TXAA Preview

[Noisiv]

Originally Posted by rewt

So what happened to all the people who said it was just a driver block

pretty sure it still is

but the TXAA is still not in it's final version, and it's impact will (hopefully) be felt further down the line (hello UE4)

[Lane]

Originally Posted by GrandMax

I want TXAA in BF3. Hell yeah.

Lol, like if texture was allready not enough blurry with their AA method . Lets hope Nvidia fix it fast.. .

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost...5&postcount=62

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost...6&postcount=36


http://timothylottes.blogspot.de/201...ut-stills.html

The problem is maybe just Nvidia blur correction is too high, not well sized like for a movie. On a movie, the blur is added as the effect is pretty easy to use for correct the view and "make disapear " the difference between 3D objects or modified object vs the real one... In a game where all are 3D objects... its plenty stupid to use it at this level.

should be fixable..

[Noisiv]

The problem is maybe just Nvidia blur correction is too high, not well sized like for a movie.

No Lane. TXAA filter kernel size is actually slightly sharper than the one used in movies.
Problem comes from the fact that movie frame is richer in details than the game frame.
So when postprocessing blur is introduced in a movie, it still retains more sharpness compared to a game.

Lod bias may be hacked into TXAA to raise game texture resolution.
I have no doubts Timothy will solve this

[Cyberdyne]

It almost sounds like timothy intended it to look that way.
Man, if you disliked the was FXAA looked...

Here is my question though, TXAA blurs out after your GPU bothers to render the textures. Sounds pretty wasteful having the GPU even render full-res textures only to have them blurred to hell afterwards.
I'm not saying it's not a cool effect, it does look neat. But just sounds like a waste of GPU time if you ask me, rendering the textures like that. You would think it would make more sense to incorporate the loss of detail in the textures when rendering them. I don't know man. I don't think I like it.

[Redemption80]

He probably did, many people prefer a softer look and/or will do anything to eradicate all shimmering.

I personally like it, though i can see some serious loss of detail on some of those shots, so it may need some tweaking.

[Spets]

Personally I don't think it looks as bad as people are making it out to be, and it works wonders in motion.
Luckily too though if you follow Timothy's blog and a couple public forums he's been on, there's still alot of work to be done with TXAA, just like FXAA used to.

[Cyberdyne]

Originally Posted by Redemption80

He probably did, many people prefer a softer look and/or will do anything to eradicate all shimmering.

I personally like it, though i can see some serious loss of detail on some of those shots, so it may need some tweaking.

Yeah, I get that it can look cool. Imagine using it in a all cell-shaded game, would look amazing. Or maybe games where there is in general a higher focus on geometry rather than textures (a lot of indie games come to mind, fighting games too).
Maybe I'm not making any sense when I say it seems pointless when your GPU bothers to render the full fledged texture only to blur out the detail, not that the look of that is bad, but it's a waste of GPU resources IMO. - having it generate one image to create another.

[Lane]

Its a choice to made somewhere between the AA result and the way to use something who look like mipmap is on low. Some games will benefit better of it off course.

Personally i dont install High res texture pack ( Like the skyrim patch )for on final have something who look like Rage textures ( ok im a bit bad there ). Peoples praise for High res textures, for increase the textures resolution and there you completely got the invert. At a moment Prtex should arrive on games, use an AA who make disapear the details of the texture is a bit strange even if finally higher detailed will be the textures, better will be the end results of TXAA.

But there again, this is a personal choice and it will depend of the games.

Its allways good to have the choice.

Need more tests, tweaks, maybe someone will come with a 3th party tweaks too soon. ( Like Injector )

[Darren Hodgson]

I find it a bit ironic that now that we have graphics hardware that is capable of handling extremely high resolution textures that the anti-aliasing methods have moved away from MSAA/CSAA and SSAA to console-friendly low-overhead FXAA and now TXAA which blur some of that extra detail!

I guess the extremely dated Xbox 360 and PS3 hardware are to blame for that but I really hope things improve with the release of the next-gen systems because I find FXAA on its own to be adequate at best (lacklustre at worst) but nowhere near as nice as MSAA/CSAA when they are working properly.

