Did you disable it in Horizons too? Because that's about what people expect from it once it's fixed.
Well... First of all: Elite: Dangerous
never had decent antialiasing - not in Odyssey, not in Horizons, not in the base game...
Yes. -I most certainly had antialiasing just as "off" in Horizons as I do in Odyssey. -Post effect AA filters like FXAA and SMAA do not really smooth out a jagged line, nor make it contiguous - they just turn the jaggies into a series of blurry lumps. It looks bad now, and it
always did.
My hypothesis on the difference from Horizons to Odyssey, and the sense that aliasing has become more prevalent, is that, unlike other things in the game, planet surfaces may previously have been rendered (in a separate pass of their own) using a forward rendering pipeline (in which you can use MultiSampling Anti Aliasing type "proper" anti-aliasing). The old terrain (both geometry and texture) also had a "softer" quality to it, and rather diffuse materials, which would produce less stark aliasing to begin with.
With Odyssey, we have more interesting materials on planets, though, with reflections, fresnel, taking effect from more simultaneous light sources, contrasting edges, etc; All probably unified into a common PBR model for all materials in the entire game, and I make the presumption that planets have now, to this end, been brought into the same deferred rendering pipeline as ships and structures were already using, and where MSAA
can not be used, for technical reasons, so a station is no more or less aliased than it was before, but it is now joined in aliasing hell, by planetary surfaces. Also: With the addition of elite feet, things can now be inspected up-close.
(The shiny materials also produce "specular aliasing", which not even MSAA can do anything about - they work on different levels (fragment shaders, and rasterisation, respectively.)
So I play in VR, which is so far rather low resolution (as in
angular resolution - I get something like 15 pixels per degree of field of view in my Valve Index headset. Contrast that against a monitor, which compresses 100° of rendered field of view from the game camera, into a picture that takes up something 30-40° in your real-life field of view (this is 1:1 in VR)).
There was a point in the past, where Valve corporation, who make OpenVR, which is one of the VR runtimes Elite Dangerous works with, updated the texture sampling algorithm used when mapping the game's output to the VR headset screens. It was a higher quality, yet high performance, method, that does produce less aliasing when given higher resolution frames from the game, but in doing so, it lost enough "crispness" to the output, that there was enough of a minor outcry from in particular Elite players, that they decided to reinstate the older version as an option, for those of us who absolutely detest blur.
At the moment I play Odyssey in VR, with
a lot of SteamVR supersampling (equivalent to "HMD Quality" in-game settings), which for my headset results in 4.5kx5k frames per eye (my belly is fairly tolerant to low framerates in VR these days - I get 20-ish fps in space with that high resolution (on a 1080Ti), and less than 10 on a planet - terrible, but not throw-up terrible), and even that is not enough supersampling to rid me of aliasing -- vertical lines still produce crawling ants that makes it look like it's raining, if I walk very slowly in an interior environment with a lot of them. (Supersampling integrates a lot of good-looking detail into the output, mind you, which no more "specialised" AA can do.)
(I have previously experimented (unplayable) with a lot of
both: "HMD Quality" (maxed out),
and the game's own "Supersampling" (whose downsampling occurs
before the frame is given over to the VR runtimes) on top, and
that has managed to begin to get me into "no aliasing" territory -- I don't have the VRAM to try that with Odyssey.
)
