you guys have been asking for this fastest Possible episode for the better
part of a year so I guess it's time to deliver for starters if you don't know
what anti- aliasing is at all yet or you
need a quick refresher please check out our overview video here or if you've
disabled annotations then use the link in the video description moving along
all methods of anti-aliasing fall into one of two groups the first increases
the sample rate which means it renders the scene at what is effectively a
higher resolution than down samples to the display res solution effectively
smoothing lines and the second blurs edges or other contrasts due to shading
and textures and is known as post AA or postprocessing since the blurring occurs
directly after the render process msaa
and ssaa both fall under the first category super sampling anti-aliasing
also known as full scene anti-aliasing or fsaa was the first type of AA
available with early video cards it is best used on photorealistic images as it
makes them appear softer and more lifelike but for line art or diagrams it
actually decreases the quality and makes them appear fuzzy especially for
horizontal and vertical lines ssaa has a
huge computational cost so most real-time applications like games have
moved away from this method typically fsaa goes up to 4X but if you have
horsepower to spare there's a modified version for SLI users which can crank
the sample rate up to 16x or even 128x
if you're running running quadros in SLI just in case your neck gets tired and
you want to put them in your computer or something msaa or multi- sampling
anti-aliasing is similar to fsaa but it
only super samples the edges of polygons
and calculates textures once per pixel which significantly cuts down on the
required processing power the main downside however is that it doesn't
prevent aliasing that appears within rendered polygons caused by blending
textures or pixel shaders after a few more advances in super sampling
techniques CSAA or coverage sample anti-
lasing was released along with the GeForce 8 series graphics cards from
NVIDIA It produced images that rivaled the quality of 16x msaa while only
causing a slightly higher performance hindrance than 4xmsaa it accomplished
this by simply detecting whether or not a polygon is present and then using that
information to judge where it needs to use super sampling so let's move over to
the second type of ant saying post AA or postprocessing a great example of this
is FXAA or fast approximate anti-aliasing this technique was
developed by Timothy Lots under NVIDIA it gets rid of jaggies or Jagged edges
by smoothing the edges on each pixel on the screen directly after each pixel is
rendered including those in Blended textures and pixel shaders the smoothing
directly after pixels are rendered part is huge as most anti-aliasing techniques
have to analyze a 3D model as a whole to smooth the edges rather than smoothing
each pixel individually FXAA judges where in edges by comparing the depth
between two pixels and smooth their edges according to their relative depth
unfortunately this technique does make some textures appear soft and must be
applied before heads up display elements are rendered so that they remain sharp
and clear FXAA was such an improvement over previous techniques that Kotaku
actually claimed that FXAA made all previous forms of anti-aliasing obsolete
with its speed and accuracy NVIDIA has also since added txaa or temporal
anti-aliasing which is a film style anti-aliasing technique designed to
reduce temporal aliasing crawling and flickering scen in motion when playing
games and this is a very complex form of AA which combines down sampling and
blurring it uses a lot more performance than FXAA its implementation differs
from game to game and it's only available on gpus from the Kepler family
or higher well Linus you might be saying
this is all well and good but what if I'm a member of team red or what if my
graphics card doesn't natively support some of the AA methods you've mentioned
in this video well that's a great question not every graphics card has
native support for each method of anti- eling but you can usually add one in
yourself it won't always work as easily or as well as a developer implemented
solution but you can actually download plenty of drivers that will add in
anti-aliasing techniques some of which are more advanced than what the
developer may have added one such solution is SMA or subpixel
morphological anti-aliasing this combines morphological anti-aliasing a
post-processing technique that identifies aliasing based on patterns
and blends colors around them to diminish that aliasing with super sampling like msaa or SSA AA to sharpen
the entire Scene It is natively supported in some games and many users
have seen Market improvements in visual quality when adding SMA to games like
Skyrim many of them claim that it provides the smoothness of FXAA without
the performance hit but of course your mileage may vary so there you have it as
usual it comes down to personal preference and you'll want to do some experimentation to see what works best
for your eyes on your rig in your games
happy fragging speaking of fragging linda.com well I guess linda.com can't
really help you with fragging but they can help you with a wide variety of other skills they have thousands of
courses with new ones added every week and each course is taught by an industry
expert so you know that the information provided is correct and relevant whether
you want to learn about programming photography or video editing so you can create awesome content like what we
release Here on Techquickie although if you compete with us we'll come and we'll
cut you uh linda.com has you covered you take each course at your own pace so
whether you're breezing through four lectures a day or only fitting in one a
week you can expand your knowledge on your own schedule plans start at a very
reasonable $25 per month which is less than a dollar a day for all you math
wizzes out there but if you want to try out linda.com completely free they're
offering a 7-Day trial to All Techquickie viewers so head over to
linda.com tequ to check that out guys thanks for watching like if you liked
dislike if you dislike leave a comment if you have suggestions for future fastest posses and as always don't
forget to subscribe