what am i doing
Arcane
- Joined
- Dec 24, 2018
- Messages
- 1,863
Tried integrating SMAA to smooth the borders between individual tlies and reduce the amount of minor pixel extrusions that would occur where small landmass features turned into one visible pixel when viewed at a distance. SMAA did not help; it produced no visible change and on particularly low settings (such as depth-based edges) would generate a lot of "sparkling" visual artifacts. Wasn't any good so I took it out (I don't think SMAA is a bad form of anti-aliasing; it just wasn't what I needed). So instead I decided to try turning on multisampling, which I'd initially avoided because it supposedly is one of the most performance-taxing forms of AA, only behind supersampling. On integrating it I found that not only did it smooth the borders and eliminate tiny artifacts, but it didn't make any major difference in frame time (8 samples, which was the maximum my weak laptop GPU will support); actually it had less of an impact than SMAA. Maybe because I'm not doing deferred rendering (which supposedly makes it much harder for the GPU to determine which parts of the scene actually require multisampling and negate the performance benefits it offers relative to SSAA), and maybe it's also partly due to the way the scene & geometry is laid out.