AAA – Analytical Anti-Aliasing

There're already games fully using SDF rendering, such as Dreams [0]. It even made a SIGGRAPH talk [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreams_(video_game)

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9KNtnCZDMI

Oh there are lots more axes than just the 3 aliasing, sharpness, and locality ones. Those are the main tradeoffs for a pixel sampling or convolution filter choice, when downscaling an image, say between nearest neighbor vs bilinear vs Mitchell (bicubic). But the antialiasing methods in this article have many tradeoffs that aren’t on the aliasing-sharpness-locality spectrum. Other issues with real time AA methods include bias, correctness, noise, quality, temporal effects, compositing/blending issues, etc. And the topic gets much wider when we start talking about DLSS, we don’t even have established terminology for the many different kinds of tradeoffs neural networks give us. Anyway just noting that the main highlights of discussion in the article, which are MSAA and AAA (and references to TAA and others), don’t fit in the aliasing-sharpness-locality space. MSAA’s tradeoffs include it only running on geometry & texture edges, and its ‘wrong order’ samples or ‘double edges’ noted in the article. TAA has a temporal aspect and is most known for ghosting. AAA as described here doesn’t necessarily blend correctly and in general it can’t handle multiple arbitrary sub-pixel events, it really only works well if there’s one edge crossing a pixel.

Not a parent but I still agree that short games are great, 2-3 hours are great (or even a bit less, there is a reason for the standard 90 minute movie). 4-5 hours can be nice too ("chapter" divisions are helpful). Games are inexpensive and plentiful these days so a nice short game is great for everyone not just people with little time for playing games. (I guess I should say the flip side is that time spent with characters is one of the interesting things that games can use to good effect and bonus objectives that encourage you to explore details of the world can be nice too depending on the type of game and are easily skipped).

The best game settings have a scene to illustrate the effect of choices along with estimated(?) performance. Unfortunately I haven't seen that too often (mostly Falcom games that PH3 worked on). I agree that stating the impact on performance is quite helpful when settings need to be lowered. Usually they are ordered "best performance" to "nicest looking" so I set the last one and only fiddle with them if necessary (a smooth 12fps works great for me so luckily that isn't often).

DLSS even in Balanced mode is annoying when the camera laterally moves, I start seeing all kinds of artifacts. Strangely enough I prefer FSR 2.0 even though there’s slightly less overall detail.

I mostly understand your perspective here from a developer point-of-view. I'd like to give you some perspective of /r/FuckTAA and similar views from the gamers' perspective.

What many gamers see in TAA and other anti-aliasing options is higher system requirements and worse image quality. Obviously, this isn't just caused by one factor but it's very noticeable if you compare games now to the games of yesteryear.

Here is a good collection of anti-aliasing methods. https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Glossary:Anti-aliasing_(AA...

Modern graphics are generally less "accurate" in terms of rendering in exchange of way better visual effects like raytracing and better shading. There's a fairly linear progression of rendering quality throughout the history of 3D rendering. Games like Half-Life 2, Halo and the first CoDs had mostly exact forward rendering, the shading was fairly simple but the rendered image did not have spatial or temporal artifacts. Individual pixels could be discerned too. If you increased the resolution, you got a crisp image with crisp UI. These games usually used SSAA, MSAA or CSAA. These methods were very expensive because they effectively rendered at a higher resolution, they could have had double the shading cost. (I know that MSAA only does it for the edges but I'm keeping the explanation fairly simple)

Next, developers started to switch to framebuffer-based methods (FXAA and SMAA). These introduced blur to the edges of objects which was a downgrade in terms of image clarity. However, these methods are fairly fast and the games didn't exhibit motion-based artifacts. The shader is relatively fast and the only real cost is an extra framebuffer in memory - which the game already probably had for other post-processing effects.

Developers also started to use deferred rendering and more buffers in general. This led to an explosive growth of VRAM usage, so for optimisation purposes, they started using the console methods of checkerboard rendering and lower-resolution buffers. A good example of this is GTA V where you can see many dithering artifacts in the distance and a generally blurrier picture. These games still didn't have temporal artifacts - looking around did not generally reduce the image quality.

Graphical demands only got more intense, so developers started to "cheat" with forms of temporal anti-aliasing, which (as in the name) introduce temporal artifacts to the image. The stereotypical poster-child for this is Unreal Engine - it's seriously impressive in many aspects but developers just started to slap TAA on everything instead of optimising their shaders and LoDs. TAA is not really one single method - it can really vary in quality based on how many past frames are used, how artifacts are removed, etc.

A while ago, NVIDIA introduced DLSS and (real-time) Ray Tracing, which changed things quite a lot. With these techniques, not even the final framebuffer is at native resolution, but is instead being upscaled from a lower-resolution framebuffer using ML-based methods. Ray tracing also requires denoising because it's infeasible to raytrace every pixel in native resolution. It works surprisingly well, but there's another reduction in clarity. And of course, since the image is effectively being reconstructed (twice!), the temporal effects are horrible, even moving the cursor around can produce nauseating artifacts on more complex objects.

Currently, the gaming industry is at a stage where the massively better GPUs are not used to progressively enhance games but to cut corners and reduce the rendering quality for everyone. Games even use DLSS for their recommended system requirements now instead of being an optional enhancer for weaker GPUs. Currently, if you don't have a top-end GPU (4080 or 4090, basically), you have to make heavy compromises in the newest games in terms of image quality or use DLSS, even without RT. I predict that in the future, even top-end GPUs like the 5090 or 6090 will have to use DLSS to get playable framerates in 1440p with acceptable graphics, not just in 4K.

There is a reason why quite a few people are pissed off. Obviously, they might not know the exact causes of these problems but it's easy to see a correlation of TAA in game - bad rendering quality and choppy FPS, so they scapegoat that. I can't really blame them, I don't think it's realistic to expect gamers to be intimately familiar with the render pipeline.