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TAA - Best AA method ever?

Peterthumpa

Peterthumpa

Member
I'm feeling that the use of TAA in the latest 2 big releases isn't getting the attention it deserves. Both Fallout 4 and Star Wars Battlefront features TAA options that almost completely clean up the image of aliasing issues.

I know that a few will talk about how blurry it looks, but honestly, it is far from bad, especially in motion. For the first time in quite some time I don't see a real need to get past 1080p with an AA solution that looks this good and performs so great, meaning that reaching the magic 60 FPS number with good IQ is easier than ever (despite Fallout 4 having many other performance issues unrelated to this).

Granted, I'm a comfy couch PC gamer, so YMMV. Not sure if it looks as good on a monitor or consoles as it looks for me now, but definitely, a step in the right direction.
 
I definitely prefer it to FXAA, that's for sure. It's still not ideal, though. In Fallout 4 I notice it causing a lot of weird visual things, like characters with stubble having their facial hair blurred while they talk.
 
It adds quite a bit of blur, but it feels so shockingly fresh after the last few years of post process AA pixel crawl..
 
TAA works wonderfully in conjunction with slight downsampling. Alternatively, a bit of post processed sharpening helps with TAA's blurring also.

Overall though, the downsides of TAA are much preferred to the downsides of not having it (the extreme tree shimmering). Aliasing will often pull me out of a game, and that has very rarely happened with the TAA in FO4.
 
I'm fine with it in Fallout since it's not like the textures hold up to scrutiny anyway, but in Battlefront it's wayyyyyy too blurry for me.
 
Way too blurry.

I use it in Fallout 4 while downsampling and using SweetFX to sharpen the image to achieve a good sweet spot. But without that, far too blurry. Sucks that FO4 without TAA while downsampled is filled with aliasing, otherwise I wouldn't use it.
 
truth411 said:
I thought SMAA was the best?
Click to expand...

You're probably thinking of supersampling (often referred to as SSAA). SMAA is essentially just FXAA minus the associated blur. Supersampling most definitely is the best method, but I believe what the OP means by "best" in this case is a combination of effectiveness and efficiency (SSAA certainly is effective but, as you'd expect, demands much more processing power).
 
The softness meshes really well with Fallout's art style. But I'm playing at 900p and it might be blur overload, my eyes have been really tired lately.
 
Any reason why FXAA took off and SMAA didn't?
At least that's the way it seems to me.
I figured more games would include SMAA with a temporal component.

[EDIT]
^Might that be the cause?
But doesn't FXAA do the same?
 
JaseC said:
You're probably thinking of supersampling (often referred to as SSAA). SMAA is essentially just FXAA minus the associated blur. Supersampling most definitely is the best method, but I believe what the OP means by "best" in this case is a combination of effectiveness and efficiency (SSAA certainly is effective but, as you'd expect, demands much more processing power).
Click to expand...
No SMAA, which is basically MLAA without MLAA subpixel weaknesses.
 
drexplora said:
Any reason why FXAA took off and SMAA didn't?
At least that's the way it seems to me.
I figured more games would include SMAA with a temporal component.

[EDIT]
^Might that be the cause?
But doesn't FXAA do the same?
Click to expand...
EDITED
SMAA used to use a post filter that adjusts the whole screen and that can wreak havoc with fonts and huds.
No driver based that seems to be handled.

I will have to go back and find the developer who discussed this in depth here a couple years ago. Broke down the AA implementations very well in some games threads. Damn my memory.

Linus's general youtube description for those who want a bit of a primer. Doesn't cover 1-2 of the more exotic types but covers the ones mentioned in the thread so far and little bits on how they work. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDo5TKr6pyc
 
Spinifex said:
Fallout 4 TAA looks great with a bit of sharpening.
Click to expand...

Incomplete. He/she needs to do a comparison on the blurring of high-quality textures too.

Karak said:
SMAA uses a post filter that adjusts the whole screen and that can wreak havoc with fonts and huds.

I will have to go back and find the developer who discussed this in depth here a couple years ago. Broke down the AA implementations very well in some games threads. Damn my memory.
Click to expand...

Thought that was only for injecting SMAA. Dev's who implement it correctly can use SMAA at the right time so that HUD is not affected.
 
btgorman said:
Thought that was only for injecting SMAA. Dev's who implement it correctly can process SMAA at the right time so that HUD is not effected.
Click to expand...
EDITED again.
Yep it was the Ryse folks talking about it in their engine that I remembered years ago and they were saying WHY it wouldn't have that problem. The injector version did that, the normal version, if of course programmed for, doesn't.

