some screenshots.

Nope I ran the game in 1080p on my 1080p monitor all the time I used that and it was still blurry. I also ran it at 4k on my 4k monitor and while a tiny bit less blurry. The text was still a garbled mess and the orbit lines were still dashed. What really turned me onto the idea that something was seriously wrong was firing up the xbox version of the game and realising how much cleaner everything was.

Switching the game from borderless windowed to fullscreen and then back to borderless windowed fixed it for me.

But you're right, it does sound like the game is choosing a lower resolution and then attempting to upscale it to fit a screen perhaps and then it gets reset to it's proper resolution when you adjust to fullscreen. This is my best guess. Though it still doesn't explain why manually choosing the resolution did nothing to improve things.

Either way I'm bloomin delighted!!!!

 

[Morbad]

Nope I ran the game in 1080p on my 1080p monitor all the time I used that and it was still blurry. I also ran it at 4k on my 4k monitor and while a tiny bit less blurry. The text was still a garbled mess and the orbit lines were still dashed. What really turned me onto the idea that something was seriously wrong was firing up the xbox version of the game and realising how much cleaner everything was.

I'm still at a loss as to what would have been causing the issues you mention.

The images you posted are what pretty much everyone else is seeing, poor specular aliasing and all. The jagged specular highlights, especially on the canopy support immediately above the message window, and similar, though lesser, issues on most of the dashboard geometry are problem being discussed in most of these threads.

Non-Odyssey content generally looks good enough; not because the AA is particularly good, but because there are so few assets that clearly reveal it's glaring weaknesses when it comes to high contrast edges. Odyssey content is different. Odyssey specific assets make extremely heavy use of these highlights. None of the anti-aliasing methods built into the game, and nearly no third party alternatives, can really clean up these kinds of jaggies without unacceptable trade-offs.

Multiple levels of scaling and filtering, such as combining the in-game super/subsampling with (DL)DSR/VSR can help, but add blur and don't fully address the issue. Same goes with more advanced post-process shader injectors. I can pretty much eliminate the jaggies with extremely aggressive TAA shaders (which are fundamentally inferior to most integrated TAA solutions for titles that expose accurate motion vectors natively), but the performance hit is large, and scenes are blurred, both spatially and temporally, to such an extreme degree that the net effect is worse than leaving things alone.

Without adding unacceptable blur, raw resolution or supersampling, are the only options and the performance hit of this is too high. I normally run 3840*2160 on a display with that native resolution, with 1.333333x supersampling, and the aliasing is still horrible on pretty much all on foot content near or within human structures. 5108*2888 (the best my OCed RTX 4090 can manage before dipping below my target FPS floor in worst-case surface content) is less than half the resolution (and about a fifth of the pixels per frame) I need to reduce aliasing to levels I find to be unobtrusive.

 

[Pigletslastand]

I'm still at a loss as to what would have been causing the issues you mention.

The images you posted are what pretty much everyone else is seeing, poor specular aliasing and all. The jagged specular highlights, especially on the canopy support immediately above the message window, and similar, though lesser, issues on most of the dashboard geometry are problem being discussed in most of these threads.

Non-Odyssey content generally looks good enough; not because the AA is particularly good, but because there are so few assets that clearly reveal it's glaring weaknesses when it comes to high contrast edges. Odyssey content is different. Odyssey specific assets make extremely heavy use of these highlights. None of the anti-aliasing methods built into the game, and nearly no third party alternatives, can really clean up these kinds of jaggies without unacceptable trade-offs.

Multiple levels of scaling and filtering, such as combining the in-game super/subsampling with (DL)DSR/VSR can help, but add blur and don't fully address the issue. Same goes with more advanced post-process shader injectors. I can pretty much eliminate the jaggies with extremely aggressive TAA shaders (which are fundamentally inferior to most integrated TAA solutions for titles that expose accurate motion vectors natively), but the performance hit is large, and scenes are blurred, both spatially and temporally, to such an extreme degree that the net effect is worse than leaving things alone.

Without adding unacceptable blur, raw resolution or supersampling, are the only options and the performance hit of this is too high. I normally run 3840*2160 on a display with that native resolution, with 1.333333x supersampling, and the aliasing is still horrible on pretty much all on foot content near or within human structures. 5108*2888 (the best my OCed RTX 4090 can manage before dipping below my target FPS floor in worst-case surface content) is less than half the resolution (and about a fifth of the pixels per frame) I need to reduce aliasing to levels I find to be unobtrusive.

I really wish you had seen what it looked like before!!! It was horrendous. All the text was blurry in the menus and I had tried every combination of supersampling along with AA techniques in the options of the game.

The pics I have posted are of the FIXED quality. You may still have a problem with them but they are spectacularly improved from what they were before. I am assuming you are used to seeing the many pics of the jagged orbit lines that look like someone has created them out of dashes rather than a continuous thin line? Well yeah, that and more. Sadly I do not have pics from when it was worse initially.

