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Decline Why are jaggies more noticeable in some games than others?

cretin

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Title. Two of my favorite games of all time, shadow of chernobyl, and ArmA (both 2 and 3), I have never been bothered by not having an AA solution. SoC simply doesn't have working AA, and back in the day running MSAA on arma 2 wasn't worth the frame hit on an already terribly optimized game. I'm sure if i took screenshots from each game some bothersome nerd could immediately highlight all the jaggies, but my point is that the lack of AA never stood out to me.

Meanwhile, many of the newer games I play, if you play them without AA of some kind turned on, the imagespace is horribly "scratchy" for lack of a better word. To make matters worse, MSAA seems to be gone from games these days and your options are between FXAA (shit) and TAA (shit). In these games, i really notice the jaggies, and they bother me.

The question i have, is, why can jaggies be much more noticeable in one game than another, even when the games are similar (e.g both first person shooters, both running in contemporary resolutions)?
 

johngalt

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This bugs me too. I think it's cause jagged edges of larger polygons aren't that bad, but the "shimmer" effect of jaggies in foliage is worse. Horizon Zero Dawn was an example of that for me.

But I love the FXAA effect, and find that 1920x1200 with a double-pass of FXAA often looks better than 2560x1600.
 

Derringer

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SGSSAA and Reshade's FXAA shader with 'FXAA_QUALITY__PRESET' set to 39 work pretty well to cover up polygon knives. There's a reason why Unreal uses TAA and that's because it's ugly dithered garbage to save performance rendering, oversharpening reveals it.
 

gurugeorge

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Strap Yourselves In
Haven't they stopped doing proper AA (MSAA) because most peoples' monitors have high enough resolution and are big enough that you don't actually need it any more?

IOW, if you're complaining about jaggies, you need to upgrade your potato and get a proper big HD monitor, or whatever the latest newfangled contraption is (QLED or something?)
 

Derringer

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Haven't they stopped doing proper AA (MSAA) because most peoples' monitors have high enough resolution and are big enough that you don't actually need it any more?
It's more that Unreal Engine doesn't support MSAA and every other fucking game nowadays uses it or Unity (which supports it). Maybe the Chinese hate MSAA.
 

DalekFlay

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Something older like STALKER you can probably use your GPU's control panel to run at double resolution internally, which will pretty much eliminate aliasing. For example on my 1440p monitor I use nvidia DSR to run games at 2880p, which kills any hint of jaggies 99% of the time. Recently did this with Dishonored and Doom 3 for example. Some relatively rare games have issues with such high resolutions though.

For more modern stuff TAA and DLSS type stuff is the future, I don't think there's any going back. Games are built around it from the ground up now usually, and if you force it off they can look weird in various ways. Doom Eternal has tons of weird shimmering and pixelization in the lighting for example, and Red Dead 2's trees and bushes look less full and pop in more obviously. I'm not a fan, but it's just an "is what it is" situation at this point. The ones that really bother me are the games made since MSAA was killed and before TAA came around in any decent way, which look jaggy as fuck and there's nothing you can do about it unless you can run them at double resolution. Rise of the Tomb Raider is a good example of this for me recently, only SMAA and too demanding for 2880p, so I just had to live with it looking like a sparkly nightmare half the time.
 

Derringer

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Reshade SMAA never did anything for me, setting up FXAA without the dithering artifacts with the '39' quality preset really does look better.
 

Azdul

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Haven't they stopped doing proper AA (MSAA) because most peoples' monitors have high enough resolution and are big enough that you don't actually need it any more?
Some effects make MSAA hard to implement, and consoles do not have enough memory to do MSAA anyway - so developers add exaggerated depth of field effects for distant objects, motion blur for close objects, chromatic aberration - and small details (including jaggies) get lost in blurry mess.

If they would go for crisp and clear (or just realistic) graphical style, jaggies would still be visible in 4k.
 

Lyric Suite

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Pointless my ass.

I want my games to be as crispy as fried bacon and the industry has completely moved towards making everything look like smeared mucus which makes even supposedly graphically intensive AAA games look like a complete pile of shit.

This is why i'm kinda of pissed at a game like Star Citizen failing so hard to deliver because the visuals are so clean i was hoping for a change in direction in the industry but nooope, can't have nice things.
 

fizzelopeguss

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MSAA is completely inadequate for modern games.