That being said I love it regardless. Injector version or straight up.
 
Love temporal AA of all kinds. Getting rid of time variant artifacts improves IQ way, way more than the added blur hurts it.
 
Unknown One said:
What does the Nvidia setting MFAA do?
Click to expand...

It's based on temporal sampling like FXAA but I believe it uses a different pixel-shader technique.

It's supposed to look more like MSAA so you don't get the bluriness of FXAA, while also halving the performance hit of MSAA.
 
flipswitch said:
In terms of blurriness, how does it compare to Quincunx AA?
Click to expand...
Depends on how liberally and how wide it accumulates and resolves samples.

For instance, Halo Reach's TAA literally uses a quincunx filter. Some newer games are using later variants of the same concept, like the flipquad used in Far Cry 4's HRAA.
 
Unknown One said:
What does the Nvidia setting MFAA do?
Click to expand...

Tagyhag said:
It's based on temporal sampling like FXAA but I believe it uses a different pixel-shader technique.

It's supposed to look more like MSAA so you don't get the bluriness of FXAA, while also halving the performance hit of MSAA.
Click to expand...

No. MFAA is basically temporally jittered MSAA. Essentially, it changes its subpixel sampling pattern. It is much more effective than plain MSAA, but has all its inherent weaknesses like incompatibility with many deferred pipelines etc.

The halving of performance hit is only because in most situations MFAA 2X is somewhat equivalent to MSAA 4x.
 
AstroNut325 said:
I thought the best form of AA is OGSSAA?
Click to expand...

Yes. As explained above SSAA is a brute force mechanism that has somewhat unreasonable and wasteful computational requirements. It produces the best result but it has a huge performance penalty.

Temporal AA solutions can have relatively good results and relatively low performance impact.
 
DemonCleaner said:
well that looks just off / wrong. especially the background...


may be something else in motion
Click to expand...
Sharpened Fallout 4 TAA shots have looked a bit weird to me, like they are artificially sharpened instead of looking "natural" in some sense.

I normally hate temporal anti-aliasing, ghosting, etc. but Fallout 4's TAA is the best I think I have ever seen. When standing still, the quality reminds me of Source Engine style MSAA for being nice and clean. In motion, even sitting a few feet from a monitor, blur didn't jump out at me. I'm pretty happy with it. I haven't noticed ghosting either. I seem to remember Crysis 2 being bad in that regard.
 
At SIGGRAPH this year, everyone and their dog was using it for cleaning up noise from real-time ray tracing with super low sample counts. Why didn't we try this sooner? It seems like an obvious solution.
 
I have always said that TAA is the most effective AA method, especially that it reduces shimmering greatly. From my experience, Skyrim's enb had arguably the best TAA alongside Fallout 4; TW3's TAA affects performance too much.

Is it worth using over SMAA or FXAA? I doubt it, but it depends on your preference and how much blurriness you can handle. I personally like to use FXAA with sharpening filters or just SMAA; I will do more experiments to reach acceptable levels of TAA blurriness using LOD bias and luma sharpen in Fallout 4.

KainXVIII said:
Not at all, SGSSAA for me.
Click to expand...

It is just as blurry as TAA, and it kills performance--diminishing returns basically.
 
Primethius said:
Way too blurry.

I use it in Fallout 4 while downsampling and using SweetFX to sharpen the image to achieve a good sweet spot. But without that, far too blurry. Sucks that FO4 without TAA while downsampled is filled with aliasing, otherwise I wouldn't use it.
Click to expand...

Yep did the same. Makes FO4 look soooo much better.

Not a fan of the blur TAA produces at all
 
Slavik81 said:
At SIGGRAPH this year, everyone and their dog was using it for cleaning up noise from real-time ray tracing with super low sample counts. Why didn't we try this sooner? It seems like an obvious solution.
Click to expand...

Elegant solutions often are just that. "why didn't I think of that", kind of solutions. Though in games it didn't produce nice results until people started doing reprojection using motion vectors in order to eliminate ghosting.

An early example of awful temporal AA was in Halo Reach:

FJUlZkf.jpg
 
tuxfool said:
No. MFAA is basically temporally jittered MSAA. Essentially, it changes its subpixel sampling pattern. It is much more effective than plain MSAA, but has all its inherent weaknesses like incompatibility with many deferred pipelines etc.

The halving of performance hit is only because in most situations MFAA 2X is somewhat equivalent to MSAA 4x.
Click to expand...

Ahh l thank you for the answer.
 
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