NVidia Anti-Aliasing Guide (updated)

So it's their damn fault then

While I really want proper AA in shadows of mordor, i still think the reason they never included it was because the game put such a heavy emphasis on it's textures. And regardless of people saying "I don't see the difference between ultra and high", I will say that the textures in shadows of mordor where extremely high quality, and if i had strong post AA, there would be little need to run ultra textures, since the post would take a lot of that detail back to high levels.

 

Ryse's "Temporal Antialiasing" is indeed mind blowing. very impressive stuff.

sorry to go off topic but may I ask which flag is it exactly ?

 

I have to disagree with this. A little averaging of high frequency information isn't going to make 1024x1024 normal maps look like their 512x512 equivalents. The difference will still be visible.


But also, like I said, if you look at the Ryse presentations, there are sections on AA'ing for example specular elements before they are even rendered.

 

-Final Fantasy XIII-
EDIT Dec/14 - The game has been updated, and largely nothing has changed.
The same issues remain.

Forced AA works without having to use GeDoSaTo to change resolution now. So you do not have to follow the trick to downsample and you also do not need to use GeDo to force AA

You can now instead use forced AA and DSR together.

Issues that no longer remain have been removed
________________________________
I want to say thanks to KoKlusz for giving me the idea to try out GeDoSaTo's FFXIII plugin, otherwise I think I may not have figured out what I did.
General Information:

FFXIII on PC is a disappointing release. Even post patch so far

Let's go over some of the issues right off the bat that still exist.

-No volume slider | As if it would make a difference since the current levels would probably be max, but at least this way we could take the sound effects down, the music up to balance it out and then just turn up the volume or altnernatively change whatever you like.


-Poor performance & Microstuttering |


-HUGE download | 50GB download,60GB Unpacked. Why? Because people asked for JPN voices, and so they also have to include all of the FMVs with JPN audio/video/sync. Which DOUBLES the download size. You know, instead of just making it a free DLC. To add insult to injury, the FMVs are very poor quality. And only 720p.


So those are the most I can remember off the top of my head.

Anti-Aliasing Information:
If you don't have a profile for FFXIII in Nvidia Inspector in your drivers. You will need to make one. To learn how to do so and how to use Inspector in general. Visit This Thread.

Flag: 0x00000281 - MSAA,TrSSAA,SGSSAA,HSAA (+-SGSSAA)
AA Fix in Inspector is REQUIRED. Otherwise you will get artifacts in hair,even when you are only using the in game MSAA! (LINK dead because MEGA is a bunch of *******s who never return emails when someone is filing false copyright claims against your perfectly legal files)

This flag is an odd duck. It basically boils down to the fact that a lot of the game's visual effects, including battle transitions, battle effects seem to be done in some form of RGBA8 that don't want to play along with the driver trying to AA them. The other downside, is that it seems some other buffers are stored in RGBA8 as well, because some elements aren't quite AA'd as well without it. But an upside is that there is less averaging or "Blur".

What happens with RGBA8 stuff is that during battles, or transition in or out to a battle, the screen will start turning into this kind of stuff, and it will stay like that for several seconds or indefinitely

So "281" is essentially the exact same functions as "2C1" except without RGBA8 enabled.

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Pictures!

Pictures all dead because Minus.com is a pile of donkey dung!

Forgot to mention that most of the native resolution shots are using Lanczos. Which I personally feel looks better than Nearest Neighbor at native resolution.

 

My god you put a lot of work into that.

 

Yeah, sadly it took me the better part of two days to make sure I didn't miss anything and tried to make it as easy to read as possible.

>_>

 

I can't get it to run smoothly. I disabled all the things I need to disable via the guides on steam, i still get drops in performance down to 45 and 30fps when npcs come at me. And the engine stutters like crazy when the framerate shift happens. It does not matter what internal resolution I run it at, same drops happen (just more severely at a higher internal res) 30fps is rock solid if i limit it to that, but then it feels like a slideshow. GTX 670 @ 2560x1440 native running Gedosato (obviously).

 

Keep it up MrBonk, great work, absolutely great.

Lightning looks better than ever!

 

Without AA bits ?

Too blurry for me...

