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[The Cockatrice]

:S

As expected. Janky AA mediocrity. I hate it when I'm right. I'll buy it on a sale tho. When will devs learn not to fucking use TAA? jesus fuck still stuck in the past.

 

[tommib]

As expected. Janky AA mediocrity. I hate it when I'm right. I'll buy it on a sale tho. When will devs learn not to fucking use TAA? jesus fuck still stuck in the past.

It’s so “second-rate The Evil Within” but we all know it won’t have any of the action brilliance of the Mikami set pieces so we’re left with a Murdered: Soul Suspect “next-gen edition”. I hate to be the gloomy poster but this ain’t it chief.

 

[64bitmodels]

:S

ahhhh
the screenshots made it look really good
those animations are really, really bad. We should not have animations that poor in the modern day. That's some PS1 stuff.
Everything else looks good, but not enough for me to buy. Imma skippin this one

 

[Shifty]

When will devs learn not to fucking use TAA?

When Digital Foundry stops treating temporal reconstruction as god's gift to image quality, hopefully...

I remember the lead programmer at a studio I worked at being all in on the TAA kool-aid. Dude was promising that he was talking to Epic through their support channels, and that they'd totally fix the ghosting and other endemic issues in an upcoming version of UE.

Now here we are, literal years later, and it's still shit for all the same reasons

 

[The Cockatrice]

When Digital Foundry stops treating temporal reconstruction as god's gift to image quality, hopefully...

I remember the lead programmer at a studio I worked at being all in on the TAA kool-aid. Dude was promising that he was talking to Epic through their support channels, and that they'd totally fix the ghosting and other endemic issues in an upcoming version of UE.

Now here we are, literal years later, and it's still shit for all the same reasons

I dont follow DF that much but I would've assumed they of all people would be against it. Oh well.

 

[FukuDaruma]

When Digital Foundry stops treating temporal reconstruction as god's gift to image quality, hopefully...

I remember the lead programmer at a studio I worked at being all in on the TAA kool-aid. Dude was promising that he was talking to Epic through their support channels, and that they'd totally fix the ghosting and other endemic issues in an upcoming version of UE.

Now here we are, literal years later, and it's still shit for all the same reasons

Yeah, I miss my staircase shimmering edges so much.

That horrible Elden Ring TAA vs the glorious Dark Souls 3 shimmering stairsteps...

The insufferable TAA of Red Dead Redemption 2 vs the amazing stairstep shimmering edges of GTAIV...

It's amazing how these studios keep going backwards...

 

[Shifty]

Yeah, I miss my staircase shimmering edges so much.

That horrible Elden Ring TAA vs the glorious Dark Souls 3 shimmering stairsteps...

The insufferable TAA of Red Dead Redemption 2 vs the amazing stairstep shimmering edges of GTAIV...

It's amazing how these studios keep going backwards...

What can I say, you've got to cope somehow if your graphics hardware is too poor for proper multisample AA.

Might as well smear out all the texture and foliage detail while you're at it, add some weird-looking trails in reflections, transparency, and fast moving objects, and scuff up the camera projection system so it can jitter everything around to try and squeeze out more usable edges.

Then we can slap some extra post effects on top to spend more GPU time trying to undo some of that mess and sharpen it up into a passable final image.

That'll look just great on top of the upscaling needed to even approach the expected output resolution, and is in no way a fancified hack designed to serve the lowest common denominator.

 

[RPSleon]

Happy to see more and more horror games getting put out with more budget than steam indie horrors.

The steam horrors are probably good market research for bigger budget companies to get involved.

 

[DonJimbo]

It's coming to Series consoles too. Next gen only apparently.

Nice hope to see it day one on Gamepass

 

[FukuDaruma]

What can I say, you've got to cope somehow if your graphics hardware is too poor for proper multisample AA.

Might as well smear out all the texture and foliage detail while you're at it, add some weird-looking trails in reflections, transparency, and fast moving objects, and scuff up the camera projection system so it can jitter everything around to try and squeeze out more usable edges.

Then we can slap some extra post effects on top to spend more GPU time trying to undo some of that mess and sharpen it up into a passable final image.

