Does Anti aliasing even work anymore?

[spiroulis]

Hello, i know this has been posted on various forums many times but i cant find an answer that i understand. So i got an rx580 and in most of the games i see a lot of jagged edges and most of the times the pixels actually move which is kinda horrible to look at. I just started playing Dragon quest XI and the problem is way too obvious here. Every setting that i change seems to not have any effect. I tried the highest aa setting on the game and the lowest but they both look the same. I tried various settings in the radeon software, "use application settings" "enchance application settings" "override" all look the same xd. So i researched and i found some people saying that you use dsr (which i tried and downscaled from 2k but still the same) and that in 1440p it works fine? i dont quite get it. Is it my gpu's fault? My 1080p monitor? Bad aa in games? Some insight would be nice, thanks in advance

[Avanta8]

Can you post a screenshot of the game?

[WereCatf]

4 minutes ago, spiroulis said:

i dont quite get it. Is it my gpu's fault? My 1080p monitor? Bad aa in games?

No idea what, but it's definitely on your end. AA works perfectly fine in all games on my end, though I have entirely different hardware.

[Tristerin]

Isnt that a port?  From 2015?

 

AA works just fine, and is very obvious in all the games I play.  Without it...1080p looks garbo.  Same as 1440p.  And I can easily tell when its on or off at 4k.

 

 

[minibois]

AA and MSAA should work fine.

FXAA is not that good in my opinion (as it mainly just blurs the image).

 

The idea of DSR (and similar tech) is that you are rendering at a larger resolution (usually 2x) and then downscaling it to a lower resolution, which the downscaling would get rid of the worst jagged edges.

AA basically renders a picture twice and blends them together, which would also get rid of the jagged edges. In my experience AA 'still' works fine (although I don't play DQ XI, no idea what AA options that has), so you'd have to include some screenshots of the contrary to show us what issue(s) you're facing.

 

[spiroulis]

 

look at the girl's face and the grass on the second image, honestly in the screenshots it does not look that bad. The bigger problem is that the jagged edges "move" and you can see the squared edges moving.

EDIT: i used dsr 4k and it seems mostly fine but my poor rx580 cant handle that xd. So do you guys think it is the games fault? The settings it has dont say they aa method, its just labeled from 1-6. I have noticed this in other games aswell tho.

[BiotechBen]

I emulate pokemon colosseum on my RX 480, upscale to a 1080p variant, and without AA it looks like absolute garbage, but if I go the other direction it just blurs everything when in motion and it's a smeary mess, I choose 2-4x MSAA and include vertex rounding(only sorta helps) to hit the sweet spot. There will always be some amount of jaggedness as the game is old and in this case designed for something like 607x416 weird resolution. Your game will have the same, it's an older game and not designed to be run at above native resolution. What would have been a single pixel at 720p is now multiple pixels at 1080p and still using the same geometry.

[Chris Pratt]

It's not so much a matter of if it works. It's imperfect by nature because the source "problem" is one that can't actually be solved. AA just tries to make it less noticeable.

 

3D graphics are represented as polygon meshes, composed out of triangles because a triangle is the simplest shape that has dimension. The job of a graphics card is to take these meshes and turn them into a pixel map based on the camera, shaders and lighting of the scene. That means you have edges on the various triangles that have to be translated into pixels, and the line of the edge often only maps to maybe like 30% of one pixel or 80% of another. Without AA you just either color the pixel or not, leading to the jagged uneven edges.

 

AA is about pixel subsampling. For example, a 4X subsampling would basically look at four points on a single pixel, like maybe each corner, and see if the line intersects there or not. This then creates an average of the amount of intersection and grades how much of the pixel should be colored, basically adding more options than just on and off. This is perhaps too simplistic an explanation, but that's the basic idea. This serves to make the line look less jaggy but can also introduce artifacts, i.e. pixels that are graded inaccurately and this don't look natural next to the others. These are the highlights you often see with AA.

 

Now, since this is a problem that has faced computer graphics since the beginning of time, there's all kinds of different methodologies for attempting to solve this problem that have been developed over the years with greater or lesser success. Not every game supports every method, so you're limited somewhat by how the individual game chose to solve it at the time of its development. Something that may have been the best option at the time may look like trash compared to a better more modern method. That's the breaks. No method is 100% perfect, though.

 

Also, since the issue is making irregular pixels caused by mapping a random edge in space to a grid look less noticeable, pretty much the best way to do that is making the grid imperceptively small, i.e. pixel density. If you have a high enough resolution on a screen sized and spaced far enough from your eyes that the human eye cannot make out the individual pixels, then the irregular lines in the pixel map essentially smooth themselves out naturally, because you can no longer perceive them. A sufficiently pixel dense display would not need AA at all, but of course, the more pixels, the harder the GPU has to work to map them all, so there's very real limits here.

