Why does Nvidia brag about FXAA? It makes most of my games look like crap...

[newtekie1]

Originally Posted by phanbuey

it doesn't seem like FXAA can tell the difference between the edge of an object and a sharp line on a texture so it makes everything look blurred...

It doesn't matter if the line is the edge of an object or a line in a texture, it should be softened by AA, that is the point of AA. It is supposed to remove jaggy lines, and the only way to do that is to soften them, or blur if you prefer.

[3870x2]

so...
¿whatcha doin with that 7970?

[STCNE]

Agreed, I don't really like the new 'low performance hit' AA that AMD and NVIDIA have now. It just blurs things too much. I used MSAA back when I played GTAIV because it looked really bad without AA of any kind(the update that added AA didn't work for me, needed a mod to bypass broken GFWL, only worked on 1.4)

What I really don't like is how NVIDIA advertised SSAA when it didn't work on any game I tried it with when I had a NVIDIA card. It's one of the few things that drove me back to AMD where I could force it on for any non-dx11 game I had. Kind of ironic really, shortly after I switched back I stopped being so picky about the graphics. When I realized I would have needed an SSD to play New Vegas with the massive texture pack I downloaded I realized how much I was putting into the GPU so I could go completly overboard with the settings and downgraded to put my money to use elsewhere.

[Phusius]

For that matter, why does Nvidia brag about TXAA and the only game that supports it:

The Secret World TXAA Demo - PC Perspective - YouT...

[Binge]

Originally Posted by Phusius

For that matter, why does Nvidia brag about TXAA and the only game that supports it:

The Secret World TXAA Demo - PC Perspective - YouT...

If you designed IP wouldn't you talk about it if your goal was to sell product?

[Benetanegia]

Originally Posted by newtekie1

It doesn't matter if the line is the edge of an object or a line in a texture, it should be softened by AA, that is the point of AA. It is supposed to remove jaggy lines, and the only way to do that is to soften them, or blur if you prefer.

Of course it matters. Lines inside of textures don't have jaggies, providing that AF is used. That's what anisotropic filtering is for, well texture filtering in general.

Any post-process AA blurs the entire screen and although the algorithms have become better and better, they are still nowhere near as accurate as MSAA because they don't perform depth tests and so they cannot tell the difference between an edge or a line in a texture.

That's not to say that FXAA is useless. For the grand mayority of people and in most games it's better than 0xAA, so for slower cards is perfect.

[Phusius]

Originally Posted by Binge

If you designed IP wouldn't you talk about it if your goal was to sell product?

Yes, but now I have no shame in being an AMD man anymore, at least they don't feed me lies. Just give me pure power and say enjoy.

[Benetanegia]

Originally Posted by Phusius

Yes, but now I have no shame in being an AMD man anymore, at least they don't feed me lies. Just give me pure power and say enjoy.

AMD did the exact same thing with MLAA, exact same claims. It looks worse, it runs slower. So are you gonna be an Intel guy now?

http://sites.amd.com/us/game/technol...ogical-aa.aspx

Small performance impact

Truth: greater impact than FXAA.

Stunning image quality

... you thread, your call.

EDIT: And woah woah woah, wait a minute:

The stunning image quality enabled by MLAA is broadly comparable to that of Supersample Anti-Aliasing (SSAA)

That's when marketing guys cross the line...

[OneMoar]

because obviously forcing a post-process effect onto games that where never written with it in mind is gonna end well

[m1dg3t]

Simple answer; To sell cards.

/Thread

[Benetanegia]

Originally Posted by OneMoar

because obviously forcing a post-process effect onto games that where never written with it in mind is gonna end well

Nah it's not a problem of being a post-process per se. Because it's post process there's no problem applying later, quality wise, performance is better if applied within the app.

The problem is the nature of the beast. Post-process AA does not have extra information. For a 1920x1080 frame, you get only that many pixels of meaningful information. Then that info is dilluted when for every pixel, nearby pixels are mixed with the original. So it's blurring, plain and simple.

With 4xMSAA you get 4 color and 4 alpha coverage samples per every pixel and it's this info that is mixed for the final picture. Nearby final pixels are not mixed with each other, blurring does not occur.

Of course 4xSSAA is much better, since you get 4 full pixels per output pixel. (with shaders, lighting, shadowing, everything already calculated)

[OneMoar]

Originally Posted by Benetanegia

Nah it's not a problem of being a post-process per se. Because it's post process there's no problem applying later, quality wise, performance is better if applied within the app.

The problem is the nature of the beast. Post-process AA does not have extra information. For a 1920x1080 frame, you get only that many pixels of meaningful information. Then that info is dilluted when for every pixel, nearby pixels are mixed with the original. So it's blurring, plain and simple.

With 4xMSAA you get 4 color and 4 alpha coverage samples per every pixel and it's this info that is mixed for the final picture. Nearby final pixels are not mixed with each other, blurring does not occur.