Usually I prefer FXAA and MSAA in games like Max Payne 3 and Skyrim as together they remove pretty much all jaggies. FXAA is a decent substitute for the demanding SSAA and SGSSAA but it's no replacement for good MSAA/CSAA in my opinion.

I'm hoping that TXAA will bridge the gap between FXAA and MSAA and offer the best of both worlds. If it does then I'd like to see that used on the next-gen systems instead of FXAA which to be honest can look very poor in some games that support that only. However, despite owning a GTX 680 for almost five months I've yet to see TXAA in any game which really is quite poor from NVIDIA considering it is one of its listed features! I was surprised when it wasn't even showcased in the recently released New Dawn tech demo.

[Netherwind]

And you need 304.79 for it too which is a bit buggy for some.

[Darren Hodgson]

I had no problems at all with the v304.79 drivers nor the current v305.53 ones I'm using now. There again I only use one (24") display and play in 2D and I think those often contribute toward people's problems.

[Netherwind]

Originally Posted by Darren Hodgson

I had no problems at all with the v304.79 drivers nor the current v305.53 ones I'm using now. There again I only use one (24") display and play in 2D and I think those often contribute toward people's problems.

I remember you talking about Vsync stuttering with 304.79?

[RoadKillNL]

Ah wait UE4 aswell eh...that means i am gonna play a game which uses it =] Fortnite.

[Redemption80]

Originally Posted by Darren Hodgson

I find it a bit ironic that now that we have graphics hardware that is capable of handling extremely high resolution textures that the anti-aliasing methods have moved away from MSAA/CSAA and SSAA to console-friendly low-overhead FXAA and now TXAA which blur some of that extra detail!

I guess the extremely dated Xbox 360 and PS3 hardware are to blame for that but I really hope things improve with the release of the next-gen systems because I find FXAA on its own to be adequate at best (lacklustre at worst) but nowhere near as nice as MSAA/CSAA when they are working properly.

Usually I prefer FXAA and MSAA in games like Max Payne 3 and Skyrim as together they remove pretty much all jaggies. FXAA is a decent substitute for the demanding SSAA and SGSSAA but it's no replacement for good MSAA/CSAA in my opinion.

I'm hoping that TXAA will bridge the gap between FXAA and MSAA and offer the best of both worlds. If it does then I'd like to see that used on the next-gen systems instead of FXAA which to be honest can look very poor in some games that support that only. However, despite owning a GTX 680 for almost five months I've yet to see TXAA in any game which really is quite poor from NVIDIA considering it is one of its listed features! I was surprised when it wasn't even showcased in the recently released New Dawn tech demo.

From what I’ve saw TXAA is blurring textures a lot more than FXAA does, but its sole purpose seems to be getting rid of all aliasing and any shimmering, even at the cost of detail loss.

As Timothy keeps mentioning, it’s a CG movie way of doing it, and in movies all aliasing is unacceptable, while a blurred texture here and there isn’t an issue as without seeing it beforehand as you won’t even know there is a loss of detail.
Unfortunately with gaming we do tend to see the original texture beforehand.

It’s not even to do with last gen consoles, or even low overheads, it’s to do with the fact traditional AA just doesn’t work with game engines these days, with MSAA/CSAA all you get is a huge performance penalty, but still end up with an aliased image.

I downloaded the 50mb/s H264 1080p video of the Samaritan tech demo not long ago, and the YouTube compression doesn’t half hide the flaws, the original is full of aliasing and it no longer looks like it could be a CGI movie, but just a very good game.

Cyberdyne, you’re making perfect sense, it does seem very inefficient to render the textures at the highest detail, then smooth away some of that detail, so maybe it will be improved as time goes on, and even if it doesn’t optional features are better than nothing.

[Noisiv]

I am not entirely happy with TSW TXAA blur, but there is really no point in overly crying about sharpness.
Because if it's ultimate sharpness you're looking for, you are looking at the entirely wrong spectrum of AA methods. You should be using MSAA, end-of-story.