That'll look just great on top of the upscaling needed to even approach the expected output resolution, and is in no way a fancified hack designed to serve the lowest common denominator.

'proper' MSAA is so great that it was never achieved so far.

REAL cases: Elden Ring TAA vs Dark Souls 3, RDR2 vs GTAIV, Forza Horizon 3,4,5 8xMSAA vs the new FH5 TAA...



And this is even with the help of the Youtube compression. The shimmering in reality is a lot worse. Is that what you call "detail"?

 

[Shifty]

'proper' MSAA is so great that it was never achieved so far.

REAL cases: Elden Ring TAA vs Dark Souls 3, RDR2 vs GTAIV, Forza Horizon 3,4,5 8xMSAA vs the new FH5 TAA...



And this is even with the help of the Youtube compression. The shimmering in reality is a lot worse. Is that what you call "detail"?

To give it a fair shot, I downloaded the max-quality version of that video to play in mpv and take YouTube out of the equation. Macroblocking isn't going to be a big deal either way seeing as the footage is already zoomed in to show pixels.

Consider the TAA example at 00:01, very crisp indeed because the camera is still:

And now the same TAA example in motion at 00:03, with a drunken blur across the whole screen:

Is this what you call detail? There's obvious ghosting behind the falling leaves as well.

Realistically, this is a crap example for both because foliage is 90% texture. MSAA can't do much with that because it only cares about geometry edges, and TAA goes nuclear because it doesn't care about geo and can't resolve a sharp frame without a static point of reference.

There's also a screen-space dither pattern being applied to introduce artificial high-frequency aliasing that TAA's innate blur can resolve into cheap fake transparency, which is going to have a negative impact on image quality for any approach that isn't TAA. So even under optimal conditions that bias in its favour, it's demonstrably flawed.

As for your other examples, GTAIV, Dark Souls 3 and Elden Ring use a deferred renderer without MSAA compatibility. DS3's built-in solution is notoriously bad and can be fixed with driver AA injection, but the comparison is irrelevant regardless since all the available options are inferior image-based techniques, of which TAA is the most advanced.

Thankfully we have clustered forward renderers these days, so the dark times of the deferred approach giving every game shit AA are gradually becoming a thing of the past. From's games in particular will benefit greatly when they catch up to the tech curve, since their worlds are all about the high-density geometry that MSAA thrives on.

 

[FukuDaruma]

To give it a fair shot, I downloaded the max-quality version of that video to play in mpv and take YouTube out of the equation. Macroblocking isn't going to be a big deal either way seeing as the footage is already zoomed in to show pixels.

Consider the TAA example at 00:01, very crisp indeed because the camera is still:

And now the same TAA example in motion at 00:03, with a drunken blur across the whole screen:

Is this what you call detail? There's obvious ghosting behind the falling leaves as well.

Realistically, this is a crap example for both because foliage is 90% texture. MSAA can't do much with that because it only cares about geometry edges, and TAA goes nuclear because it doesn't care about geo and can't resolve a sharp frame without a static point of reference.

There's also a screen-space dither pattern being applied to introduce artificial high-frequency aliasing that TAA's innate blur can resolve into cheap fake transparency, which is going to have a negative impact on image quality for any approach that isn't TAA. So even under optimal conditions that bias in its favour, it's demonstrably flawed.

As for your other examples, GTAIV, Dark Souls 3 and Elden Ring use a deferred renderer without MSAA compatibility. DS3's built-in solution is notoriously bad and can be fixed with driver AA injection, but the comparison is irrelevant regardless since all the available options are inferior image-based techniques, of which TAA is the most advanced.

Thankfully we have clustered forward renderers these days, so the dark times of the deferred approach giving every game shit AA are gradually becoming a thing of the past. From's games in particular will benefit greatly when they catch up to the tech curve, since their worlds are all about the high-density geometry that MSAA thrives on.

Not both, no. A bit of blur is 100 times more realistic than stairsteps and shimmering galore in all screen. FH5 TAA has been a much needed improvement over the shitty MSAA that has been lacking on the *entire* series.

What would be a showcase of the goodness of MSAA? some game with all geometry, no foliage, no transparencies, ... ?

