Anti-aliasing has been bad since launch.
Maybe he lost hope that it'll ever be fixed.
Anti-Aliasing in a Nutshell - Odyssey
- Thread starter Koben
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Anti-aliasing has been bad since launch.
Maybe he lost hope that it'll ever be fixed.
And not likley to be fixed before dinner...
I think they will wait for FMF/FGF to be ready before moving on.
As witnessed by the thread, antialiasing is something different for different players.
Just like during Horizons introduction things take time and yelling at the bread won't bake it faster. =)
As witnessed by the thread, antialiasing is something different for different players.
Just like during Horizons introduction things take time and yelling at the bread won't bake it faster. =)
This wins the most painful necro for 2024!
Incorrect.
It can't be bad if it doesn't exist.
Just like raxxla, it's in the game and fdev knows where it is..
It just needs to be found by the community
I don't know if the community will find this Anti-aliasing thing, it's been a long while now. Even on my humble hardware (4GB GPU) i can mostly get it to look "not too jaggy", but that last bit of smoothness is impossible to crack, so i put up with it and focus on all the actual incredible graphics around the game galaxy in general. All the photo threads show how great the game can look 
Could they add TAA (Temporal Anti-Aliasing) or TSAA (Temporal Super Anti-Aliasing)? TAA softens the image, removes the jagged edges, but it also blurs details of the image quality a bit. This is more noticable at lower resolutions. However, the framerate with TAA stays high compared to other methods. Higher framerate (60 - 120 FPS) shows less image artefacts, ghosted frames and errors.
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I've mentioned elsewhere why I don't think this is currently practical for ED.
The version of Cobra that ED uses evidently doesn't expose enough, or precise enough, motion vector information to allow decent quality TAA work. If it did, we'd have TAA, FSR2, and probably DLSS (which are all essentially different implementations of TAA).
Frontier does have newer iterations of Cobra that do support these features. Maybe if they sell enough ships they'll decide to spend some of that on porting the game to a newer version of the engine and we can have these things...if they think better AA will sell more ships.
Well that's better than nothing. Because now the game looks much worse without anti-alaising. There's new screenshots and videos on YouTube of ED without anti-aliasing and it looks really bad. The poor anti-aliasing makes ED appear much older and outdated.
They'd have to upgrade this aspect of the game at least. Better graphics quality is more appealing to gamers. The ships, cosmetics, livery would be more visually appealing to buy.
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ED has always had post-process AA options, which were 'good enough' until Odyssey came along and added tons of high contrast specular highlights that are very difficult to anti-alias. Frontier has no easy solution here; they can redo half the content in the game to avoid the kinds of surfaces and edges that current AA methods have problems with, or they port the entire thing over to a new iteration of the engine and maybe improve things with some form of aggressive TAA. They'd probably want to do both, because even with good motion vectors, getting TAA to handle this level of contrast without smearing everything into oblivious is not easy.
And yes, pretty much any game will look like crap if anti-aliasing is completely disabled.
I think the AA problems are one of the reasons the Python MkII is shaped the way it is. Smooth curves and lower contrast edges are much easier to anti-alias. There are still issues around the radiator vents and vertical stabilizers, but it would be much worse with a more angular design.
Lots of games have high contrast levels. The jagged edges issue was solved in those games years ago. Meanwhile, ED has not been updated to modern anti-aliasing standards yet.
Porting ED to a newer Cobra version would be worth it. Then they could implement multi-star lighting such as from 2 stars in a system. Maybe add ray tracing, path tracing, because the colors are cartoony now.
The current in-game anti-aliasing options in ED don't look good either. That's why so many YouTube videos about ED have very noticeable jagged edges which makes the graphics 20x worse.
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Worth it to the Frontier bean counters?
The antialiasing solutions in ED have always been bad. In Odyssey the aliasing is outright terrible. However, the fix is not going to be an easy one (else it would have been done already), and most players seem fully content looking at jaggies.