 

Super resolution techniques are a similar but somewhat different way to solve this issue. The idea is that the more pixels you have (i.e. the denser the grid) the easier it becomes to represent these edges in space, meaning you have to make less compromises, and AA techniques don't have to be utilized as heavily. However, again, that means the GPU has to handle more pixels, so it has serious performance implications. For example, you could render at 1440p and downscale to 1080p, but then if you can do that, why not just render and display at 1440p on a more pixel dense display. In other words super resolution is mostly a non-starter unless you simply just have far more graphical horse power than you need anyways. Like if you have a 360hz 1080p display and a 3080 because you want 10,000,000 FPS in CS:GO, but now you're playing a casual AAA game that doesn't need more than 60 FPS, you could employ super resolution for a better image at 1080p, because your GPU is only at like 30% utilization. That's obviously kind of an edge case, though.

[emosun]

You know , I think I can pile on and say that the AA in my games..... doesn't work either. I have a 4k display so I can kinda just escape the problem by running thing in 4k. But yeah , my AA also doesn't work.

[Hairless Monkey]

It looks like that game uses a lot of alpha textures for the grass etc. Standard AA methods tend to work on polygons, but not on those transparent textures. I doubt that game has support for more advanced forms of AA. For NVIDA, you can force "Transparency AA" in the control panel for some games that support it. I don't know if/what the AMD equivalent would be for that.

[emosun]

41 minutes ago, Chris Pratt said:

Not every game supports every method, so you're limited somewhat by how the individual game chose to solve it at the time of its development. Something that may have been the best option at the time may look like trash compared to a better more modern method.

I can say honestly that the AA in older games actually tends to be better than newer games.

 

I was trying to remember what game I was playing way back in the day where the AA was just incredible and almost perfect and the I remembered it's was the original Dirt from 2007 that my dad had. I agree they definitely had to program for this to get the AA to work this well.

The overall sepia tone and overuse of bloom looks very 2007 , but from an AA standpoint it's a good example of how it could be done much better today in more modern games.

 

 

 

 

[jones177]

The last test I did with AA was with Fallout 4 in 4k.

There are parts of the image that I like with no AA and the are parts that I like with TAA. Sort of a tossup.

Next time Dragon Quest XI is on sale I will pick it up. You have got me curious.

[typographie]

https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Dragon_Quest_XI

The PCGW article lists a few methods to force anti-aliasing in the game via .ini tweaking. SSAA in particular might yield some noticeable results, but even the TAA listed is probably better than the game's default FXAA.

 

I don't think there's anything wrong with your hardware. It's just a game with shitty options for anti-aliasing, it happens.

 

https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Engine:Unreal_Engine_4#Jittery_temporal_anti-aliasing

Since the game uses Unreal Engine 4, you might be able to try this edit as well to improve TAA flicker. I have absolutely no idea if it will work or do anything noticeable, though.

[Mark Kaine]

This really greatly depends on the game. 

In some games I like actually no anti aliasing,  because there is none that bothers me, some games I use enhance,  transparency thingies in nv settings, etc.  Generally I like taa+fxaa most,  but this often also depends on other settings like ao or vxao, motion blur, and also especially af, etc.

 

I have not seen a game yet where either of these methods doesn't work. 

 

2 hours ago, typographie said:

 

https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Engine:Unreal_Engine_4#Jittery_temporal_anti-aliasing

Since the game uses Unreal Engine 4, you might be able to try this edit as well to improve TAA flicker. I have absolutely no idea if it will work or do anything noticeable, though.

Interesting, I think i was able to reduce that with enhance aa and transparency in Tekken 7 (which is ue4 iirc)

 

 

[Morrie Sells Wigs]

On 3/31/2021 at 12:47 PM, spiroulis said:

Hello, i know this has been posted on various forums many times but i cant find an answer that i understand. So i got an rx580 and in most of the games i see a lot of jagged edges and most of the times the pixels actually move which is kinda horrible to look at. I just started playing Dragon quest XI and the problem is way too obvious here. Every setting that i change seems to not have any effect. I tried the highest aa setting on the game and the lowest but they both look the same. I tried various settings in the radeon software, "use application settings" "enchance application settings" "override" all look the same xd. So i researched and i found some people saying that you use dsr (which i tried and downscaled from 2k but still the same) and that in 1440p it works fine? i dont quite get it. Is it my gpu's fault? My 1080p monitor? Bad aa in games? Some insight would be nice, thanks in advance

It may simply be that your 1080 resolution can be very blurry, and very jaggy.