Aliasing (Jaggies) in games and monitor size etc, advice please!

[shadow of chaos]

I've had a 27" S27A750D for almost 2 weeks now but i'm noticing Aliasing more, i assume because of the screen size.

I thought it was due to the bigger pixels on it, but after returning to my old 22" 226BW at 1680x1050 native resolution, it was hard to tell the difference in L4D2. I know looking up close to the screen you can see the pixels, but on both monitors i have i could see big aliasing on the same objects especially shiny ones. So downgrading to a 24" at 1920x1080 would yeild no noticable difference and would be pointless to me.

So what is to blame here? is it the monitor, the resolution, or games themselves?. I don't want a super high 2560 resolution screen, that would require too much gpu power to keep fast speeds. But i'd like answers to the above questions if anyone can answer them. I only have till today to decide if i want to return the monitor, but it's hard to decide.

I don't know if anyone else has a Samsung S27A750D, but if anyone reading does can you tell me if you notice any fuzziness at times during movement in games?.

[[XC] Oj101]

Can you post a screenshot? Full 1920x1080. If it looks fine on my monitor (same resolution but smaller), it's not your screen but the game for some reason. If I can't see jaggies then it's your screen.

[Chickenfeed]

It is due to the screen size in relation to its resolution, ie dot pitch. 27" at 1080 has a really high dot pitch so aliasing will be that much more noticeable. The only thing you can do is run things like super sampling or high levels or anti aliasing to reduce the effect.

For example at 27" 1080 is 81.59 pixels per inch @ 0.3113mm dot pitch. 24" 1080 is 91.79 pixels per inch at 0.2767mm dot pitch. Some people prefer to have larger pixels as it increases viability and allows one to view said display at farther distances. If you sit reasonably close to your display
however, the higher the ppi the better. Basically in the nutshell 1080 at 27" is the lowest common ppi on a computer display.

[El Mano]

It is due to the screen size in relation to its resolution, ie dot pitch. 27" at 1080 has a really high dot pitch so aliasing will be that much more noticeable. The only thing you can do is run things like super sampling or high levels or anti aliasing to reduce the effect.

For example at 27" 1080 is 81.59 pixels per inch @ 0.3113mm dot pitch. 24" 1080 is 91.79 pixels per inch at 0.2767mm dot pitch. Some people prefer to have larger pixels as it increases viability and allows one to view said display at farther distances. If you sit reasonably close to your display
however, the higher the ppi the better. Basically in the nutshell 1080 at 27" is the lowest common ppi on a computer display.

This.
27" at 1080 is a bad idea. I wouldn't buy such a monitor.

[STEvil]

I'm using a 46" at 1920x1080, aliasing isnt too much of an issue for me.. but I dont sit and stare at the grass

Have a 30" 2560x1600 as well..

[dairyFarmer]

how close do you sit to your screen STEvil? and OP?

[BrightCandle]

For a long time now I have always bought monitor sizes that represented the smallest screen for a certain resolution. It was the 15", then 17", then 19" and onto 24". Each offering a jump in resolution and offering the maximum PPI as it was the smallest screen offering that resolution. Computer graphics are bad enough without making the aliasing look worse. The big noise about the so called retina screens is about trying to avoid the need for anti aliasing, as even at the best of times its a poor approximation to actually having the additional pixels to make the screen fool the human eye.

27" for 1080p, I didn't even know they did PPI that low. Normally 27" is famous for being the next jump in resolution to 2560.

[shadow of chaos]

Nobody is explaining why they think it's the ppi to blame, as i said it's hard to tell the difference on my 22" at 1680x1050 to my 27" at 1920x1080

if i look close to the screen i can see the pixels around things, very small. But certain things in the game like thin metal poles and shiny stuff show a lot more aliasing. How can the monitor be to blame for that?, pixels would show aliasing on the same level for everything surely?

[[XC] Oj101]

Yes, this is why I'm asking for a screenshot

[shadow of chaos]

Yes, this is why I'm asking for a screenshot

Attached 2 screenshots, they are full size.




They have been resized a bit small, here are links to them full size http://www.freeimagehosting.net/a5mt3 and http://www.freeimagehosting.net/wsxie

[zanzabar]

so you had this monitor
http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-S27A75.../dp/B0059031XE

if so that you problem not the games or anything, you were seeing ghosting and deinterlacing artifacts from samsungs low quality processing. you should be fine if you bigger but i would really recommend a 24" lg ips, they have small bezels and are ips so it will be much better than anything newer from samsung.

in the future you should also probably never buy samsung for anything but smartphones, ram, or appliances, they make bad quality tvs and monitors and the samaung by seagate hard drives are low tier seagate drives.

[bamtan2]

the different anti-aliasing techniques just approximate higher resolution rendering. raise the res or raise the AA, either way jaggies are removed. raising the AA costs less gpu power because it is tuned for efficiency over the worst case scenario (pure higher res). AA is a math trick.

the same dpi/ppi on two different sized monitors will produce the same jaggies. the bigger monitor just shows extra stuff too.

if you want less jaggies, switch to a monitor with higher dpi/ppi, or turn up the AA on yours.

ghosting during movement is a different topic.