Too many normal maps, alpha transparancies and foliage edges that completely fucks up the edge detection. Every modern game I've tried which supports MSAA looks like shit and is still a jaggy mess. Absurdly expensive too. Performance so bad it's simply better to downsample.

It's great for old games where everything is made up of boxy, simple primitives.
 

DalekFlay

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It's great for old games where everything is made up of boxy, simple primitives.

Even games as old as Dragon Age: Inquisition have MSAA that only works on half the shit on screen, and halves your framerate. This isn't a new development, it is what it is.
 

Baron Dupek

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Not compatible with new, shiny, unnecesary tech trend in graphic department...
 

Avonaeon

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Didn't see this mentioned, but I think some of it can also be attributed to dynamic resolution, where parts of the image will be rendered at different resolution, to help with performance. In essence, without AA enabled, some jaggies just look bigger than others because they are. That's how I understand it anyway. Might be wrong though.
 

DalekFlay

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Didn't see this mentioned, but I think some of it can also be attributed to dynamic resolution, where parts of the image will be rendered at different resolution, to help with performance. In essence, without AA enabled, some jaggies just look bigger than others because they are. That's how I understand it anyway. Might be wrong though.

It's very common on console games, but on PC it's always a toggle you have to opt into, so it shouldn't be a secret. But yeah, I've dabbled with it and think everything gets noticeable more blurry and jaggy, it's very obvious. Maybe less obvious on a TV from further distances.
 

Bad Sector

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MSAA is completely inadequate for modern games. Too many normal maps, alpha transparancies and foliage edges that completely fucks up the edge detection.

You can control how many samples are used in polygon interiors using a minimum fraction - setting that to 1.0 is essentially SSAA, which is overkill, but something between 0.25 to 0.5 is enough to cover jaggies and avoid most shimmering. For example in a new engine i'm working on i use 8xMSAA with 0.5 minimum samples (so the GPU will use at least 4xMSAA for polygon interior - note that obviously both are configurable).

It is also literally a single extra line of code in both OpenGL and Vulkan and if the driver/GPU doesn't support it, they can ignore it, so there aren't any downsides implementation-wise (though you do still need MSAA support).

One reason this isn't used much is that... i can't seem to figure out anything equivalent on Direct3D 12. The closest is a "quality" parameter, but that is very vague (it just says that increasing it increases the multisampling quality at cost of speed - which technically does apply to minimum sampling coverage setting

Didn't see this mentioned, but I think some of it can also be attributed to dynamic resolution, where parts of the image will be rendered at different resolution, to help with performance. In essence, without AA enabled, some jaggies just look bigger than others because they are. That's how I understand it anyway. Might be wrong though.

Yes, though note that dynamic resolution is applied for the entire rendered scene, not just parts of it - essentially this is rendering only inside a fraction of the backbuffer and then scaling up that fraction to fill the screen. Also note that this is orthogonal to antialiasing - you can have the most complex antialiasing in combination with dynamic resolution.

Also TBH i'd expect any game that uses it on PC to provide controls for setting it the minimum scale to 100% (ie. disable it) since that is trivial to do.

(there have been some attempts to render different parts of the screen -e.g. objects- at different resolution, e.g. this one from Intel, but i do not think these caught on)
 

Norfleet

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I don't use any of these fancy AA solutions. They just make the image blurry so you can no longer see which pixel belongs to which item. If I want my view to be blurry, I can use my own anti-aliasing solution. I call it VodkAA. It uses no processing time at all and has zero impact on frame rates. You just consume the VodkAA and voila, whatever these "jaggies" are, they're gone now.
 

Azdul

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MSAA is completely inadequate for modern games.

Too many normal maps, alpha transparancies and foliage edges that completely fucks up the edge detection. Every modern game I've tried which supports MSAA looks like shit and is still a jaggy mess. Absurdly expensive too. Performance so bad it's simply better to downsample.
As I understand, there is no 'edge detection' in MSAA. You're simply rendering geometry using slightly different camera angles, and average over the results. If the vertex disappears in the middle due to alpha channel, FXAA / MLAA / SRAA will stumble upon edge detection, but MSAA will simply do nothing.

MSAA is great for engines built upon older DirectX or OpenGL not using vendor specific extensions. You're not messing with rendering pipeline, so enabling MSAA will get you expected results.

MSAA is great for Vulcan and DirectX 12, when you're designing your own rendering pipeline and rendering passes from ground up to support it, and you know what you're doing.

