NVidia Anti-Aliasing Guide (updated)

SGSSAA looks best, followed by DSR @ 30%, GeDoSaTo 3840x2160 Lanzcos looks pretty bad. Maybe try bicubic, i find it's the middleground between smoothness and sharpness. Lanzcos inherets too much aliasing.

(Although I will admit 3840x2160 Lanzcos has the best texture/mipmap detail, look at the distant objects, you can see more defined textures than any other option, however borderlands is the kind of games where you can smudge some of that up for performance, by upsampling, or for looks, by adding AA. Texture detail is far less important)

I've noticed that lowering the resolution not only boosts my fps, but how much physx degrades performance. It's buttery smooth once I start getting down into the lower end 2k resolutions (my screen being 2560x1440). Smooth physx performance at ultra (physx level) is actually the most impressive visual thing about the game. It seems a bit excessive that each physx particle is shadowed ingame though. Maybe lowering the shadow resolution would boost the physx fps dramatically, since during gameplay I can have thousands of shadowed particles and rocks all casting 2048/1024 shadows. That's like the entire skyrim's landscape in terms of polygon/shadowing just for physx clutter.

 

What GPU are you using by chance? I'm curious. The game visually doesn't look really upgraded at all even from from the first borderlands aside from phsyx..

 

A gtx 670, running a 2560x1440 catleap 2b ips screen, that does 130hz. You know, one of those korean overclockable ones.

I did have two 670's in sli, however one died on the same month my rma (return to manufacturer) and thus warranty ran out. If I get a 970 or 980, i'll probably keep this gtx 670 around for physx. Since a lot of the games i enjoy coming back to and playing for a long time seem to use physx (batman games, borderlands games)

 

Just been having a play around with MFAA in WatchDogs.

I set x2 MSAA ingame and enabled MFAA via inspector for the Watchdogs profile.

All it did was create an area of bluriness just in front of my character that followed me around everywhere.

Anyone else using MFAA yet and what are your impressions ??

 

I don't think it's finished. I've messed around it a lot with kelper (in nivida inspector it says "maxwell" so that could be why) and while it does change my framerate slightly ingame, it does zero to edges in dx11 games with AA. I think it's a work in progress feature and the option in nivida inspector is reflecting what's coming, not something that's usable yet.

Either that or it's the most useless aa known to man.

 

So i just tested something out, if you enable a dsr resolution for the desktop (say 1.2x) and then run a game fullscreen-windowed, it uses the DSR filter at your native, or below resolution. I ran 1600x900 (on a 2560x1440 monitor no less) with dsr enabled. It does not look very good, but it also shows you that DSR's downscaling performance hit is huge.


Native resolution without DSR: 108fps avr 5 minutes ultra physics play @ 2560x1440
Native resolution: 52fps average 5 minutes, ultra physics play @ 2560x1440 with desktop set to DSR.

That's a HUGE performance premium simply for activating the DSR filter. For the record, gedosato at 3840x2560 is 53fps. That means, that the framerate hit of the FILTER ALONE for dsr is the same as going from 2560x1440 to 4k. Twice the resolution. And that's judging it on Gedosato, which also has a performance premium over actual 4k. So we are talking even more of a DSR hit than that.

I really hope that maxwell has some kind of DSR related hardware that makes it process things quicker, because when nivida and the eurogamer review of DSR said the performance hit is minimal, they better have not been getting the same performance results as me. Because if they did that's an outright fabrication of reality.

That's a 200% performance premium for the dsr filter. LOL!!!!!

 

Yeah it must be hardware specific then, as on Maxwell DSR filter is about 2-3% vs traditional downsampling.

(i posted my results in your DSR thread :thumbup

 

Jeez. The filter isn't THAT good is it?

There's no way to get screenshots post downsampled is there?

I'd like to see how it looks at 0% smoothness, 50% and 100% if the performance hit is that great..


It seems maybe per usual that they didn't test it against performance of regular driver downsampling or GeDoSaTo maybe..


Maybe the improved chroma compression is what helps performance?:3eyes:

They never mentioned that Maxwell had hardware built in for this or that Kepler would not have as good performance...or maybe they gimped it on purpose to make people go "Wow looks so good" and upgrade for better performance... I mean, Lottes said TXAA was possible on fermi, but Nvidia never felt the good will to give'em even a taste of it.

 

The performance hit isn't that great, as i've just said its 2-3%

My proof is here I found 2-3%

Pcper.com found 1-2%

 

When I finish the game i'll take a few minute to take the shots if no one does it in the meantime.

 

The filter is good, its better than gedosato and driver downsampling, but it's not in line with the performance hit i personally get. Right now I believe maxwell hardware has some quicker hardware method of processing DSR. Since I don't believe I have any system bottlenecks.

I'm not doubting the 1-2% or even 2-3% figures, the reviews tested 980/970 maxwell chips though, kelper, at least in my case, is struggling and taking a 200% instead of 2% performance hit. Is it my drivers? my system? Something I did somewhere along the track? Sure, it's possible. I'd like more feedback about other non-maxwell users and if they only get a 1-2% hit or something rather epic like i get.


Maybe there is some chip on maxwell that specifically handles the 13tap filter, lol. Who knows right?