TXAA gets rid of with shimmering aka temporal aliasing aka aliasing in movement, and it is simply impossible to retain sharpness and deal with shimmering.

From Timothy Lottes blog:

• Anti-aliasing is always a trade off with sharpness, even when done correctly by super-sampling and a proper down-sampling filter.
  
• There is a direct trade off between sharpness and temporal aliasing.

This is also obvious if you set lod bias to some negative value, therefore increasing texture resolution. You get increased sharpness but the shimmering is also increased.

[psyside]

SMAA is the best method together with SSAA/MSAA all of this other "low performance" impact AA modes sux.

[Noisiv]

Originally Posted by psyside

SMAA is the best method together with SSAA/MSAA all of this other "low performance" impact AA modes sux.

as does both your topic knowledge and contribution

[psyside]

Originally Posted by Noisiv

as does both your topic knowledge and contribution

Thanks, i prefer to be realistic, if you want to act superior this is bad place, instead of that try the same approach irl, oh wait you can't.

[Cyberdyne]

Originally Posted by Noisiv

This is also obvious if you set lod bias to some negative value, therefore increasing texture resolution. You get increased sharpness but the shimmering is also increased.

TXAA is not a super heavy hit in performance, but it's there. And then negative LOD obviously is a heavy performance hit. Having the detail, removing it, and adding it again. I know it's what we do with sgssaa, but I'm not convinced it's the way to go.

[MrMicrochip]

Well I am shocked. Those example pics are horrific, there is so much blur that even textures loose most of its detail. I would not use TXAA at current state.

[Noisiv]

Cyberdyne, LOD bias fps impact is practically nonexistent... AFAIR

[Cyberdyne]

Maybe it depends on the game then?
Because anything past -1.5 LOD in Skyrim is a lag fest for me. The only game as of late I've bothered to add LOD.
The act of removing mipmaping and having far textures display as full res from afar seemed made sense in my head that it cuts your FPS. I know it did in Skyrim, tried -3.0 for the hell of it and I got maybe 10 fps with the texture pack DLC.

[fellix]

Negative texture LOD is known to cause GPU texture cache trashing, that could affect the performance depending on the particular case/game and the GPU architecture that is running on.

[Noisiv]

Originally Posted by Cyberdyne

Maybe it depends on the game then?
Because anything past -1.5 LOD in Skyrim is a lag fest for me. The only game as of late I've bothered to add LOD.
The act of removing mipmaping and having far textures display as full res from afar seemed made sense in my head that it cuts your FPS. I know it did in Skyrim, tried -3.0 for the hell of it and I got maybe 10 fps with the texture pack DLC.

Yeah... just tried it in Skyrim. Kills my fps. Skyrim is enough texture heavy for my GPU/VRAM even as it is.

[SirPauly]

Timothy joined in the Discussion at Anand's.

After investigating the feature, well, it really does a nice job of cleaning up the aliasing, specifically while moving and in this context, really may help immersion for the one's that don't mind the trade-off.

However, this offers a noticeable blur and many gamers like sharp and clean and Timothy mentions some details here:

http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost...&postcount=191

The quote I enjoyed was the SSAA Discussion aspect:

Originally Posted by SirPauly

I am not saying this is traditional or conventional super-sampling.

Originally Posted by TimothyLottes

Yeah TXAA is not conventional super-sampling. Certainly I'd rather just super-sample everything on a rotated grid, just do RGSSAA, but the cost of that is not practical in many cases. So TXAA does the next best thing, and uses samples across time. So in motion, when the temporal aliasing is bad with MSAA, you get some non-conventional form of SSAA with TXAA.

Note at some point the LOD bias could also be applied to TXAA just like RGSSAA. This is something I'm looking to improve upon on later TXAA releases once I get the jitter to the point where I like it (then you'd have 2 shaded samples/pixel on still images too, so LOD bias starts to make more sense).

The key to me is this brings some unconventional SSAA to modern titles with efficiency - without the big hit associated with SSAA. That's what impressed me the most.