Regarding the whining about anti aliasing not working....

[FFCW_Urizen]

Originally Posted by Liz Lemon

Yeah, deferred rendering has made the formerly easy step of adding AA very difficult.

And that is why you see tons of modern games that lack support for AA entirely - games like Crysis, Battlefield 3, Dead Space, Mass Effect.

It is hardly a problem unique to cod.

Crysis had AA implemented but not AF . Don´t know about Crysis 2 though, haven´t played it in a while . To me AF is more important than AA, because i got the feeling that with TFTs, AA got more and more useless, especially with very high dpi. AF on the other hand...

[Skoshi Tiger]

In the past when I was using AA I had to reduce my resolution in order to improve my dot visiblity to a useable level.

Now that I've disabled my AA setting I can actually see the dots at the full native resolution of my monitor (1680x 1050).

My understanding of AA is that it works by blending the colours found in adjacent pixels (by a variety of methods). This is bad for seeing fine detail in the images.

Cheers!

[Liz Lemon]

Originally Posted by FFCW_Urizen

Crysis had AA implemented but not AF . Don´t know about Crysis 2 though, haven´t played it in a while . To me AF is more important than AA, because i got the feeling that with TFTs, AA got more and more useless, especially with very high dpi. AF on the other hand...

Crysis sorta has msaa, but not on things like vegetation. They actually used a hybrid solution where there is a post-aa effect on some things. Crysis 2 is even weirder - it uses temporal aa on far away objects, and something sorta like smaa on nearby objects. As for AF - it doesn't work with their implementation of parallax mapping, and almost everything on the ground uses parallax. I think it does work if you turn off parallax mapping though.

Originally Posted by CWMV

So how does this company getting it wrong absolve 1C of their mistake/failure to release this part of the sim in a functioning form?

Its like accidentally running over a hooker, and then telling the cops hey its alright, my rich neighbors freezer is FULL of dead hookers, so I'm good.

Or something like that....

Because getting true AA working with a deferred rendering pipeline is very, very difficult - and some of the greatest programmers working in real time 3d haven't been able to figure out how.

But hey, maybe you can figure out how!

[Verhängnis]

I managed to force AA with Nvidia fine with minimal to no FPS loss.

[Ataros]

Originally Posted by Liz Lemon

Because getting true AA working with a deferred rendering pipeline is very, very difficult - and some of the greatest programmers working in real time 3d haven't been able to figure out how.

Yes, now it is much more difficult than 10 years ago.

One more rather important disadvantage is that, due to separating the lighting stage from the geometric stage, hardware anti-aliasing does not produce correct results any more: although the first pass used when rendering the basic properties (diffuse, normal etc.) can use anti-aliasing, it's not until full lighting has been applied that anti-alias is needed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deferred_shading

Sadly not everyone makes his research before posting which makes some posts look like ignorant speculations aimed to insult developers.

[FFCW_Urizen]

Originally Posted by Liz Lemon

Crysis sorta has msaa, but not on things like vegetation. They actually used a hybrid solution where there is a post-aa effect on some things. Crysis 2 is even weirder - it uses temporal aa on far away objects, and something sorta like smaa on nearby objects. As for AF - it doesn't work with their implementation of parallax mapping, and almost everything on the ground uses parallax. I think it does work if you turn off parallax mapping though.

MSAA doesn´t work and has never worked with alpha channels. It only works on geometry, that is why there was Transparency-AA (NVidia) or Adaptive-AA (ATi) introduced.

Actually i´m starting to lose track of all the different AA techniques, temporal AA? SMAA? phew.

[robtek]

Originally Posted by FFCW_Urizen

MSAA doesn´t work and has never worked with alpha channels. It only works on geometry, that is why there was Transparency-AA (NVidia) or Adaptive-AA (ATi) introduced.

Actually i´m starting to lose track of all the different AA techniques, temporal AA? SMAA? phew.

Or the german abbreviation "LMAA" comes to mind regarding al the aa's.

[FFCW_Urizen]

That´s definitely the best technique, lol.

[Liz Lemon]

Originally Posted by FFCW_Urizen

MSAA doesn´t work and has never worked with alpha channels. It only works on geometry, that is why there was Transparency-AA (NVidia) or Adaptive-AA (ATi) introduced.

Actually i´m starting to lose track of all the different AA techniques, temporal AA? SMAA? phew.

Hahahah, it has gotten really confusing! (and transparencies + MSAA + deferred = NOPE)

ogssaa, sgssaa, msaa, fxaa, mlaa, smaa, dlaa, ebaa, sraa and more! All have advantages and disadvantages, and there are those who will argue in favor of one or the other. It can sorta turn into a pissing match of opinions where opinion matters more then fact.

But this is a pretty good resource for understanding the different types of aa currently in use; http://naturalviolence.webs.com/generalaa.htm

AA is a tough thing. It can kill performance but it also boosts image quality. And games are all about a trade off - speed vs image quality. Finding the proper balance is hard - and different games/situations complicate things further. Untimely though you'll never satisfy everyone - even ssaa has its detractors. But maybe we'll start agreeing until we can do real time raytracing and the like... probably not.

Timothy Lottes, an nvidia developer, has a blog that has delved into some of these issues, and if you follow video game forums then you can see just how divisive this issue can be amongst the "hardcore" gamer set. Even in the company of "gamers" the solution isn't clear - some people prefer the artificially high micro-contrast/sharpness that games create.

His blog is here: http://timothylottes.blogspot.com/

Untimely "sharpness" is a difficult thing to quantify and AA only solves part of the problem, but that is beyond this discussion.

Also, I should mention that AA works fine if you run the game in DX9 mode. There was a post where luther confirmed that the game is using a deferred renderer in DX10 mode, but DX9 is a "traditional" forward renderer. So, if you want AA you can have it, just don't complain when you don't have the fancy shader and lighting effects of DX10 mode! aka il2 mode!

And I don't mean to come off as terse in my posts. It's just that I've been working on a game for the past ~1.5 years that uses a deferred renderer.. and AA has been a near constant headache for us. I can understand why COD has the problems that it does, but most people seem to think its 2004....

EDIT: I've been screwing around with forcing OGSSAA in COD, but doing so with my semi-old ati card, a 4870x2, it doesn't seem to work. Can someone with a nvidia card, or a newer ati card try to force it? I know it'll make performance unbearable, but it'd be cool to see radio wires without jaggies

[FFCW_Urizen]

SSAA with ATi cards works only on DX9 Engines.

BTW, how do you set SG- or OG- MS(SS)AA with ATi cards??