Just take off your glasses? FXAA? Texture LOD?

Discussion in 'Videocards - AMD Radeon Drivers Section' started by nonexistent, Feb 1, 2013.

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FXAA or MSAA?

  1. FXAA please

    13 vote(s)
    16.3%
  2. MSAA please

    56 vote(s)
    70.0%
  3. Just took off my glasses :P

    11 vote(s)
    13.8%
  1. nonexistent

    nonexistent New Member

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    I dunno if this has been discussed before but I am worried abaut the FXAA implementation in games. More and more games do not even allow to switch off FXAA and FXAA has replaced MSAA in many games.
    Maybe this is only my point of view but for me FXAA is as if you have forgotten to put on your glasses! The whole HD experience of modern games is blurred. Even MSAA blurrs the textures a little but at least you have some HD highlights. In Assassin's Creed 3 for example the FXAA even has a major impact on performance and you are not able to switch it off. So who has decided that FXAA is the way graphics are meant to be?
    Usually I even turn off all antialiasing and set Texture LOD in RadeonPro to -0,2 so that texture details are crisp even on distant objects which gives a more realistic visual experience (for example Age of Conan).
    So what do you think? I would not enforce FXAA as the way to go.
     
  2. BetA

    BetA Ancient Guru

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    i think the same way..
    u could use sweetfx (lumasharpen) to counter its Blur effect...

    or just use the better AA, sgssaa with neg lod or supersample aa , msaa etc..

    -BetA-
     
  3. Espionage724

    Espionage724 Guest

    Developers who already skimp-out on making console ported games work properly on PC. AA might take a bit of effort to get right, but why take that effort, when you can just slap FXAA over the entire scene, lessen jaggedness, AND get minimal performance hit? :p
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Feb 1, 2013
  4. Fox2232

    Fox2232 Guest

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    Actually regular textures have soft enough gamma/color transitions to not trigger FXAA/SMAA.
    That is why those filters yield better results on scenes without AA than on scenes with 2x/4xAA.

    Filter does not work on edges with low contrast too.

    If filter is implemented incorrectly then it really makes blurry image no matter if it's FX/SMAA.
     

  5. Nichtswisser

    Nichtswisser Guest

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    FXAA and MLAA are crap. The whole reason why we're seeing more and more of it is because of deferred shading which is a vain attempt to make it possible to render more light sources on ancient console hardware. It makes certain things a little cheaper to render, yet one problem, and not the only one, is that hardware AA (MSAA) does not work with deferred shading.

    And thanks to that we get a poor mans AA that has trouble to work when things are moving, which they usually do constantly in games, and which makes everything blurry.
     
  6. Mr Terry Turnip

    Mr Terry Turnip Guest

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    The only time I use FXAA is when MSAA is too heavy performance wise, unfortunately with this new AA it does not equal the devs thinking ideal we can make much better gfx now we have an AA option with such a small performance hit, it equals less work for the devs, instead of m..

    Actually I cba anymore.

    More powerful GPU? IDEAL means we don't have to spend extra time with optimization.

    LESS DEMANDING AA? IDEAL! SAME!

    You get the idea.

    It's all a con.

    We are not paying an extra £250 for a super powered GPU so we can get better performance we are [paying that so devs can be less arsed to work to get the games looking great and running well.

    There are many ways you can look at this, it's all the same in the end.

    We lose. (money as well)
     
    Last edited: Feb 12, 2013
  7. AbjectBlitz

    AbjectBlitz Ancient Guru

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    I just use downsampling, FXAA and similar are terrible implementations that just blur the image. Cant stand anything that blurs my games.
     
  8. NiColaoS

    NiColaoS Master Guru

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    On DX9 games, MSAA is more than enough ( e.g., Skyrim ). I don't like FXAA; especially when in motion. Also, FXAA defeats the purpose of HD Textures. I see guys using the best HD Textures on Skyrim while they have FXAA enabled... Madness. Although despite the blurriness, it seems you get better results on some "normal" edges.

    On DX11 games with tessellation and more edges/objects in menu, I prefer a combination of both. On Bf3 for instance, 4xMSAA + FXAA on Low gives the best results. And that's because the game is heavily optimised for this combination.

    I really wonder when the time that we'll be able to afford 4x SSAA will come.
     
    Last edited: Feb 12, 2013
  9. Danny Nissan

    Danny Nissan Active Member

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    I agree with OP, FXAA/whatever blurs the image too much. The "HD" is totally gone in todays games - looks like you play in 1680x1050 on a 1920x1200 LCD....
     
  10. Dwarden

    Dwarden Member Guru

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    this poll is flawed by default ... as no SMAA mentioned ...

    SMAA is way better in quality than FXAA with sharpen filter

    so if you going to try run discussion about post process AA like MLAA, FXAA, SMAA

    hint, don't confuse SMAA with MSAA ... two different things

    SMAA is http://www.iryoku.com/smaa/

    then please talk about all of them

    note: if there is better ppAA than SMAA please smash me with URL/ docs / details ... thanks
     
    Last edited: Feb 14, 2013

  11. Redemption80

    Redemption80 Guest

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    It depends on the implementation, MSAA just doesn't work very well in most new game engines so even if the game has MSAA i still need a bit of post processing to stop the image looking a jaggy mess.
    FXAA looks good in screenshots, but in motion it's a different story and can end up making the aliasing even more distracting, TXAA has alot of potential though, but still needs some work i think.

    I don't mind a little blurring here and there, if i need to do a before and after to notice it then it's not an issue.

    Personally i think alot of people are half blind anyway.
    Nothing worse looking than a jaggy image and ever since things like SweetFX have appeared i've noticed more and more that people crank the sharpening up so high it makes me pull back from the screen
     
  12. Lowki

    Lowki Master Guru

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    In most games i prefer no aa looks way more crisp. Some games look god awfull without it one in particular is skyrim then i like super sample aa with edge detect.
     
