Nine months or so back I made a thread about adding FXAA to all PS360 games by playing via a capture card and running the postprocessing on PC using PtBi.
The main drawback of that method was that applying FXAA "blindly" on the whole image doesn't just anti-alias edges, it also slightly reduces texture clarity and, worst of all, negatively affects the clarity and shape of user interface elements.
Well, I finished work on a new post-processing anti-aliasing method that almost entirely eliminates that problem. A somewhat detailed description can be found here. In short, it uses the crazy power of contemporary GPUs (and a really useful OpenGL 4.2 extension) to search image areas that are (almost) certainly aliasing artifacts, and then selectively applies highest quality FXAA to only those areas. TPXAA is an improved version that takes multiple frames into account.
Some comparison images:
Clearly, the anti-aliasing effect is as good as FXAA. If you pay really close attention to the upper left texture you can also see how it's slightly blurred in the FXAA version.
2D/UI content is not blurred or deformed in any way.
I feel confident in saying that unlike FXAA, TPXAA is almost always purely an improvement, it never degrades any aspect of image quality.
Here are the full res images the first comparison above is cropped from (taken from Nier):
No AA
FXAA
TPXAA
What's the catch?
Well, there are two of them. First of all, to use it on console games, you need the right capturing hardware.
The second is performance. For a 720p frame FXAA takes 1.3ms on my setup -- TPXAA can take 2.8 - 3.6. Still easily enough for 60 captured console frames per second, but not a realistic option in any way for high-res PC games.
If anyone has the right equipment and an AMD card I'd be really happy to hear about any results, this was developed and tested on Nvidia so I'm almost certain that some problems may come up.
The main drawback of that method was that applying FXAA "blindly" on the whole image doesn't just anti-alias edges, it also slightly reduces texture clarity and, worst of all, negatively affects the clarity and shape of user interface elements.
Well, I finished work on a new post-processing anti-aliasing method that almost entirely eliminates that problem. A somewhat detailed description can be found here. In short, it uses the crazy power of contemporary GPUs (and a really useful OpenGL 4.2 extension) to search image areas that are (almost) certainly aliasing artifacts, and then selectively applies highest quality FXAA to only those areas. TPXAA is an improved version that takes multiple frames into account.
Some comparison images:
Clearly, the anti-aliasing effect is as good as FXAA. If you pay really close attention to the upper left texture you can also see how it's slightly blurred in the FXAA version.
2D/UI content is not blurred or deformed in any way.
I feel confident in saying that unlike FXAA, TPXAA is almost always purely an improvement, it never degrades any aspect of image quality.
Here are the full res images the first comparison above is cropped from (taken from Nier):
No AA
FXAA
TPXAA
What's the catch?
Well, there are two of them. First of all, to use it on console games, you need the right capturing hardware.
The second is performance. For a 720p frame FXAA takes 1.3ms on my setup -- TPXAA can take 2.8 - 3.6. Still easily enough for 60 captured console frames per second, but not a realistic option in any way for high-res PC games.
If anyone has the right equipment and an AMD card I'd be really happy to hear about any results, this was developed and tested on Nvidia so I'm almost certain that some problems may come up.