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Old 02-04-2012, 08:27 PM
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Ailantd Ailantd is offline
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Ok, here we go with some 3d history that can help you to understand the state in the 3d industry about AA.

AA was introduced some years ago in the fixed pipeline as a hardware/driver feature, so developers just needed to tell the GPU to activate it and the GPU did all the work. You even could activate or deactivate it from your GPU driver configuration. That is how fixed pipeline engines worked and still works. Of course in fixed pipeline engines developers are limited to what drivers and hardware can do (no great fX or effects, only common and standard things). Now we have non fixed pipeline engines, wich works with shaders, where developers can (and have to!) control all about the rendering process, which is extremely more complicated and time consuming, but we can have bump mapping, nice reflections and plenty of other nice FX, only limited by imagination, hardware processing time and time to develop and optimice it. Important thing is that now all is coded by developers, including AA. In this kind of egines AA is no more automatic and need to be manually coded as post process filter over the whole image. Thats why even if you turn on AA in drivers configuration in no fixed pipeline engines it do nothing. Hardware do no calculate it automatically anymore, not AA, not anything. Coding AA filter shader is not easy if you want it to be efficient and not blurring all the image. You need to identificate manually all edges and so on... So give devs a break, things are not easy anymore as we ask for more fx and eyecandy. It can be done, but need time if you also want a lot of fps.
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Last edited by Ailantd; 02-04-2012 at 08:33 PM.