Any reason not to combine Control Panel FXAA with in-game Anti-Aliasing settings?

MSAA is the most demanding form of AA and really doesn't offer any difference. I stay away from it.

 

It's not though, MSAA was introduced to be less intensive than FSAA

 

Yet its not.

 

It is though. FSAA was always a super scale, MSAA samples edges only.

 

Blur can be mitigated by either higher resolution and/or sharpening. SSAA 4x + SMAA T2x is the ultimate AA solution. Unfortunately it's also the most hungry solution.

 

On the contrary, SSAA is the most demanding. MSAA only covers geometry, whereas SSAA covers everything, which is why MSAA was created.

 

I've been using NV FXAA on top of the in-game AA methods for most games throughout the years and haven't really had too many problems. In some cases the game gets too blurry and I won't use it there, but usually the extra FXAA helps clean up the image on my 1440p setup. A lot of the AA methods in games just aren't enough for me as I guess I prefer a slightly softer image.

 

I thought we were talking about FXAA not FSAA

 

You brought MSAA into it claiming it was the most intensive,
I brought FSAA into it because MSAA isn't the most intensive

 

You are such an arrogant ass.

 

You mistake arrogance for your own ignorance.

You made an absolutionist claim that MSAA is the most intensive, with no context whether you meant against FXAA or otherwise and got the butthurts when told otherwise.

MSAA was introduced to do antialiasing in a geometry optimized way instead of the full screen method (now known as SSAA) employed by 3DFX and RIVA TNT cards.

Where as the performance of FXAA scales with shader units, the performance of MSAA scaled with ROP count.

Modern GPU's have not really increased ROP counts since MSAA has gone to pasture.

 

Alright then.

 

You've had MSAA vs SSAA explained to you multiple times. It was an honest small mistake, your denial of it made it big. Either you still think you're right and you still don't understand, or you're too manly to say "ah ok, makes sense".

 

Who are you talking to?

 

No one. Nothing to see here, move on. For your sake. And our sanity.

 

Because he pointed out your claim was bogus?

 

Overwatch screenshots comparison here: https://imgur.com/gallery/AsvvkQk

(1440p max in-game settings -- screenshots comparing in-game SMAA max w/ no sharpening and no control panel FXAA then comparing w/ only sharpening (0.25 w/ default grain rejection of 0.17) then comparing w/ FXAA + sharpening + in-game SMAA). It may be tricky to tell the difference without looking at the actual screen so I'll summarize what it looks like to my eye:

1) in-game SMAA (max) w/ no control panel FXAA and no control panel CAS Sharpening

Looks fine, but there is perceivable aliasing in the image still and some texture detail looks rather "flat". This is the default since it's only using in-game settings at native resolution.

2) in-game SMAA (max) w/ no control panel FXAA and control panel CAS Sharpening ON (0.25 w/ default grain rejection of 0.17)

Inner surface texture detail (like the lines on the wall or the inner surface detail of the robot or weapon models) looks discernibly better to my eye -- it "pops" in a way that looks pretty good in my estimation (though oversharpening too much doesn't look great in my opinion either to be clear). Sadly aliasing is noticeably a bit worse -- I expect what's happening is the aliasing present in the image is being sharpened a bit as well which doesn't look great. Also, UI elements will be included which probably isn't desirable (as discussed above).

3) in-game SMAA (max) w/ control panel FXAA ON and control panel CAS Sharpening ON (0.25 w/ default grain rejection of 0.17)

To my eye this looks to be overall the "best" of them though the UI does look worse (there are some cons as discussed above and going off of Terepin's comments you can run into some issues combining multiple post AA methods).

Still, with this combo aliasing around the robot model and within the gun model itself looks reduced to my eye and we still get some nice "pop" from inner surface detail (like the wall rectangles or robot body texture). I'm perhaps not the most discerning individual and I may be missing some issues this causes so feel free by all means to let me know how it looks to you or if I've glossed over any "cons". The primary issue I've noticed is that some UI elements don't look so great (this is probably why Hearthstone looks like garbage in my local tests with control panel FXAA and/or CAS Sharpening -- that game is largely card art/UI elements seems like).

EDIT: Here are screenshots for Hunt Showdown tested the same way: https://imgur.com/gallery/J9TAsKn.

 

Sorry for late response. And the answer is yes. You're basically applying sharpening on top of sharpening. And the same goes for AO. Only use one, never both.

 

@Terepin Yeah, I noticed in Crysis 3 (which is arleady doing its own internal sharpening at 0.25 by default -- this can only be changed via console commands after the game has started in my own tests) if I also apply Nvidia control panel CAS Sharpening it just looks like total garbage -- probably because as you say I'm combining two different forms of sharpening on top of each other.