  13. AbjectBlitz

    AbjectBlitz Ancient Guru

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    Kind of depends if one plays singleplayer or multi I guess. In single I don't really care, but in multi I want super crisp image. Any blurring is most certainly a no, I would rather have jaggies than a blurred image making pixel hunting headshots difficult.

    One of the main reasons why I always loved PC gaming was the crisp, sharp high rez graphics. So these blur cheap AA implementations bother me and so do the games that try to look cinematic with ridiculous motion blur. :bang:
     
    Last edited: Feb 14, 2013
  14. Nichtswisser

    Nichtswisser Guest

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    Yeah, motion blue is just terrible. As are DoF effects. For cut scenes those are ok as they produce a cinematic effects which fits those well, yet not for actual gameplay as you don't see those in real life either.

    Really not sure what's up with the blurriness movement apparently going on in the gaming industry. Blurry textures, blur-shader-AA, motion blur, depth of field blur.... Would I want blurry, I would play in non-native resolutions and stop cleaning my monitor.
     
  15. CPC_RedDawn

    CPC_RedDawn Ancient Guru

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    I think its pretty unanimous that everyone would prefer the much better IQ of MSAA compared to FXAA and other such injectors that clearly just mask the image by adding a filter to the image which blurs out jaggies.

    I want Nvidia and AMD to focus more heavily on MSAA or even SSAA (Super Sample AA) our graphics cards nowadays are so powerful yet if we apply super sample AA to our latest games our fps plummets in most cases. Super Sample AA destroys jaggies and the IQ is simply without question the best. Our graphics cards now come with Tessellation engines, part out our cards architecture and drivers have been specifically designed for Tessellation. So why can't they do the same thing for AA?? Make a graphics card architecture that is made from the ground up to push as many frames as possible at high resolutions with high levels SSAA applied and Tessellation. Our games would looks so much better for it, and if graphics manufacturers start to better support it in their architecture then maybe devs will also apply it to their games as well.
     

  16. plywood99

    plywood99 Guest

    Agree 100%
    SMAA looks awesome. SMAA with a decent sharpen filter looks amazing.
    Honestly I wonder why AMD/Nvidia don't support SMAA and other post processing effects. It's simple to include with the driver and gives the user a ton of options to play with to set each game how the user sees fit.

    The future is in post processing effects people. Time to get on board.
     
  17. NiColaoS

    NiColaoS Master Guru

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    SMAA/SweetFx/FXAA/MLAA same crap, slightly different settings. Since it's not working when in motion and on some specific objects at all, there's no fundamental difference. You place them all in one category, "Post Processing AA" and you're done.

    Without the solidness that MSAA or SSAA provide in the environment, this AA method will remain bad, no matter what. Think of the wires on Operation Firestorm or the poles generally on Battlefield 3. Try to go from one flag to another on Firestorm that you have a big open area in front of you, and tell me how it looks... Everything is flickering/flashing, along with the blurriness. Then, apply 4xMSAA and lower the FXAA to 'Low' -It's almost perfect.

    I really prefer to lower the eye-candy as much as I need in order to maintain at least the 4xMSAA and 60FPS VSync'ed. If there's a reason to make me get a second GPU, that would solely be for 4xSSAA. But I'm not so mindless yet. :S
     
    Last edited: Feb 15, 2013
  18. Dwarden

    Dwarden Member Guru

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    Nicolaos I guess you don't even bothered compare the quality of SMAA vs rest ...

    for me the SMAA is only usable ppAA compared to normal MSAA ...

    and yes I use it already together with SSAA ...

    our ARMA 2: OA and TOH supports ppAA (FXAA or SMAA) which can be combined with super-sampled (200% render then downscaled) and MSAA ...
     
  19. Fox2232

    Fox2232 Guest

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    Yes, I love downscaling posibility in ARMA 2. I use 1.33/1.5 multiply of native screen res. Those are pretty nice.

    And I would love to have such thing incorporated in Driver or RadeonPRO.
    In some cases I use SoftTH to get it working but it sometimes results in smaller text/hud.

    And in game like Path of Exile external SMAA filter from RadeonPRO gives less blurry image than game's own AA method.

    I personally consider best thing (atm.) to have SMAA + 1.33/1.5x downscaling.
    From visual it is somewhere between 4x and 4x EdgeDetect. But performance hit is much smaller.
     
  20. Mr Terry Turnip

    Mr Terry Turnip Guest

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    Graphics cards are piss weak, 4xSSAA 1080p should be bog standard stuff in 2013

    Every BS excuse in the book to release next gen cards charging £500 a pop, which barely get 15-25% increase AT BEST over last gen cards - pitiful

    If they use much better tech, they even be sure to crap it out by clocking it so damn low... said increase remains at.. you guessed it.. about 15-25%


    Pitiful.

    They could, if there was proper demand for it ofc (there is not, people are satisfied with the power available in 2013) actually release cards with proper next gen tech and NOT cripple them with hideous slow clock speeds etc, therefore giving a WORTHY, and ACCEPTABLE 50-80% performance increase over LAST gen cards - this should be the god damned EXPECTED shizzle, but it's not, people just have become accepting of the weak increases latest gen cards provide, and throw in the FANBOYS who love to spout garbage like "well you do not have ot buy a new card every generation..." idiots, you do, because GPU's are so damned piss weak and games coded so lazily we need to get every damned increase we can possibly get, so we end up so desperate (as perfectly manipulated by the likes of Nvida etc etc) we will pay absurd amounts to play games at 1080p maxed out.

    Poor.
     
    Last edited: Feb 15, 2013

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