 

So, long story short, I got a neurological issue about a year ago now that i won't get into here, but one of the symptoms is dim vision. Makes the dark spaces hard to see in movies and games, and that also affects the strength of colors. It's made me hate green/brown shades of things and games that have too much desaturation and darkness (damn you final fantasy and your dark green/browness)

Anyway, I did some deep scouring of the ini file of borderlands pre-sequel and tweaked the settings so my eyes respond more to the way the game looks. If you agree with me about the changes, then I can share the changed settings.

This is also without any use of sweetfx, so there is the additional bonus of zero performance hit.

http://imgur.com/a/xDFPr#0

 

I didn't realize that, but it was through Steam uke2:
I was too lazy to do anything else at the time after spending a few hours getting configs ready for friends.

That's where it becomes subjective. While SGSSAA does the best with aliasing, the blur is very noticeable in general over everything compared to downsampling. I generally like a sharper picture, but I do see why you like bicubic also--it's nice too. Time for me to edit stuff to hopefully get it in between the 2. I was thinking of going down to 2560x1440 and using 2xSGSSAA while going higher on the negative LOD.

Nvidia generally has a good steak when it comes to propitiatory AA methods imo, so I'd expect it to stand its own. But I can't get it to really work, so just ignoring it 'till an official release.

From all that I can gather though, there will likely be a very slight blur, but lower aliasing in general with probably near-FXAA performance. Sounds interesting to me still, especially if its more customizable through the driver rather than FXAA which isn't customizable (strength/clamps/thresholds) in the driver.

Maybe you'll appreciate this but they don't compare it to all you want to see (give pics time to load after clicking). I don't recall the "Smoothness" setting having any real impact on performance, but I only looked at it quickly in other games a week or 2 ago so can't remember. I would say the sweet spot for me is between 20%-35% visually.

There shouldn't be any special parts in Maxwell. It's instigated by the fact they're bring DSR over to the other architectures like Kepler. If Maxwell retained the onboard ARM chip as originally planned, then maybe, but I don't see anything restrictive about the hardware atm. I think it's just Fermi and TXAA (and now Fermi and DSR, and low-end Kepler and DSR) all over again is all. I think the same applies to MFAA as well, although am unsure about what kind of impact it will have on VRAM which could be a reason? Does it rely on CUDA like Physx?




But overall, depends on the game so far for me. Payday 2 obviously I can run maxxed out at 3840x2160 DSR, but that's also a not as demanding game (I should probably try GeDoS) with it. Borderlands I have tweaked for 4096x4096 shadows, higher resolution shadows at distance, and more.

I was unable to get CSAA working with Borderlands however :bang: It just sits there at a black screen--really wanted to check that out due to the amount of VRAM I have sitting around now.

 

How can I make DSR to use higher resolutions?

 

1. In NVCP > Manage 3D Settings > Global Settings > DSR - Factors (Tick all of these or which ones you want) > Apply.
2. Redo any Inspector settings you need to.
3. When running a game, the new resolutions will show up, i.e. 3840x2160. Select it, and it will automatically be downsampled.

If you're asking how to allow higher values than 4.0x, I don't believe you can? Unless of course you know how to take apart the driver and rework it to your liking.

On a side note, I have to figure out why frame rate limiting isn't spot on anymore, but allowing it to go at least 5-10 frames higher than I specify even though the hex values are correct.

 

I was tinkering around to see if 2x MFAA could be used to enable 4x SGSSAA (since 2x MFAA uses the same sample pattern as MSAA) ... though no luck. However, I am just trying to force MFAA on my GTX 780M (i.e. not Maxwell), so maybe it is just a hardware limitation?

I would be very curious to hear if 2x MFAA could be used to enable 4x SGSSAA on 900 series cards. Imagine 4x SGSSAA at the price of 2x!

 

Some people claim mfaa is working, for me it's not. I think MFAA is not a base AA, it's an addon aa. So you would enable sparse grid, and then mfaa. I would imagine that would be supersampled in exactly the same way sparse grid supersampling usually does, with mfaa doing it's thing at the same time. Rather than MFAA acting as a MSAA base for SGSSAA.

And that's only if MFAA works with driver forced AA. I believe at first it's only going to be something you use at the same time as ingame MSAA. So for example, hitman absolution has MSAA support, mfaa can be tagged along, kind of like adding fxaa on top of normal MSAA, only a lot better due it giving the impression of higher AA.

So Hitman Absolution, 2xMSAA + enabled in control panel MFAA = 4xMSAA quality with slightly better transparency coverage. (Aka, what txaa, fxaa, does)

My hope is that mfaa works exactly like fxaa, in the sense that it can work stand alone and combined with anything so long as you check it in nividia inspector/control panel/GFE, now THAT would be nice. Even if it's worst case, and you have to enable it with games with MSAA options, which would be a silly move on nvidias behalf, it would still be pretty cool getting 4x MSAA quality in some games. Like the aforementioned hitman, which requires 100% more gpu power going from 2xmsaa to 4xmsaa.

 

Aw that sucks sorry to hear that.

But I really like your tweaks to be honest! Looks more colorful than vanilla to me without being ugly like SweetFX usually does

 

It won't work like that when it's properly implemented in software.

But what it may actually do is help reduce performance cost of SGSSAA. But whether it comes at a quality cost. That's another story.

 

I'm having bit of a hard time believing that a Gaussian filter 'looks' better than Lanczos. Computationally of course it's cheaper than Lanczos and only a tad more expensive than bilinear(generic downsampling). So I'm not sure how it's only a few % more taxing, not that I'm dismissing it either.