Crysis and Transparency Anti-Aliasing

[Der_KHAN]

well so far iv'e been pretty p§$%ed off that there's no TAA in Crysis.
i mean crytek showed off all these amazing screenshots but when you get to play the game it just looks jaggy as hell.
no matter what driver settings, the foliage just looks like crap!

and if you are one of the many 22" TFT owners who have to reduce their screen resolution below 1680x1050 to get playable fps, the matter becomes even worse.
interpolation and aliased images just dont go well together...


with the new 169.04 drivers its possible to use Supersampling on the whole image.
so now i can at least complain about this issue by showing a screenshot comparison.
the first one is made with 4xMSAA and Transparency AA enabled in the driver panel. (TAA in super- or multisampling mode looks the same in this game, i.e. there is no TAA).

the second image is made with 4x4 Supersampling.
this is close to what the game would look like if there was TAA. (4x4 enabled using the nhancer tool, 4xS doesn't work btw)


as you can see the framerate with "full-scene"-supersampling is catastrophic.
though i guess super-sampled TAA would also create a huge framedrop.
theres just too much alphatest-textured foliage on the screen. kinda like in the game Oblivion.

but even if TAA splits the framerate in half, i'd much rather play at 800x600 than look at that ugly, interpolation-distorted image of 1280x800 pixels!
i mean look at that 2nd screenshot, isn't that just f*&%in beautiful?

[RPGWiZaRD]

LOL nice timing, I was just commenting in another forum on exactly this how Crysis fooliage looked like a pixelmess and very unimpressive in fact. But that 2nd screenshot is just WOW.

Anyways remember good old FarCry, well I kinda miss the smooth texture feeling we were used to from the FarCry/HL2 era. I'll attach some example below. While textures then weren't as detailed as you can see now in the newer titles (still I think the variance is often a bit too big) as opposed to being a lot more balanced before.

Often games tend to look a bit too pixelated nowadays and I think STALKER introduced this, especially the leaf tree textures on distance, Crysis is no different, looked like a pixelmess UNTIL I saw your 2nd picture. It was quite funny first I thought wtf that looks nothing special and then scrolled down a bit and almost my pants.

Thx for that screenshot, that's some pure eyegasm but too bad the performance is really bad too. Anyways thanks for this screenshot.

Anyways here's some FarCry picture with lots of vegetation textures from a jungle. I think comparing to many modern games the textures are very smooth and nice actually, it just needs a bit more details and it would be really awesome but at least there's no pixelmess....

[Der_KHAN]

well it all started with "HDR"-games i think.

eversince there were sm3.0 games there have been complications to anti-aliasing. hell, i even ditched my X850XT for a 7800GTX just because Battlefield2 looked that much better with TAA! and then all of the sudden nobody seemed to care about that feature anymore, not even about AA at all, because hdr was sooo much more important...

splinter cell 3 - no AA with HDR
age of empires 3 - no AA with HDR (i didnt even play that because it was so ugly and i wasnt dumb enough to get a X1800 for it)
stalker - no AA with HDR on any video card

and imagine that: in the year 2007 A.D. EPIC releases a top-title that has no support for Anti-Aliasing whatsoever... wtf where they thinking???
ut3 being one of the most anticipated eye-candy games ever and they just totally kick pc gamers in the nuts!

"yeah, AA works on the xbox version m'kay, but we just didn't have the budget to get it done for the pc as well. ...i guess some guy at nvidia will find a cure anyway..."

...kudos to Midway. they really learned how to "EA" a customer... dammit i could rant about this all night long

[zanzabar]

no1 will use TAA the full replacement for FSAA is MSAA and once dx10.1 is out people be complaining that its mandatory to have 4xmsaa making multi gpu and necisity


and if u have a good grafix card u wont need aa people should be outraged that the coding is sloppy adn that the hardware is inaccurate

[Der_KHAN]

no1 will use TAA the full replacement for FSAA is MSAA

uuh, no...

and if u have a good grafix card u wont need aa

...and no.

MSAA only filters the edges of polygons, whereas TAA is an addition to that and also filters alphatest textures. so i should have written MSAA+TAA to be perfectly correct.
you might wanna read that up here: bit-tech.net


on a side note FSAA is only short for Full-Scene Anti-Aliasing which can be both super- or multisampling.

[zanzabar]

not that would be awesome but i still think that hard ware makers should make better stuff so that aa of any verity isnt needed

[Soulburner]

not that would be awesome but i still think that hard ware makers should make better stuff so that aa of any verity isnt needed

Aliasing is a fact of 3D game design, it has nothing to do with the hardware.