It is broken somewhere in the middle, especially when using deferred lightning / shadows or fancy shaders. You want to support older GPUs, but at the same time you don't want to design separate renderer for them, so MSAA option is either not available or broken.
 

Bad Sector

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As I understand, there is no 'edge detection' in MSAA. You're simply rendering geometry using slightly different camera angles, and average over the results. If the vertex disappears in the middle due to alpha channel, FXAA / MLAA / SRAA will stumble upon edge detection, but MSAA will simply do nothing.

What you describe is kiiiiinda sort of close to what TAA does (though it does it over several frames which is why when you stay still the image becomes very smooth but when things move they are a bit sharper). Though "TAA" isn't really a single method, it is more of a general approach and every implementation is different - kinda similar to SSAO.

MSAA is basically a modification of SSAA. SSAA takes multiple samples for each pixel (taking samples = checking if a pixel is inside or outside a triangle and if inside, calculating the final color) and averages the result. Essentially it is like rendering a picture at a high resolution, e.g., 2000x2000 and scaling it down to 1000x1000 (this is 4xSSAA because it uses four samples -2x2- per pixel).

MSAA does that but it only uses multiple samples near the triangle edges (there is no edge detection since the GPU already knows where the edges are) and only one sample for pixels that are "inside" the polygon. This allows it to be faster than SSAA while still producing smooth edges.

The main issue with this is that anything with high contrast inside the polygon only has one sample taken so it can have jaggies. Note that this isn't just about pixel shaders or even modern engines (though pixel shaders often are used to add normal mapping and sometimes even parallax mapping which essentially acts as if you have more geometric detail without actually having it, so it makes the issue more visible). You could have the same issue with, say, a game using one or two big triangles with a texture with a checkerboard and nearest point filtering: jaggies will appear where the checkboard changes from black to white because even though you are using MSAA, it is only applied at the edges of the triangles and not inside the triangles where the checkerboard changes from black to white.

One way to avoid this is to do what i wrote previously and define a minimum number of samples per pixel. This is trivial to do though it does make rendering the scene heavier (and MSAA itself isn't light either). On the other hand this could be applied per material so you could only use it for problematic materials that show a lot of shimmering.

Modern GPUs also have introduced variable rate shading which essentially allows shader calculations to be shared among nearby pixels - ie. the opposite of MSAA. I haven't tried it myself (i do not think my GPU even supports it) but it could probably be used to counteract the performance penalty that a minimum number of samples per pixel adds. Though that is a guess TBH.

It is broken somewhere in the middle, especially when using deferred lightning / shadows or fancy shaders. You want to support older GPUs, but at the same time you don't want to design separate renderer for them, so MSAA option is either not available or broken.

FWIW this was only an issue back in the midlate 2000s when GPUs didn't support multisampled render buffers, but nowadays it isn't really a problem and hasn't been for a while (actually it wasn't even when i made that engine, i think even the ATI X1950 my old Athlon64 has could do it). This video shows an engine i wrote back in 2012 and has deferred shading, SSAO, 4xMSAA and contact hardening soft shadows (which is what the video mainly focuses on).
 

DalekFlay

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You can control how many samples are used in polygon interiors using a minimum fraction - setting that to 1.0 is essentially SSAA, which is overkill, but something between 0.25 to 0.5 is enough to cover jaggies and avoid most shimmering. For example in a new engine i'm working on i use 8xMSAA with 0.5 minimum samples (so the GPU will use at least 4xMSAA for polygon interior - note that obviously both are configurable).

I really wish more games had a slider that let you render above the output resolution. When a game does that, like Assassin's Creed Origins for example, it's a marvelous AA solution even at 20% above, or 40% if you've got the horsepower.

Obviously nvidia DSR allows this, but unless you use a straight 2x on each axis it causes distortion that you need to blur the image to get rid of, ruining the effect.
 

Alienman

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Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy Codex Year of the Donut Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Not an AA expert, but if you wanna see a grade A anti-alias disaster play Hell Let Loose. I'm not sure if it's the developers or just the Unreal 4 engine being unreal.

Ffxa basically does nothing. Not sure it is even working.
Standard Taa is someone pouring 2 liter vaseline over your screen. Everything is out of focus and there is this weird ghosting/shimmering effects on all movements. It's a real pain to play and see anything.
Then we have clarity Taa, it's Taa but without the vaseline. I'm not even sure what it does really, because no jaggies have been smoothed out, it kinda looks like playing without AA, but everything is sharpened. So sharpened it will eventually feel like sharpened knives in your eyes.
 

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