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Unity now has decent temporal anti-aliasing - also: Anti-Aliasing Comparison Tool

D

Durante

Member
I made an AA comparison tool 3 years back or so. It did the job, but was difficult to use, didn't always run on all systems, didn't provide additional information to guide people in what to look for, and didn't support any temporal AA.

Over the past few days I made a new version of the tool in Unity, which should hopefully fix all these issues.
I wrote a blog post about it, and you can get it here .
(why Mega? Because it's the fastest and least annoying free file host that can deal with decent traffic in my experience)

Perhaps the most interesting part is that it includes the temporal AA currently in development for Unity. I hope this might get some developers of Unity games to try it, as long as you can avoid its failure states the quality/performance ratio is pretty outstanding.

It also allows comparing the default Unity included FXAA with the just as easy to integrate and free "Cinematic Effects" SMAA, which should hopefully get even the tiniest developer to switch to the latter if they are still using the former. I really don't want to see Unity games with the only AA option being a low-quality implementation of FXAA anymore, it just doesn't make sense on any modern platform.

Here are a few screenshots.
But if at all possible, download the tool and try it out yourself rather than just looking at screenshots. A large part of the point of this tool is to show those types of effects that simply don't exist in static screenshots.

aatest_2016_10_08_21_4ar00.png

aatest_2016_10_08_21_2tqm8.png

aatest_2016_10_08_21_cco48.png
 
D

Durante

Member
Let me know if you have any issues running the tool.

(And at this point, even if it works for you at all. It was tested on a grand total of 2 PCs so far)
 
C

Calabi

Member
Just tried it and it ran fine on my PC.

If I ever eventually get around to making a game I definitely wont use the default FXAA.
 
A

Alo81

Low Poly Gynecologist
As soon as I saw this thread name I thought "Oh cool, I remember Durante made an AA comparison tool. I should checkout whatever this one is."

Great work, just played around with it and it gets the story across well. I feel like with the huge performance impact SSAA has, and peoples tendency to enable it not considering such, it might be useful to add an option for that.
 
D

Durante

Member
DieH@rd said:
Works fine on fx8350/470x/Win10.
Click to expand...
Thanks for the report.
That's the nice thing about releasing something based on an extremely widely used engine -- when I wrote my original one in plain OpenGL I had some issues with AMD cards in the initial release, but this seems to work everywhere so far.

Alo81 said:
As soon as I saw this thread name I thought "Oh cool, I remember Durante made an AA comparison tool. I should checkout whatever this one is."

Great work, just played around with it and it gets the story across well. I feel like with the huge performance impact SSAA has, and peoples tendency to enable it not considering such, it might be useful to add an option for that.
Click to expand...
Yeah, the original one had SSAA, and I really should add it to this one as well. Ideally some kind of sampling slider from 0.5*0.5 tp 2x2 like some recent games have.
 
P

Painguy

Member
MSAA + TAA is super trippy for the sub-pixel example. You can see the TAA accumulating data from the previous frame lol. (i'm guessing thats whats happening lol)
 
D

Datschge

Member
Durante said:
Let me know if you have any issues running the tool.
Click to expand...
Tests work fine using Wine 1.9.19 under Linux running on a lowly Intel Braswell iGPU. Issues are the text is not showing up and temporal AA (both 8 and 32 samples) flickers, but I'll chalk that up to Wine's D3D to OpenGL conversion. ;)
 
I

Izuna

Banned
lovely, surface book dGPU, latest updates

Fuck me, why isn't SMAA just automatically included in everything, I love this.

I wish ReCore had it. Instead, it has broken TAA or FXAA

@Durante, is there any way to make it "larger?" The window is pretty small on my book ~ I don't need it but it takes up like 10% of my screen
 
D

Durante

Member
Cobalt Izuna said:
@Durante, is there any way to make it "larger?" The window is pretty small on my book ~ I don't need it but it takes up like 10% of my screen
Click to expand...
It's a bit difficult due to the nature of what it is.
The problem is that what constitutes "sub-pixel" obviously depends on the pixel size in relation to the size of the rendered object. so to make sure that everyone sees what they are supposed to see I had to lock the rendering size to a specific value and build it around that.

I could add a kind of "high-dpi mode" where I double the window size in both x and y and use point sampling. I should probably do that.
 
T

Turin Turambar

Member
Cool software, it worked with my amd 290x in Win10.

But, it should be possible to resize or turn to full screen mode, the graphics showing the aliasing are a bit too small otherwise. I mean, it's supposed to show the fine difference between AA modes...
 
E

Evo X

Member
I thought this was about Assassin's Creed Unity and was surprised they were still patching that game. Lol
 
K

Knurek

Member
Now it only there was a way to inject Temporal Aliasing the way we can inject SMAA. :\
(Works fine here, Win10 x64 1510, i74970k+980TI)
 
A

Auto-Reply

Member
Durante said:
It's a bit difficult due to the nature of what it is.
The problem is that what constitutes "sub-pixel" obviously depends on the pixel size in relation to the size of the rendered object. so to make sure that everyone sees what they are supposed to see I had to lock the rendering size to a specific value and build it around that.

I could add a kind of "high-dpi mode" where I double the window size in both x and y and use point sampling. I should probably do that.
Click to expand...

That would be cool.

(Program works fine on my end btw (i7/Win7Pro/980ti))
 
I

Izuna

Banned
Durante said:
It's a bit difficult due to the nature of what it is.
The problem is that what constitutes "sub-pixel" obviously depends on the pixel size in relation to the size of the rendered object. so to make sure that everyone sees what they are supposed to see I had to lock the rendering size to a specific value and build it around that.

I could add a kind of "high-dpi mode" where I double the window size in both x and y and use point sampling. I should probably do that.
Click to expand...

That'd be sweet.

Seeing how FXAA trashes texture quality is eye-opening for me. I used to force it for every game, but there are times where I'd prefer aliasing or something insufficient such as 2xMSAA just because the blurriness is not worthwhile.

There is a tool for demonstrating CMAA that I liked to use to show friends (where I could inject SMAA manually) that also showed a bunch of stuff (though you might know of it):

Article: https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/conservative-morphological-anti-aliasing-cmaa-update

Download link (from the bottom of the article): https://software.intel.com/sites/default/files/managed/53/c8/CMAA1.3_26March2014.7z

Of course, this isn't using Unity so it's not demonstrating the same thing, but I thought I'd share just in case it gives any inspiration.
 
T

Truant

Member
I love TAA, especially in open world games. Jaggies and shimmering make me sick.

Note that I'm playing on a 55" TV quite a ways from my couch. Sharpness isn't that much of an issue to me.
 
T

tauke

Member
Works fine on my setup (i7 4770K, GTX 780, Win7) although I prefer if there is a way to make the resolution/window size bigger (like double/quadraple the size).
 
D

Durante

Member
tauke said:
Works fine on my setup (i7 4770K, GTX 780, Win7) although I prefer if there is a way to make the resolution/window size bigger (like double/quadraple the size).
Click to expand...
Yeah, I'll implement that in the next version. The only problem is that it's a bit constraining to maintain the same pixel size : object size ratio, as I explained above.

(I could just always render at the same resolution and use bilinear scaling, but that would distort the resulting visuals a bit)
 
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