Of course 4xSSAA is much better, since you get 4 full pixels per output pixel. (with shaders, lighting, shadowing, everything already calculated)

exactly there is nothing inherently wrong with fxaa its self fxaa/smaa work best when you provide it with all the information about the scene when you just slap something on down the pipe it endsbadly

[Benetanegia]

Originally Posted by OneMoar

exactly there is nothing inherently wrong with fxaa its self fxaa/smaa work best when you provide it with all the information about the scene when you just slap something on down the pipe it endsbadly

But it doesn't get any more info whether it's built into the game or applied later. The algorithm is run AFTER the final composition is made. When the aliased frame is ready to be sent to the monitor, it's then when FXAA or MLAA take that picture and basically blur it "intelligently*". There's no extra information passed by the games engine, no further calculations other than what the algorithm does on those 1920x1080 pixels. That's why it's so fast.

* The algorithm suposedly takes care of trying to guess what needs to be blurred most (i.e polygon edges) and what info needs to be kept (i.e a line or dots in a texture).

[Phusius]

Fair enough bene, MLAA, never heard of it before now. Heh, well I am happy with my 660 non-ti version, it runs everything very well so far and stays ice cold and silent. so it all depends if I end up fixing the vrms on my 7970 whether or not I keep it. may just throw away my arctic 7970 cooler and use my reference Msi cooler that my 7970 came with originally, i hear the ref should cool vrms much better

[OneMoar]

method != implementation it is very possible to apply fxaa to certain elements of the scene and not to the entier frame (bf3 does this sorta)

[Benetanegia]

Originally Posted by OneMoar

method != implementation it is very possible to apply fxaa to certain elements of the scene and not to the entier frame (bf3 does this sorta)

Then it's not really fxaa. Honestly I don't know how it works and I have no interest in the game, so I can't even see it with my eyes. Google doesn't help either.

I've seen that it's used alongside MSAA or something like that, so it's posible that it uses some kind of Edge Detect AA (kind of like MSAA but only coverage, without 4x color info), bake that alpha coverage info into a texture and then use that texture to let the algorithm know where to enhance the blurring on edges, and less on textures. Fair enough, but since alpha tests are performed anyway, MSAA could be used in the first place (or CSAA, because that's basically what CSAA is). Seems like a moot point. idk.

[OneMoar]

I guss that point is that if I got out and buy a brandnew sports car and they claim it goes 0-60 in under 4 seconds and every time I have a chance I have to get up to 60 I gun the engine and then the engine blows up in ~30k that's not exactly the car dealers problem really bad analogy I know but its late and ./care

[Widjaja]

As said in a previous post, certain types of AA can make a game look worse or cause graphical glitches.

Only way to find out is try the different types of AA if you can be bothered and see which types appeal to you in certain games and which do not.

Some people like types of AA which make the game look like it is played through VGA to remove the jaggies.
Some people see the jaggies as making the image look crisp.

[Benetanegia]

Originally Posted by OneMoar

I guss that point is that if I got out and buy a brandnew sports car and they claim it goes 0-60 in under 4 seconds and every time I have a chance I have to get up to 60 I gun the engine and then the engine blows up in ~30k that's not exactly the car dealers problem really bad analogy I know but its late and ./care

I'm not very good with analogies either, but for what we are discussing: post-process AA is like painting the car. The end result is mostly the same whether you paint the body before the car is assembled or afterwards. Painting it afterwards means you have to cover the parts you don't want painted and so it will take more time (analogy to the greater performance hit when applied outside the app).

[johnspack]

fxaa actually worked great on my sli 285s, but 32x csaa on some games, upto 8x supersampling in most, works better on my 480. I stopped using fxaa....

[johnspack]

FXAA worked great with my sli 285s. Nice bandaid for weak cards. With my 480 I use 32x CSAA, SuperSampling, and enforced real AA. I'm looking at sli 480s soon, which is the min to go past 660ti in performance....

[TheHunter]

If you think its crap now, then download older 300.xx & 301.xx drivers and you will see what's crap.


From what I saw they changed its algorithm since early 304.xx and it actually looks "ok now.

[newtekie1]

Originally Posted by Benetanegia

Lines inside of textures don't have jaggies, providing that AF is used. That's what anisotropic filtering is for, well texture filtering in general.

They most certainly do have jaggies, any time a line doesn't line up exactly with the pixels of the image there will be jaggies, AF helps but only to a point, AA does way more to remove jaggies.

[Benetanegia]

Originally Posted by newtekie1

They most certainly do have jaggies, any time a line doesn't line up exactly with the pixels of the image there will be jaggies, AF helps but only to a point, AA does way more to remove jaggies.

AF does EXACTLY the same as AA (more so MLAA or FXAA) except it includes a perspective correction on the algorithm (read is better), so what are you talking about? If AF does not get rid of jaggies AA certainly won't. That being said, try to use AF because if you still see jaggies on textures, you are not enabling it properly. I've not seen jaggies on textures in a long long really long time.

[3870x2]

Originally Posted by Benetanegia

AF does EXACTLY the same as AA (more so MLAA or FXAA) except it includes a perspective correction on the algorithm (read is better), so what are you talking about? If AF does not get rid of jaggies AA certainly won't. That being said, try to use AF because if you still see jaggies on textures, you are not enabling it properly. I've not seen jaggies on textures in a long long really long time.

AF is anisotropic filtering, which filters actual textures. Maybe you mean something else than anisotropic filtering.