Antialiasing in Elite - blinking edges

[Kyokushin]

How is Your experience with altialiasing?

Both on flat screen, and VR, i need to use supersampling to remove 'blinking' from edges.
In all games everything is fine, but in Elite it looks really annoying, especially in VR.

I have Odyssey+ and i am playing on ultra settings with SS 0.5 and HMD 2.0 + Steam Supersampling 200%
On flat screen i am using just 2.0 SS.

This is a bug of that tame or maybe you have some idea for that?

 

[jojon]

That x0.5 SS just blurs the image, which I personally detest, but I do realise some swear by it...

This is all because multisampling types of Antialiasing does not work with deferred rendering, which Elite uses (allows for a bunch of things such as lots of light sources, at relatively low rendering cost); You should have seen the exact same problem in tons of titles built on Unreal Engine 4, by now (EDIT: Those tend to come with extremely thick blur-masquerading-as-AA enbled as default, to hide the jaggies).

This leaves us with post-processing methods, such as SMAA, but those basically just blurs high contrast areas, more-or-less intelligently, rather than better represent sub-pixel detail.

There have long been voices calling for Frontier to add Temporal Antialiasing, which takes data from previous frames into account, but, frankly, that comes with its own set of downsides, adding motion blur and ghosting artefacts, to the spatial blur.

Various new algorithms pop up from time to time -- come and go... Maybe we can get rid of those crawling ants one of these days… I actually find the specular aliasing to be the more egregious one, over that on line edges; The bits where you have something shiny, with an environment map reflecting over a normal map.

 

[Kyokushin]

Can we do something from Nvidia driver level?
There are settings for AA what we can enforce, but never tested that.

 

[jojon]

Can we do something from Nvidia driver level?

I am not even half-well versed in mucking about with that, but I believe in this particular case, the answer is probably no, unless there is a more recent, and much better, post processing algo, that the driver can forcefully substitute, in place of SMAA.

I frankly wonder (no true basis for that wondering, really) if many things people report achieving on driver override level, may not be more placebo, than actual effect… :7

Some have high hopes for the deep learning stuff that NVidia touts with their "Turing" GPU series (the game developer, prior to launch, provides the learning algorithms with tons of pairs of: "this is what it should look like", and "...but this is the best we'll actually render", frames, from just about any scene, angle, and lighting conditions the game can throw at you, and the digested result of this is then used to real-time improve the latter type into something resembling the former, when playing the game), but I remain sceptical -- at the end of the day, it will fill in the blanks with best-guesses, rather than rendering the actual correct detail. :7

 

[Vtskr]

Don't ever use SS < 1 especially with HMD quality and SteamSS. With your settings game engine renders at 250% resolution, which is then up-sampled to 500% (steamss and HMD q) and downsampled back to 100% by compositor. Resulting in blurry image with less details. For best quality use 200% SteamSS with 1SS and 1HMDq

 

[Kyokushin]

Don't ever use SS < 1 especially with HMD quality and SteamSS. With your settings game engine renders at 250% resolution, which is then up-sampled to 500% (steamss and HMD q) and downsampled back to 100% by compositor. Resulting in blurry image with less details. For best quality use 200% SteamSS with 1SS and 1HMDq

I though the same. But i tried settings 0.5 SS and HMD 2.0 and text seems to be more sharp and nothing is blurred.
Try it, i am curious Your opinion after that.

 

[Vtskr]

Thats is because HMD 2.0 is using old steam supersampling scale. So it's 280% of native O+ resolution. Basically you are rendering at 140% of native resolution. Just use 140% steam super-sampling and you get less blurry image with more fps

 

[Kyokushin]

I have set SS to 200% 140% is not enough, 200% is giving much better result than 140%.
Test my settings with SS 0.5 and HMD 2.0

 

[Cmdr Delmonte[VR]]

Will watch this with interest, so far I have ignored the steam settings and just used in the game. SS 1.0 and HMD 1.25 Lots of settings off or Low just
to get a good image a decent frame rate

 

[Vithigar]

This is all because multisampling types of Antialiasing does not work with deferred rendering [snip]
This leaves us with post-processing methods, such as SMAA

MSAA doesn't work correctly with deferred rendering, yes, but there are other options besides post-processing. Full screen super sampling methods (nvidia DSR, AMD VSR, steam VR supersampling, elite supersampling) work just fine with deferred renderers.

 

[jojon]

MSAA doesn't work correctly with deferred rendering, yes, but there are other options besides post-processing. Full screen super sampling methods (nvidia DSR, AMD VSR, steam VR supersampling, elite supersampling) work just fine with deferred renderers.

Well, yes, obviously, and we're all trying to push this as high as out machines can muster (...which isn't very-, if trying to hit desired frame rate targets - especially in VR). :7

...but I thought the point at the moment was trying to find solutions that are less costly than full on SSAA (...none of which can, of course, be all that SS is, but... tradeoffs, tradeoffs…)

I certainly disagree with the, around here, often floated notion of supersampling x2.0, and immediately entirely cancelling that would-be benefit out, with x0.5 game internal supersampling (...or any other ratios of the two), which only results in a softer image, losing all "crispness", as the in-the-end-rendered-at-x1.0 image is unnecessarily resampled, but can accept that to the eyes of some, that slight blur will be taken as an improvement of sorts; To them, their own.

(PS: If you have the VRAM, you might try, once, jacking both in-game SS, and either in-game "HMD Quality" (if a VR user), or any external render target size multiplier, to x2.0, just to see what it looks like -- rather nice, IMHO, but the frame rate tanks, of course, under 16 times normal workload. :7 (Values over 2 is most of the time not very beneficial, because of the resampling algorithm usually limiting sampling ratio/pattern, for speed (some may not); That's when it may help to do the supersampling in two stages)).

 

[Vtskr]

I though the same. But i tried settings 0.5 SS and HMD 2.0 and text seems to be more sharp and nothing is blurred.
Try it, i am curious Your opinion after that.

I tried it, btw. Fonts really do look good, but everything else looks really ty. Am i missing something?

 

[Kyokushin]

I tried it, btw. Fonts really do look good, but everything else looks really poopooty. Am i missing something?

Hmm i focused on fonts. Need to check then