 

No, this is using the bits mentioned above. 0x00000281^^^^

 

I can't either really. (And if you look at my screenshots, performance is not very good)

At this point it's just a waiting game to see if they fix it

No, this is using the bits mentioned above. 0x00000281^^^^

And even if that picture is still too blurry for you
(Because there is so little averaging compared to 8xSGSSAA in many games you can't possibly make it any sharper other than by using nearest neighbor. Sorry forgot to mention was using Lanczos for 8xSGSSAA at native )
Comparing 8xMSAA in game vs 8xSGSSAA the difference in sharpness is very little IMO and looks great in motion. A lot less temporal aliasing than with 8xMSAA.
Most of the averaging comes from AA'ing lighting buffers, smoothing high frequency details that just resolve as shimmering and flickering. The stuff all in the background is because those elements were aliased. Something you can clearly see with 8xMSAA.



The option for just using downsampling+MSAA is available (And again using Nearest Neighbor at native for sharpest results) And as you can see by my screenshots, 3x3+2xMSAA still looks very good. Though there is still some temporal aliasing that SGSSAA gets better. But it's certainly good enough for most people.


Here's a comparison of 3x3+2xMSAA and 8xMSAA too

 

Been replaying Dragon Age Origins, the 0x004010C0 flag with 4x SGSSAA causes significant amounts of blur despite what the 3dcenter post says. Oh well, after using SGSSAA in the Mass Effect series, I want to put it on every game (as long as my system can handle it), lol

Out of curiosity, how do people find the proper compatibility bits for games anyways? It can't just be trial and error with the amount of possibilities there are.

 

There are a lot of AA flags that work with different games, I recently got carmageddon 1 and 2 working with SGSSAA via a glide wrapper emulator. So I am running an old glide game, with DSR and SGSSAA. LOL. Same is true for some other older glide games. Can't find any working HBAO+ flags though.

I just tried a few flags, they all worked I just chose the one with the best alpha coverage and least blur. HBAO+ flags are harder to find though, and even some of the flags people have listed in the hbao+ flag thread don't stick all the time. Personally I would only list the flags that work with fog and don't turn on/off. It also says in the hbao+ thread that there is no flag for risen 3, I have found the wolfenstien flag does not turn on/off.

Anyway, for hbao+, it's definitely trial and error. For AA bits, it's much much easier, unless it's a dx11 game. Then it becomes nearly impossible unless a game is already using some kind of msaa, in which case there is a chance you can "enhance" it.

 

Speaking of AA, did anyone check out the slides for the AA solution they're using in Car Fry 4? HRAA seems like a neat little and rather inexpensive mixture of temporal AA, postprocess AA, regular hardware sampling and analysis.

HRAA being Hybrid Reconstruction AA(not to be confused with "High Resolution AA").
http://advances.realtimerendering.com/s2014/drobot/HRAA_notes_final.pdf

 

Depends when I choose to play farcry 4, if i upgrade to a 970, at some point when i have money, then i'll be using txaa most likely. Since it's my preferred option.

 

Oh, I also thought I would share with you a minecraft screenshot of 4k DSR minecraft.

 

My bad, sorry for the double post.

http://i.imgur.com/xLKxtMZ.jpg

 

@Mr Bonk

Thanks for the exhaustive FFXIII report! You are a gentleman and a scholar.

Here's another screen via GeDoSaTo 1620p with 4xMSAA. When I play with this downsampled to 1080p, it provides better temporal antialiasing than even 8xSGSSAA at 1080p (most noticeable as pixel crawling in Lightning's hair)

Really looking forward to hearing about what can be done with respect to font replacement. I have heard there may be some way to also improve the quality of the FMVs...? In any case, here she is:

 

You need to disable the "Framebuffer effects" or whatever it's called to fix the blurring. You can also downsample with SGSSAA via standard driver downsampling which should sharpen it quite a bit

 

Hair is the only thing downsampling really does better in my testing. Which is the most obvious element that will look better the higher the resolution goes. (And less temporal aliasing on the hair as it goes up as well)

SGSSAA doesn't do well with that because the effect is still limited to the resolution you render at it seems. No matter the sample count of the AA you are using.

With some downsampling+4xSGSSAA it really shines! With the lanczos filter on, it's really sharp and gets just about everything.


Though, even just at native resolution. 8xSGSSAA performance is pretty good and looks great.

Really though, anything other than just MSAA looks great in this game!
(Except for maybe the driver YYxS modes. Which don't look very good for the performance)


I only hope they can fix the poor port without breaking anything related to AA or GeDoSaTo or other stuff.