You must remember that this is a jpeg pic of a screenshot. The forums don't accept the bitmap image that Elite naturally screenshots too and if I were to screengrab properly the file is too large to upload here. So you are likely noticing the loss of quality from how the game is actually rendered.

 

[Morbad]

The pics I have posted are of the FIXED quality.

I gathered that.

So you are likely noticing the loss of quality from how the game is actually rendered.

I'm not. These aliasing artifacts (your image) are present in everyone's game:

Those aren't compression artifacts, those are areas where the contrast is too high for the game's SMAA or FXAA to adequately smooth. It's a minor issue in ship cockpits and space content, but much more serious in on-foot or surface settlement content.

These are lossless .png images that are exactly what I see (when playing in SDR) in game at 4k with 1.5x supersampling (going to want to open them in their own tabs and zoom to 100%):

The dramatically higher resolution and the scaling pass help a lot, but the same areas are still aliased and all high contrast edges/lines still shimmer in motion. And that's in non-Odyssey 4.0 content. In on-foot Odyssey content, there are far more of these edges and even at 6k internal resolution, they are impossible for me not to notice.

Here is a video, at the highest quality (captured with AV1 CQ 15, then transcoded with h.265 NVENC 10-bit, CQ 16, slowest preset to reduce file size and allow playback without hardware AV1 decode) I can manage that will still play on most systems without overloading them, that shows how pervasive aliasing is even at 4k+1.5xSS+FXAA in Odyssey content, when the game is working normally:

Upload files for free - 2024-06-12 13-08-23.mp4 - ufile.io

Download 2024-06-12 13-08-23.mp4 for free from ufile.io instantly, no signup required and no popup ads

ufile.io

None of that shimmer is from encoding artifacts. That's the game.

Anyway, all this goes to show that aliasing that is highly problematic for @Cosmo, myself, and most of those vocal about aliasing in threads like this may be entirely acceptable to, or even go unnoticed by, others. This is why I don't think a fix is forthcoming.

 

[V'larr]

I really wish you had seen what it looked like before!!! It was horrendous. All the text was blurry in the menus and I had tried every combination of supersampling along with AA techniques in the options of the game.

The pics I have posted are of the FIXED quality. You may still have a problem with them but they are spectacularly improved from what they were before. I am assuming you are used to seeing the many pics of the jagged orbit lines that look like someone has created them out of dashes rather than a continuous thin line? Well yeah, that and more. Sadly I do not have pics from when it was worse initially.

You must remember that this is a jpeg pic of a screenshot. The forums don't accept the bitmap image that Elite naturally screenshots too and if I were to screengrab properly the file is too large to upload here. So you are likely noticing the loss of quality from how the game is actually rendered.

sounds like you just had FSR (undersampling) enabled (which it might be by default, if memory serves) and switching the modes disabled that. Changing from windowed to fullscreen and back certainly doesn't address the glaring jaggies & shimmering in the combat tutorial.

 

[Rat Catcher]

ED's dated graphics have resulted in reduced sales and less active players

Do you have hard evidence to support such a bold statement?

It does frequently come up as a reason why they play the other game(s) that need no mention.

I guess they are all playing NMS then...

 

[Jack Winter]

Anyway, all this goes to show that aliasing that is highly problematic for @Cosmo, myself, and most of those vocal about aliasing in threads like this may be entirely acceptable to, or even go unnoticed by, others. This is why I don't think a fix is forthcoming.

I definitely dislike the spatial/temporal/specular aliasing that I see even when rendering to 5760x3240 and letting Nvidia's 2.5X DLDSR convert it to 4k for output on an 4k OLED. But honestly I think the crazy shadows annoy me even more. The only solution I've found so far is to just ignore it, otherwise I'd have to stop playing the game..

But I also fall in the camp that prefer crisp and high contrast compared to a more blurred image.

 

[Morbad]

But I also fall in the camp that prefer crisp and high contrast compared to a more blurred image.

Modern AA solutions don't require much in the way of trade-offs here. Good TAA has minimal motion blur, mostly targets edges, and is followed by a sharpening pass that produces crisp images with minimal aliasing. This is what makes Odyssey's solutions so frustrating...we've seen how anti-aliasing can be done better.

 

[Pigletslastand]

sounds like you just had FSR (undersampling) enabled (which it might be by default, if memory serves) and switching the modes disabled that. Changing from windowed to fullscreen and back certainly doesn't address the glaring jaggies & shimmering in the combat tutorial.

No I've always had it on Fidelity CAS and literally no other settings were changed other than the windowed - fullscreen - windowed options. It was purely that that changed my graphics for me. Don't know what to tell you other than it worked for me and a few others.

This is clearly not the same issues as Morbad's and others though. Mine was to do with dashed orbit lines and very very blurry text in menus and panels and an overall improvement in visuals all round.

 

[Cosmo]

Here's a related thread on steam: Really bad aliasing...

This is clearly not the same issues as Morbad's and others though. Mine was to do with dashed orbit lines and very very blurry text in menus and panels and an overall improvement in visuals all round.

That's probably a graphics bug.