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AAA – Analytical Anti-Aliasing

blog.frost.kiwi

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Re: AAA – Analytical Anti-Aliasing

#32
post #25

Graphics programming analysis done using examples written in WebGL–genius. Hypertext that takes full advantage of the medium. This reminds me of something I'd see on https://pudding.cool/ , but it goes far more in depth than anything there. Absolutely fantastic article. I've been using MSAAx4 in my rendering engine for some time and only recently have considered switching to a FXAA / TAA implementation. I'm actually…

I really dislike TAA, especially on lower framerates. There's too much ghosting. I often switch it to a slower algorithm just so I don't get ghosting.

It’s very strange. I had a vivid dream, only about 5 hours ago, where I was debating the drawbacks of TAA with some scientists in a lab (likely because Half Life has been in the news this week). I think I dream about rendering algorithms once every several years.

And now today there’s this post and your comment here in the front page.

Re: AAA – Analytical Anti-Aliasing

#33
post #29

Tangent: my biggest problem with AA is something adjacent to it, which is that almost none of my games bother explain what the differences are between the different abbreviations available in the settings, half of which are completely unknown to me. Like, sure, I can look them up but a little bit of user-friendliness would be appreciated. This article will probably help for future reference though!

Games/graphics are one of those domains with a lot of jargon for sure. If you don't want to be a wizard you can just mess with it and see what happens. I like how dolphin approaches this with extensive tooltips in the settings, but there's always going to be some implicit knowledge. On a meta level - I feel like I've seen anti-acronym sentiment a lot recently. I feel like it's never been easier to look these things u…

The PS4 Pro introduced the gaming world to the simplification of settings from dozens of acronyms that were common to PC Gamers, down to “Performance” and “Quality”.

I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s now a market demand for that to spread back to PC land.

Re: AAA – Analytical Anti-Aliasing

#34

Thanks for sharing! Author here, happy to answer any questions.

Great write up, excellent explorables. I skimmed some parts so forgive me if this was covered, but I wonder what happens with overlapping shapes in this approach. For example, a white background with a black disc and then a white disc of the exact same size and position would probably leave a fuzzy gray hairline circle? With regular antialiasing it should be all white.

Re: AAA – Analytical Anti-Aliasing

#35
I really miss MSAA. I still dislike DLSS personally. I realize many people seem to like it, but it just does not look that good to me. Or as good as things used to look or I believe could look.

Sure it's better than TAA, but come on, this can't be the ultimate end for gaming graphics... At least I hope it isn't.

Re: AAA – Analytical Anti-Aliasing

#36

I really miss MSAA. I still dislike DLSS personally. I realize many people seem to like it, but it just does not look that good to me. Or as good as things used to look or I believe could look. Sure it's better than TAA, but come on, this can't be the ultimate end for gaming graphics... At least I hope it isn't.

Same here. I can't put my finger on what exactly it is, but it just never feels and looks as good as lower quality at full resolution.

Re: AAA – Analytical Anti-Aliasing

#37
post #9
post #6

Awesome article. SDF(or mSDF) isn't the future. It's already "good enough" classic. > This works, but performance tanks hard, as we solve every > bezier curve segment per pixel This is "the future" or even present as used in Slug and DirectWrite with great performance https://sluglibrary.com/ https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/directwrite/...

I may be remembering totally wrong, but isn't the algorithm used in Slug patented?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42194175

Re: AAA – Analytical Anti-Aliasing

#38

Graphics programming analysis done using examples written in WebGL–genius. Hypertext that takes full advantage of the medium. This reminds me of something I'd see on https://pudding.cool/ , but it goes far more in depth than anything there. Absolutely fantastic article. I've been using MSAAx4 in my rendering engine for some time and only recently have considered switching to a FXAA / TAA implementation. I'm actually…

[deleted]

Re: AAA – Analytical Anti-Aliasing

#39
post #6

Awesome article. SDF(or mSDF) isn't the future. It's already "good enough" classic. > This works, but performance tanks hard, as we solve every > bezier curve segment per pixel This is "the future" or even present as used in Slug and DirectWrite with great performance https://sluglibrary.com/ https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/directwrite/...

[deleted]

Re: AAA – Analytical Anti-Aliasing

#40
post #29

Tangent: my biggest problem with AA is something adjacent to it, which is that almost none of my games bother explain what the differences are between the different abbreviations available in the settings, half of which are completely unknown to me. Like, sure, I can look them up but a little bit of user-friendliness would be appreciated. This article will probably help for future reference though!

Games/graphics are one of those domains with a lot of jargon for sure. If you don't want to be a wizard you can just mess with it and see what happens. I like how dolphin approaches this with extensive tooltips in the settings, but there's always going to be some implicit knowledge. On a meta level - I feel like I've seen anti-acronym sentiment a lot recently. I feel like it's never been easier to look these things u…

> just mess with it and see what happens

And even if you know every detail, that's still the best course of action, I think. Which kind of antialiasing you prefer, and how it trades with performance and resolution is highly subjective, and it can be "none".

There are 3 components to rescaling/rendering pixels: aliasing, sharpness and locality. Aliasing is, well, aliasing, sharpness is the opposite of blurriness, and locality is about these "ringing" artefacts you often see in highly compressed images and videos. You can't be perfect on all three. Disabling antialiasing gives you the sharpest image with no ringing artefacts, but you get these ugly staircase effects. Typical antialiasing trades this for blurriness, in fact, FXAA is literally a (selective) blur, that's why some people don't like it. More advanced algorithms can give you both antialiasing and sharpness, but you will get these ringing artefacts. The best of course is to increase resolution until none of these effects become noticeable, but you need the hardware.

The best algorithms attempt to find a good looking balance between all these factors and performance, but "good looking" is subjective, that's why your best bet is to try for yourself. Or just keep the defaults, as it is likely to be set to what the majority of the people prefer.

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