What about Rockstar games? nothing has been near the quality of RDR2 in terms of AA quality. There may be some minor flaw here and there, but you just play and the game looks gorgeous without the stairstep and shimmering edges that have been plaguing games for ages.

It's not just vegetation, which is already a big part of almost any game. It's horribly unrealistic shimmering shit everywhere:

 

[Shifty]

Not both, no. A bit of ghosting is 100 times more realistic than stairsteps and shimmering galore in all screen. FH5 TAA has been a much needed improvement over the shitty MSAA that has been lacking on the *entire* series.

And thus we reach the subjective element of the argument. I could make the same claim for full-screen blurring, and it wouldn't be any more correct than yours in absolute terms.

Realism has nothing to do with it unless you're limiting your argument to games that aspire to look realistic.

What would be a showcase of the goodness of MSAA? some game with all geometry, no foliage, no transparencies, ... ?

Anything where the prime source of aliasing is caused by geometry edges instead of cutout transparency or high-contrast texture edges (which can be AA'd at an asset / filtering level, so aren't a problem).
Transparency isn't an issue either - TAA games fake it with masked dithering because adding more passes to a deferred renderer is really expensive. Forward renderers use real hardware blending, which MSAA has no problem with.

So, more or less any 3D scene that isn't a forest. Foliage is a very specific corner of 3D that makes all the wrong optimizations if the prime concern is to avoid aliasing.

What about Rockstar games? nothing has been near the quality of RDR2 in terms of AA quality. There may be some minor flaw here and there, but you just play and the game looks gorgeous without the stairstep and shimmering edges that have been plaguing games for ages.

I haven't played a Rockstar game since Max Payne 3, though RDR2 is another example of an environment where foliage plays a big part.

Another easy win for TAA:

And what exactly is "default" AA in the context of Alien Isolation?
Based on some quick research, a form of 2x MSAA, a.k.a. bottom-tier and not that good to begin with. You want 4x minimum.
On top of that, Alien Isolation is a deferred game, meaning the MSAA implementation is a weird custom case that was likely doomed from the get-go due to extra performance overhead.

Any comparison is an easy win if you seek out the bottom-of-the-barrel example and compare it to the best you've got.

It's not just vegetation, which is already a big part of almost any game. It's horribly unrealistic shimmering shit everywhere:

That's a shading problem, not an MSAA one. Look at the edges of the car's silhouette, around the wingmirrors, roof and shocks - they're smooth, so the AA is doing its job.

The laddering here is down to the fragment shader in charge of specular lighting. Unlike geometry, shader logic doesn't multisample unless you code it in manually, so any subpixel details like bright highlights are going to alias unless you use GPU magic to calculate inter-pixel derivatives and smooth out the result. They evidently they opted to skip on that and lean on TAA to average out the result instead, I'd guess for time since writing correct derivative math is harder than fixing it in post. Could also be console GPU limitations.

The problem there, aside from it aliasing in the first place, is that information is lost - the left image is more 'physically correct' in that the highlights are the right brightness with regard to the PBR algorithm, whereas the right image blurs it all down for smoothness, discarding lighting energy in the process for a dimmer end result. Doing it right from the get-go in the fragment shader would make it correct even in the case of using no AA at all, as well as reducing the error margin for energy loss under TAA.

 

[SteadyEvo]

It's not a AAA blockbuster game, so it's jank.

They released a video… it looks janky. But that says nothing about the gameplay. Could turn out great

 

[Warablo]

The graphics look decent, I worry about everything else.

 

[Esca]

I'm keeping an open mind. Jank doesn't phase me much after playing so much eruo jank games over the years. I don't hope it is cleaned up. Guys I was in school with some were dedicated to just animation and other that didn't care but nearly all knew how to do it to not be janky. So students were/ are putting out better quality than a commercial product is sad. They must have amateur hour going on over at their animation team because no good artist would put that out with their name on it

 

[FukuDaruma]

And thus we reach the subjective element of the argument. I could make the same claim for full-screen blurring, and it wouldn't be any more correct than yours in absolute terms.

Realism has nothing to do with it unless you're limiting your argument to games that aspire to look realistic.


