No Hardware Anti-Aliasing under DirectX 11?

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Originally Posted by raelgun

Only for a console user, PC users have enjoyed high resolution for years now beyond that of 1920x1080.

How many years have the likes of 2560x1440 monitors been in existence?

And if you enjoyed the opportunity to downsample from a higher resolution, you will notice a increase in visual fidelity, the very reason some of us who spent money on the likes of a Nvidia 780 could enjoy, why spend money on something like that and stick to stone age settings?

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Most/all 23" monitors are 1920x1080 and most 24" monitors are 1920x1200 (I have one of each.) Players with 27" monitors and 4K monitors(typically wider than HDTV) are SOL.

I have a friend who plays games on his 4K monitor and lots of games just completely have a spaz with it. The inherent problem with LCD screens is that all resolutions but the native resolution look like garbage, because the monitor's upscaling algorithm is meant for speed, not quality. I'd rather have a nearest-neighbor 2:1 scale than a bicubic blurfest.

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Originally Posted by Furyhunter

Hardware anti-aliasing doesn't work in deferred shading. FFXIV uses deferred shading to make dynamic lighting very inexpensive and scale well.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deferred_shading

"One more rather important disadvantage is that, due to separating the lighting stage from the geometric stage, hardware anti-aliasing does not produce correct results anymore since interpolated subsamples would result in nonsensical position, normal, and tangent attributes."

MSAA and family are not options because the renderer does not allow for it.

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They could still do SSAA/FSAA supersampling, which is what "hardware antialiasing" was back a decade ago before lower quality MSAA took the crown. But to do so requires having the GPU computational scale, which just doesn't exist in any GPU on the market.

eg to do 2X SSAA/FSAA, you need to render 1920x1080 at 3840x2160, which only the top tier cards can do. If you have a 4K monitor then you have to render at 8K (7680 x 4320) which no single GPU can do.

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Originally Posted by Ladon

It's way more than an adjustment. It would require a rewrite of the graphic pipeline, which while is not a total engine rewrite, is anything but trivial.

Not to mention that the lighting engine would in fact need a total rewrite and then most of the pixel shaders would need to be rewritten as well.

This is all assuming forward rendering would actually be suitable and workable for a game like Final Fantasy 14. Franky, it likely is not simply because of the massive object density hundreds of player models create. A single light source would likely bring a forward rendering engine to its knees in this type of common scenario that is found in the game. The deferred shading allows FF14 to cast multiple light sources on a large amount of objects with relatively low impact on performance. You would need a ridiculous amount of hardware just to brute force this and we haven't even gotten into the performance hit that even 2x sampled AA would bring into this scenario.

And to top it all off, DX11 really offers nothing in the way of performance enhancements that will alleviate this issue. DX12 might, in theory, but nobody as really played around with it enough to be sure.

As others have already mentioned, if you have the hardware, supersampling is going to be a better option here. Fortunately the UI even scales well so it actually works very will with FF14 with some very pleasing results.

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It's way more than an adjustment. It would require a rewrite of the graphic pipeline, which while is not a total engine rewrite, is anything but trivial.

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There are methods to avoid a complete pipeline rewrite, I even posted one.

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Not to mention that the lighting engine would in fact need a total rewrite

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It would not. I can provide several sources on that to prove the fact if you want.

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This is all assuming forward rendering would actually be suitable and workable for a game like Final Fantasy 14. Franky, it likely is not simply because of the massive object density hundreds of player models create. A single light source would likely bring a forward rendering engine to its knees in this type of common scenario that is found in the game.

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This wouldn't require singling out objects in the scene marked for forward rendering instead of deferred rendering. As I've said in my original post this simply isn't required. COMPLETE Hardware AA under Deferred Rendering has been supported for a very, very long time under DX10 (onwards).

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The deferred shading allows FF14 to cast multiple light sources on a large amount of objects with relatively low impact on performance. You would need a ridiculous amount of hardware just to brute force this and we haven't even gotten into the performance hit that even 2x sampled AA would bring into this scenario.

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There's several methods to applying MSAA to a Deferred scene which DOES NOT require beastly changes or complete re-writes. It requires adjustments. All of the current methods to get around this simply require working around the system already in place. (Which exactly what we did), several methods don't do this flawlessly, others do.

I can list each one we testing several projects using ONLY deferred rendering if you'd like, it'll take me some time to read up on it again to make sure I'm not spouting complete nonsense.

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And to top it all off, DX11 really offers nothing in the way of performance enhancements that will alleviate this issue.

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Hardware AA has had a negligible performance impact, 6-10 years ago, the performance difference was notable, through your average high end system today? No.

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As others have already mentioned, if you have the hardware, supersampling is going to be a better option here

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Supersmapling is even more performance intensive. You've literally gone back a step MSAA/TXAA would barely scathe a 1/5th of the performance impact of Supersampling the scene.