[[XC] Oj101]

Ok I had a look at the first picture, the jaggies are terrible on the car. However, the tree to the left runs at almost the same angle as the car's A pillar yet isn't jagged at all, so I'm going to put blame on the game's engine and agree with zanzabar's explanation. I don't agree with him about Samsung drives though, they've been brilliant since the original IDE SpinPoint and the F3s were awesome - I've probably sold in excess of 600 of them and off the top of my head I can remember two returns - better than Seagate or Western Digital of the time.

[zanzabar]

Ok I had a look at the first picture, the jaggies are terrible on the car. However, the tree to the left runs at almost the same angle as the car's A pillar yet isn't jagged at all, so I'm going to put blame on the game's engine and agree with zanzabar's explanation. I don't agree with him about Samsung drives though, they've been brilliant since the original IDE SpinPoint and the F3s were awesome - I've probably sold in excess of 600 of them and off the top of my head I can remember two returns - better than Seagate or Western Digital of the time.

all of the cars added in l4d2 look messed up as you said. the windows and railing are were you can see if it is an AA problem.

and on the drives, samsungs HDD biz was bought buy seagate, the drives that say samsung on them are mostly no longer made in the old samsuing facility and are equivalent to WD blue and green drives. when they were samsung any failed drive was scraped, now they are sold as 5400/5900 drives and the cashe is much slower as they are nolonger a premium product. if you remember when they used to ship OEM drives with poor packaging and they would get messed up durring shipping (when they had just plastic and no drive foam coffin) the complaints roll in like that now about how the drives die and to make it worse things like the f4eg now run really slow in the 60-70MB/s range (i am guessing to make the full rpm drives look good) and start getting smart errors in a week or less. if you look back at my love of all things samsung the lcd hate came when they moved to no IPS and stated to sell lower resolution monitors with forced overscan, and the drive hate is when they were sold off and the post merger drives suddenly were slower and died in a few months.

[[XC] Oj101]

I didn't know that Samsung branded drives were still being sold, I was referring to before the buy-out. In South Africa you can no longer get Samsung branded drives at all.

Sorry for the OT

[Chickenfeed]

The source engine benefits from transparency multisamplimg or supersampling due to the large amount of alpha textures and specular used. Given the engine is easily tamed on modern hardware if you have a halfway decent gpu you'll be able to use 2x supersampling no problem. It will clean things up a lot.

[EniGmA1987]

I would try running some Edge-Detect multi-sampling. I believe the lowest setting is putting it to 4x and selecting Edge-Detect. It changes the equivalent to 12x. That usually works really well and doesnt cost a lot. If those settings dont work, step up to supersampling.

[STEvil]

how close do you sit to your screen STEvil? and OP?

3-4 feet.

the game engine, AA method, or possible GPU drivers are to blame given those pictures.

[shadow of chaos]

I tried edge detect AA, didn't really seem to be any different from max 8x msaa in the game settings which are what i took the screenshots with. Tried super sampling before as well, it just made everything look a bit blurry and dropped the frame rate a lot.

[EniGmA1987]

Well if you are unhappy with the top AA options available to you, your options are this:

1) try doubling the resolution and downscaling, with added AA on top. Probably a worse performance hit than 2x SSAA you already tried
2) buy a new monitor with higher resolution
3) buy a new graphics card and run 24x adaptive multi-sample Anti-aliasing

[Chickenfeed]

Didn't notice until now that your Samsung is a 120Hz display. Of course an older 23 or 24 1080 3D display will have a sharper image but often these newer 27" TNs perform better in other respects so there's currently no best of both worlds where PC 3D is concerned today. Either you deal with a large TN panel with low dpi which handles motion well or you get a slower 60Hz IPS panel with higher dpi along with their better colour reproduction and viewing angles but weaker motion performance. Theres a compromise to be had either way. If you primarily game and don't mind the viewing angles, stick with the 120Hz display.

EDIT : Heres comparison of L4D2

16xQ CSAA and 2x Supersampling and there still is a fair bit of aliasing due to all the alpha textures



16xQ CSAA with transparency multisampling and 4x Supersampling - significantly less aliasing on alpha textures in large due to the transparency samlping



And finally 16xQ CSAA with transparency multisamlping and no supersampling



As you can see the supersampling helps a bit but most of the IQ improvement comes from anti aliasing on the alpha tested objects via transparency multi sampling, also it is not as demanding so overall its win / win. Edge detect AA on AMD hardware is the Nvidia equivalent of this.

Unfortunately due to the large number of games using engines with deferred lightning, aliasing is usually next to impossible to avoid in many cases (pre DX10.1 renderers largely) which will further amplify a lower dot pitch on a display. In these cases MLAA and FXAA tend to be the only solutions ( if you chose to call them solutions at least )

[EniGmA1987]

Either you deal with a large TN panel with low dpi which handles motion well or you get a slower 60Hz IPS panel with higher dpi along with their better colour reproduction and viewing angles but weaker motion performance. Theres a compromise to be had either way. If you primarily game and don't mind the viewing angles, stick with the 120Hz display.

Or you can look around very carefully for a certain special monitor that is IPS, 27", and overclocks up to 120Hz

[STEvil]

and it has a nice resolution as well.

[El Mano]

Do they still sell the OC version of that monitor? I thought it was discontinued.

[STEvil]

There's new production runs