Anything where the prime source of aliasing is caused by geometry edges instead of cutout transparency or high-contrast texture edges (which can be AA'd at an asset / filtering level, so aren't a problem).
Transparency isn't an issue either - TAA games fake it with masked dithering because adding more passes to a deferred renderer is really expensive. Forward renderers use real hardware blending, which MSAA has no problem with.

So, more or less any 3D scene that isn't a forest. Foliage is a very specific corner of 3D that makes all the wrong optimizations if the prime concern is to avoid aliasing.


I haven't played a Rockstar game since Max Payne 3, though RDR2 is another example of an environment where foliage plays a big part.


And what exactly is "default" AA in the context of Alien Isolation?
Based on some quick research, a form of 2x MSAA, a.k.a. bottom-tier and not that good to begin with. You want 4x minimum.
On top of that, Alien Isolation is a deferred game, meaning the MSAA implementation is a weird custom case that was likely doomed from the get-go due to extra performance overhead.

Any comparison is an easy win if you seek out the bottom-of-the-barrel example and compare it to the best you've got.


That's a shading problem, not an MSAA one. Look at the edges of the car's silhouette, around the wingmirrors, roof and shocks - they're smooth, so the AA is doing its job.

The laddering here is down to the fragment shader in charge of specular lighting. Unlike geometry, shader logic doesn't multisample unless you code it in manually, so any subpixel details like bright highlights are going to alias unless you use GPU magic to calculate inter-pixel derivatives and smooth out the result. They evidently they opted to skip on that and lean on TAA to average out the result instead, I'd guess for time since writing correct derivative math is harder than fixing it in post. Could also be console GPU limitations.

The problem there, aside from it aliasing in the first place, is that information is lost - the left image is more 'physically correct' in that the highlights are the right brightness with regard to the PBR algorithm, whereas the right image blurs it all down for smoothness, discarding lighting energy in the process for a dimmer end result. Doing it right from the get-go in the fragment shader would make it correct even in the case of using no AA at all, as well as reducing the error margin for energy loss under TAA.

Forza Horizon has been using MSAA (up to 8x) for the entire series. It's one of the most optimized and better looking engines and games there are. The pixelated fake transparecency you talked about it's been there since forever, it's not a TAA thing. It was there since at least FH3 and TAA just has been introduced a few weeks ago for the first time in FH5.

This is Forza Horizon 4 PC Ultra maxed out with 8xMSAA:

"the (MS)AA is doing its job"... yeah, a really BAD one. That's the point. It misses MOST of the aliasing, and can only deal with a very minor part of what you see on the screen...

Again, Forza Horizon 4 PC Ultra maxed out with 8xMSAA:

And this is 8xMSAA in Forza Motorsport 7 PC Ultra maxed out:

And this is GT Sport TAA on PS4 Pro:

GT Sport PS4 Pro TAA top vs Forza Motorsport 8xMSAA maxed out PC down:

The sheer lack lof AA is everywhere, not just vegetation, transparencies, cables, fences, ... even on car parts edges:

The difference is a lot more staggering in motion, where you can see perfect stability in games with TAA and a shimmering fest all over the screen in games with MSAA.

But I guess Turn10/Playground weren't competent enough to do 'proper' MSAA in 10 years?

You are writing long ass excuses trying to justify WHY MSAA looks worse...

I mean, what can be clearer than this? anybody which isn't blind or a fanatic can see it. This is PC, not consoles. TAA has been introduced just a few weeks ago, after they been using MSAA for 10 years. These games have NOT been designed around TAA. On the contrary.

"That's a shading problem, not an MSAA one"... NO, that's an ALIASING problem. TAA can deal with it, and MSAA can NOT. That's the thing. MSAA, apart from having a bigger performance hit, has a LOT of things it can NOT deal with. It cannot deal with textures, transparencies, shading aliasing, parts ... so it can only deal with pure geometry edges and that's it, and sometimes it even can't with those, like the car parts in the FH4 example:

And the result is having aliasing and shimmering all over the screen in your game. While TAA *may* have a bit of blur and *may* have a bit of ghosting and that's it.