Yes, because good graphics should increase sales of cosmetics (livery), ships etc. More people would play ED because it would be more visually appealing.
Very many players have complained about the terrible aliasing in Odyssey. This is one of many threads about the issue. There's countless comments on videos about the terrible aliasing.
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We should try opening this thread again in 2035..
Content is a very strong word, I think most of us tolerate it because there are no real alternatives.
I'm continuing to put off Odyssey content because of it....
I wouldn't say it like that. I for sure would love to see Elite on a newer version of Cobra if that brought Multi-Star light, raytracing possibilities and DLSS3, and ship interiors, and gas giants, and, and, and... We wait and at some point, as is usually the case, the issue/feature becomes the priority and it gets worked on. If the resources aren't there for it at this point then negatively quarter backing Frontier Dev at every turn isn't going to make them magically appear, and more likely hamper the situation rather than help. As much as I hate the fact that marketing and managed PR perception of products can create a Thargoid Titan sized thick veil of success and vitality that conceals empty broken promises and money squandering (looking at you CIG), the fact is that it works.. (again, looking at you CIG), and the opposite of that also works.
I am one of those very many and have have posted in most of the threads you are referring to. However, very many is not always, or even often, synonymous with most.
Look at the first several pages of this thread, and many of the others. There are people who cannot see blatant aliasing, claim to not be experiencing the problem it, or completely misattribute the phenomena being pointed out it. And the people on this forum, posting in these threads, are far more likely to see and correctly identify the issue, than the mean. I still don't think most of the player base is even aware there is an issue.
The problems with shadows are far more blatant, have been blatant far longer, and improvements here have been few and far between. It's low priority because most players are mostly indifferent. I see them and I was annoyed by them enough to spend hundred of hours teaching myself how cascaded shadow maps work, from scratch, to try to fix them (only to have Odyssey's shortcuts undo most of my progress)...but most people will never notice or care. Only the most blatant problems draw enough attention to be addressed promptly and sometimes not even then.
I think those of us who have a problem with the level of aliasing in this game, and there are many, tolerate it because there are no alternatives.
I think the overwhelming bulk of the player base, who do not visit the forums, or reddit, or know much of anything at any technical level, may be vaguely aware that there is something off with the game's graphics, but they look past it and generally do not care. They are probably entirely content with the way the game looks with regard to aliasing.
We've been waiting the entirety of Odyssey's existence for solutions to issues that Frontier has said they were prioritizing. People are rightly annoyed at the lack of progress.
New Launcher, Issue Tracker Updates and more
Greetings Commanders. Thought it might be nice to hop in this afternoon and do a little information roundup for those who may have missed some key information highlights from yesterday's livestream. We absolutely appreciate that not everyone here watches the streams of course, so let's make...
Frontier announced they were working on an antialiasing solution three years ago, which was tentatively slated for release two years ago, then, last year, closed one of the most upvoted issues on the issue tracker (with nineteen pages of comments and confirmations), without doing anything identifiable to address it.
Same goes for Odyssey's performance issues, which was the third issue in that list. Performance has improved and some of the fixes were even good ones, but there were also fixes that did essentially nothing other than degrade visuals, and no fix that I am aware of has yet addressed the most fundamental issues pointed out back in the Odyssey Alpha. They got the low hanging fruit, broke a few things in the process, and then moved on. That's still much better than how aliasing has been treated thus far.
Lack of communication is still a problem. There is no transparency. All we are left with is the self-evident and speculative extrapolation from the few facts available. As a former optimist, some of the more optimistic interpretations of Frontier's ability, values, doctrine, intent, and priorities strike me as increasingly delusional.
Probably most players who are familiar with modern video game graphics recognize that ED's anti-aliasing is bad. It can be made less obvious via super sampling though.
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.
A poll about anti-aliasing in the ED subreddit would most likely show that a far majority thinks its bad.
For example this screenshot by Syst3mat1c3rr0r was made on 5 June 2024:
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100% this, and the same goes for the awful shadows!