Different Types of Anti-aliasing as Fast As Possible
Techquickie
·Techquickie
·2015-05-07
·
1,141 words · ~5 min read
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you guys have been asking for this fastest Possible episode for the better
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part of a year so I guess it's time to deliver for starters if you don't know
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what anti- aliasing is at all yet or you
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need a quick refresher please check out our overview video here or if you've
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disabled annotations then use the link in the video description moving along
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all methods of anti-aliasing fall into one of two groups the first increases
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the sample rate which means it renders the scene at what is effectively a
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higher resolution than down samples to the display res solution effectively
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smoothing lines and the second blurs edges or other contrasts due to shading
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and textures and is known as post AA or postprocessing since the blurring occurs
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directly after the render process msaa
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and ssaa both fall under the first category super sampling anti-aliasing
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also known as full scene anti-aliasing or fsaa was the first type of AA
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available with early video cards it is best used on photorealistic images as it
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makes them appear softer and more lifelike but for line art or diagrams it
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actually decreases the quality and makes them appear fuzzy especially for
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horizontal and vertical lines ssaa has a
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huge computational cost so most real-time applications like games have
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moved away from this method typically fsaa goes up to 4X but if you have
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horsepower to spare there's a modified version for SLI users which can crank
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the sample rate up to 16x or even 128x
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if you're running running quadros in SLI just in case your neck gets tired and
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you want to put them in your computer or something msaa or multi- sampling
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anti-aliasing is similar to fsaa but it
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only super samples the edges of polygons
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and calculates textures once per pixel which significantly cuts down on the
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required processing power the main downside however is that it doesn't
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prevent aliasing that appears within rendered polygons caused by blending
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textures or pixel shaders after a few more advances in super sampling
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techniques CSAA or coverage sample anti-
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lasing was released along with the GeForce 8 series graphics cards from
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NVIDIA It produced images that rivaled the quality of 16x msaa while only
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causing a slightly higher performance hindrance than 4xmsaa it accomplished
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this by simply detecting whether or not a polygon is present and then using that
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information to judge where it needs to use super sampling so let's move over to
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the second type of ant saying post AA or postprocessing a great example of this
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is FXAA or fast approximate anti-aliasing this technique was
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developed by Timothy Lots under NVIDIA it gets rid of jaggies or Jagged edges
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by smoothing the edges on each pixel on the screen directly after each pixel is
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rendered including those in Blended textures and pixel shaders the smoothing
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directly after pixels are rendered part is huge as most anti-aliasing techniques
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have to analyze a 3D model as a whole to smooth the edges rather than smoothing
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each pixel individually FXAA judges where in edges by comparing the depth
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between two pixels and smooth their edges according to their relative depth
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unfortunately this technique does make some textures appear soft and must be
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applied before heads up display elements are rendered so that they remain sharp
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and clear FXAA was such an improvement over previous techniques that Kotaku
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actually claimed that FXAA made all previous forms of anti-aliasing obsolete
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with its speed and accuracy NVIDIA has also since added txaa or temporal
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anti-aliasing which is a film style anti-aliasing technique designed to
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reduce temporal aliasing crawling and flickering scen in motion when playing
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games and this is a very complex form of AA which combines down sampling and
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blurring it uses a lot more performance than FXAA its implementation differs
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from game to game and it's only available on gpus from the Kepler family
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or higher well Linus you might be saying
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this is all well and good but what if I'm a member of team red or what if my
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graphics card doesn't natively support some of the AA methods you've mentioned
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in this video well that's a great question not every graphics card has
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native support for each method of anti- eling but you can usually add one in
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yourself it won't always work as easily or as well as a developer implemented
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solution but you can actually download plenty of drivers that will add in
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anti-aliasing techniques some of which are more advanced than what the
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developer may have added one such solution is SMA or subpixel
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morphological anti-aliasing this combines morphological anti-aliasing a
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post-processing technique that identifies aliasing based on patterns
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and blends colors around them to diminish that aliasing with super sampling like msaa or SSA AA to sharpen
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the entire Scene It is natively supported in some games and many users
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have seen Market improvements in visual quality when adding SMA to games like
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Skyrim many of them claim that it provides the smoothness of FXAA without
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the performance hit but of course your mileage may vary so there you have it as
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usual it comes down to personal preference and you'll want to do some experimentation to see what works best
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for your eyes on your rig in your games
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linda.com tequ to check that out guys thanks for watching like if you liked
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dislike if you dislike leave a comment if you have suggestions for future fastest posses and as always don't
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