jolle
05-03-05, 07:25 PM
Was thinking a bit about it, a while ago I read Sweeney mentioning scepcism about MSAA for the future, seeing how it doesnt work on the internal aliasing inside textures..
And it is true, it struck the most with Riddick, mad crawling all over the place with all the bumpmapping (or normal maps).
Now we se more use of it, aswell as more extreme surface emulating methods such as Virtual Displacement, parallax and offset mapping.
"Virtually" creating heights and depths they create "fake" edges that arent polygonal and wont be AAed with MSAA.
So, has there been any news on the AA front?
I wouldnt mind if SSAA came back, sure it is heavy since it renders the entire image (2x2 SSAA @ 800x600 = 1600x1200 right?) larger and downsamples it.
But it does affect the entire image, and not just polygonal edges.
I also remember when I first ran "Dawn techdemo" on my ol 9700Pro (with that wrapper) and what a huge difference it made when I turned on 6x AA.
The more "real", the better graphics gets, the greater difference Aliasing makes, like if you were watching "Shrek" and then saw a version that wasnt rendered with SSAA.
would be all jaggie and horrible, while it doesnt make THAT much difference on Quake1.. in a overall impact of the graphics..
I guess another solution would be MSAA that can detect alpha channel in transparent textures, aswell as the edges in "surface emulating" textures, would be faster atleast, if it can be done..
Saw some tool that would do alpha channel checks for AA on ATi cards, early beta stuff and I havent tried it myself..
The "easy" way would be to just require people to get larger screens and play @ 1600x1200 or higher where the aliasing is less apparant I guess, but since its still quite a "buzz" around AA I would expect there is alot of marketing value in having good AA solutions with your products these days..
Whats your thoughts about it?
Does anyone have any news of word on what the next gen hardware might bring? if they bring anything new in terms of AA at all..
I would atleast expect FP16 Framebuffer that supports AA, since HDR is moving in bigtime..
And it is true, it struck the most with Riddick, mad crawling all over the place with all the bumpmapping (or normal maps).
Now we se more use of it, aswell as more extreme surface emulating methods such as Virtual Displacement, parallax and offset mapping.
"Virtually" creating heights and depths they create "fake" edges that arent polygonal and wont be AAed with MSAA.
So, has there been any news on the AA front?
I wouldnt mind if SSAA came back, sure it is heavy since it renders the entire image (2x2 SSAA @ 800x600 = 1600x1200 right?) larger and downsamples it.
But it does affect the entire image, and not just polygonal edges.
I also remember when I first ran "Dawn techdemo" on my ol 9700Pro (with that wrapper) and what a huge difference it made when I turned on 6x AA.
The more "real", the better graphics gets, the greater difference Aliasing makes, like if you were watching "Shrek" and then saw a version that wasnt rendered with SSAA.
would be all jaggie and horrible, while it doesnt make THAT much difference on Quake1.. in a overall impact of the graphics..
I guess another solution would be MSAA that can detect alpha channel in transparent textures, aswell as the edges in "surface emulating" textures, would be faster atleast, if it can be done..
Saw some tool that would do alpha channel checks for AA on ATi cards, early beta stuff and I havent tried it myself..
The "easy" way would be to just require people to get larger screens and play @ 1600x1200 or higher where the aliasing is less apparant I guess, but since its still quite a "buzz" around AA I would expect there is alot of marketing value in having good AA solutions with your products these days..
Whats your thoughts about it?
Does anyone have any news of word on what the next gen hardware might bring? if they bring anything new in terms of AA at all..
I would atleast expect FP16 Framebuffer that supports AA, since HDR is moving in bigtime..