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Originally Posted by Furyhunter

Hardware anti-aliasing doesn't work in deferred shading. FFXIV uses deferred shading to make dynamic lighting very inexpensive and scale well.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deferred_shading

"One more rather important disadvantage is that, due to separating the lighting stage from the geometric stage, hardware anti-aliasing does not produce correct results anymore since interpolated subsamples would result in nonsensical position, normal, and tangent attributes."

MSAA and family are not options because the renderer does not allow for it.

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By default, no. With a bit of adjustment. Yes.

Please see the sources I provided on the topic. This hasn't been an issue since Dx10 first rolled out.

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MSAA and family are not options because the renderer does not allow for it.

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If you refer to my original post, a very easy to add adjustment fixes this issue without affecting anything already in the scene.

I am also disappointed as FXAA is terrible looking and I expected better AA options in the DX11 client.

Warcraft has recently moved to a deferred lighting engine and they were able to offer a load of better AA options including, FXAA Low, FXAA High, CMAA, MSAA 2x, MSAA 4x, MSAA 8x, SSAA 2x, SSAA 2x + CMAA so I don't see any reason why FFXIV cant.

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Originally Posted by Kosmos992k

I'm contedting your assertion that a process that by definition *reduces* the data in the image somehow results in increased fidelity, which by definition it cannot do.

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Evidence is in the link, you should read it fully, many people have confirmed the results, you realise this feature is basically SSAA or render scale.
There are games out there that have this feature, take a read on it. Really you should try it instead of trying to deny it.
Theres a reason why Nvidia has implemented DSR into its drivers officially.

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Originally Posted by KisaiTenshi

Most/all 23" monitors are 1920x1080 and most 24" monitors are 1920x1200 (I have one of each.) Players with 27" monitors and 4K monitors(typically wider than HDTV) are SOL.

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1920x1080 is a thing of the past, especially with modern hardware, people with good hardware should be encouraged to use high resolution.

If you find the sweetspot, you don't actually get any blurring, only at the extreme end.

My native resolution is 2560x1080 21:9, something FF14 does very well actually, however there are jaggies with it, playing at 2944x1242 provides a much cleaner picture and more detail.

And if you are wondering, I still sustain 60 FPS (limited to) and no need to use FXAA which needs to burn in hell.

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Originally Posted by Coolit

I am also disappointed as FXAA is terrible looking and I expected better AA options in the DX11 client.

Warcraft has recently moved to a deferred lighting engine and they were able to offer a load of better AA options including, FXAA Low, FXAA High, CMAA, MSAA 2x, MSAA 4x, MSAA 8x, SSAA 2x, SSAA 2x + CMAA so I don't see any reason why FFXIV cant.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lm_8ag7oPs0

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Originally Posted by raelgun

Evidence is in the link, you should read it fully, many people have confirmed the results, you realise this feature is basically SSAA or render scale.
There are games out there that have this feature, take a read on it. Really you should try it instead of trying to deny it.
Theres a reason why Nvidia has implemented DSR into its drivers officially.

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I know what it is. I know what it does. If you know what it does, then how can you poosibly argue that a technique that *reduces* the resolution of an image can in any way increase the fidelity of the resulting reduced image? What you are suggesting is like saying that an MP3 ripped at 320kbps sounds better than the raw audio on a CD.

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Originally Posted by Kosmos992k

I know what it is. I know what it does. If you know what it does, then how can you poosibly argue that a technique that *reduces* the resolution of an image can in any way increase the fidelity of the resulting reduced image? What you are suggesting is like saying that an MP3 ripped at 320kbps sounds better than the raw audio on a CD.

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Because its hard to argue with results :), the results are clear, more detail shows on the screen with comparisons. Seriously, instead of complaining actually do it your self and see the results. Also audio is an interesting one since I own a $130 usb DAC + audio technicas m50 which are around $130 if I had to look at USA prices :).

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Originally Posted by raelgun

Because its hard to argue with results :), the results are clear, more detail shows on the screen with comparisons. Seriously, instead of complaining actually do it your self and see the results. Also audio is an interesting one since I own a $130 usb DAC + audio technicas m50 which are around $130 if I had to look at USA prices :).

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I'm sorry, you're just ignoring the fact that any lossy compression (which downsampling is a form of) actualoly reduces the fidelity of the image. It's just that in your opinion, in the circumstances you see it, you think that visually the image is better. That is an entirely subjective point of view, and ignores the facts. I'm not arguing the point further with you since you do not wish to discuss the facts, but prefer to use subjective opinion instead.

BTW I'm not sure why you felt the need to mention a $130 DAC, you can't contest the fact that ripping raw audio from a music CD to an MP3 format is converting the original source audio using a lossy compression method that downsamples the audio.

Guys stop arguing. The point of the thread is we want hardware AA, and clearly WoW's able to do it, and this is a WoW clone so where is the MSAA yoshi? yoshi where is it?