The 3D games we play and love are all made up of thousands, if not millions, of colored straight lines, which inevitably will look jagged in our screens if not for smoothing anti-aliasing techniques. Let us explain in this new deep dive.
https://www.techspot.com/article/2219-how-to-3d-rendering-anti-aliasing/
Thanks for the detailed review of anti-aliasing. But it feels like this subject has been re-iterated on TechSpot countless times. Or maybe I have been a TechSpot user for too long
Matrox's FAA was an interesting idea - starts similar to MSAA, in that for each primitive being rendered, each pixel is run through a depth test to determine which ones lie on the edges of the primitive. Those pixels are written to a separate buffer in memory (aka the fragment buffer), whereas all of the rest are passed along the pipeline to the final frame buffer. The fragment buffer is then sampled and blended, by a dedicated ASIC in the chip, with the results then blended with the frame buffer. Nice in principle, but the need for separate hardware (and the overall lack of performance of the Parhelia) meant few developers would take the time needed to implement some that only a tiny minority of the game's user base could support.
Depending on what era of ATi/AMD's AA techniques one is looking at, there is some science behind it. ATi experimented a lot with using a variety of sampling patterns (mostly stochastic in nature, and with lots of sampling points), for both SSAA and MSAA, to improve the overall quality of the blending; Nvidia typically stuck with ordered and rotated grids, and relatively few samples.
Depending on the game I sometimes prefer the jaggies so turn off AA in all its forms. Then again I had no problem gaming on 8 bit machines in my youth so mayhap I'm more forgiving than those who need perfect graphics to enjoy a game.You know you're getting old when the before and after images look identical to you
No its not.
For good reason: most of those just aren't used these days. Quincunx and CSAA are old modified versions of MSAA from Nvidia - the former used a 2x sampling pattern but blended the results from neighboring pixel's samples too; low cost but poor visual result. CSAA included a sampling pattern for the primitive coverage of a sub-pixel and use those results in the blending algorithm. TrAA is another one of Nvidia's old systems, that used MSAA for all non-transparent primitives, and SSAA for transparent ones. Nvidia now recommends that developers use a variant of TAA or DLSS, if there's hardware support.
You know you're getting old when the before and after images look identical to you
A few years ago, I played Jedi Knight (still play it every now and then) and I noticed the game was almost jaggie free but a little bit blurry. I figured I had enabled FXAA or something, after I went back to desktop and noticed everything was a little bit blurry. I realized "ok I need glasses"
A few years ago, I played Jedi Knight (still play it every now and then) and I noticed the game was almost jaggie free but a little bit blurry. I figured I had enabled FXAA or something, after I went back to desktop and noticed everything was a little bit blurry. I realized "ok I need glasses"
