No Hardware Anti-Aliasing under DirectX 11?

I’m sure I’m not the only person who was expecting this change to come about, only to feel rather bit disappointed that the time hadn’t been taken in order to make the adjustments for this. It would require a bit of effort in order to apply, but the trade off is an extremely huge difference.

The performance difference being a concern for some, FXAA is still a viable option to have this wouldn't go away. However the option to choose between software AA and hardware AA should be added in the future, as in this day and age the performance difference isn't drastic enough to consider it a dead avenue.

Hopefully a community rep could take the time to read through this and appropriately forward this information to the development team, that there's still a want for hardware anti-aliasing, if it could be added to the schedule. (As they did say they wanted to add more DX11 features in the future).

“What is Anti-Aliasing?”

Anti-Aliasing is an industry standard for reducing the inherent ‘stair-case’ effect that all 3D based games suffer from. The larger the distance, the more ‘pixelated’ things appear.
3D objects are made up of vector based polygons, because the computer is trying to render the vectors as accurately as possible to suit a pixel-based monitor, it creates this stair-case effect as a result, leading to the requirement to smooth it out afterwards.
This problem solver comes in various forms, some require more effort to implement as well as requiring more processing power in order to function.
But the trade-off is worth it. Software AA does not hold a candle to Hardware AA.

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“I don’t understand this, summarise it for me please?”

Essentially, every frame the game renders have ‘layers’, due to the way Deferred Rendering rendered lighting, shading and geometry in the scene, the hardware antialiasing would be ‘defeated’, meaning no effect would take place, this issue under DirectX9 pretty much lead to the wide-spread use of FXAA as a replacement. DirectX 10 fixed this issue, however it requires a bit of adjustment on how the scene is rendered.

“Wait, so FXAA isn’t Hardware Anti-Aliasing?”

No. FXAA is ‘Software’ Anti-Aliasing, this is a quick ‘pass’ over the entre screen/game scene AFTER the frame has been rendered which simply blurs it in order to try and smooth the aliasing in the scene. It’s very light on performance and easily applied, so it’s a great choice.

“So, then why bother with Hardware AA?”

The major difference between software AA and hardware AA is how it handles the scene it’s applied to. There are varying types of Hardware AA but basically it’ll detect ONLY the aliasing in the scene, including transparent edges (Hair/Grass/Robes)
This is an example of Hardware AA (Bearing in mind SSAA is old and no-longer used, but it shows the difference quite strikingly);
http://36646d87786feafc0611-0338bbbc...0.Z-Z96KYq.jpg

“I’m still a little confused as to how this applied to FFXIV?”

Looking at the previous image I posted in the last section, notice the difference in the jagged vs. smooth edges? When you’re playing FFXIV you may notice even with FXAA enabled the edge of your character, your hair, the grass, certain objects nearby or in the distance suffer from this jagged edge look where this seem to flicker a bit.
Hardware Anti-Aliasing would almost completely defeat this issue. It’s extremely powerful and it drastically improves the overall appearance of the game. FFXIV 1.0 proved this, with AA turned off, the game almost looks like ARR, with Hardware AA turned on, it looks like a completely different game altogether.

http://puu.sh/hsIgC/e7c7acbfe1.png

As you can see, with FXAA turned on [right] and turned off [left], the difference is substantial, however there's still a lot of ailising left over. An image doesn't do it as much justice, but try it for yourself in-game, and you'll notice the aliasing is still quite aggressive even with FXAA turned on, especially with anything that moves, or appears in the distance.


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For a technical analysis on the possible process they could use, you can view it here;
http://docs.nvidia.com/gameworks/con...drendering.htm

Sure you didn't mix the order of the FFXIV pictures? The left one looks a lot more aliased to me. Anyways, a real AA would be nice.

You're not the only one.

Kind of a let down. Well I didn't have my expectations too high, but FSAA was on the list...

There is no new AA technique in the new DX11 bench. FXAA is the only option atm. Devs also mentioned somewhere (I dont have the link now) that they will bring more DX11 features in the new client in the future. So maybe we will get SSAA and TXAA in the future.

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Originally Posted by Waliel

Sure you didn't mix the order of the FFXIV pictures? The left one looks a lot more aliased to me. Anyways, a real AA would be nice.

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I did mix them up! Thank you!

Hmm... I remember saying in past 'DX11 Coming!' thread that it wouldn't be the 'second coming' for the game. Admittedly, it was more about Square not upgrading the textures, but this is more of the same sentiment. I don't really understand why people were so convinced that the differences were going to be 'night and day'. It's just DirectX, it's not a rebuilt game engine.

The one thing I really wanted from the DX11 client was better AA options >.>
Might as well keep using DX9 + Gedosato/post processing if we're not getting better AA options

Due to no proper AA or render scaling options, seriously, they can add that in to the game, downsampling from a higher res to get sharper details however this mucks up the UI scaling a crap ton and forced to limit my self to 15% extra resolution otherwise the UI just cannot keep up, come on JP companies, there are resolutions that are bigger then 1920x1080p, its bloody stone age.

The trees still flicker like crazy for me, some more AA is very much needed.

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Originally Posted by raelgun

Due to no proper AA or render scaling options, seriously, they can add that in to the game, downsampling from a higher res to get sharper details however this mucks up the UI scaling a crap ton and forced to limit my self to 15% extra resolution otherwise the UI just cannot keep up, come on JP companies, there are resolutions that are bigger then 1920x1080p, its bloody stone age.

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I'm downsampling from 1440p to 1080p and that's just about doable with the UI at mostly 140%

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Originally Posted by Gilraen

Hmm... I remember saying in past 'DX11 Coming!' thread that it wouldn't be the 'second coming' for the game. Admittedly, it was more about Square not upgrading the textures, but this is more of the same sentiment. I don't really understand why people were so convinced that the differences were going to be 'night and day'. It's just DirectX, it's not a rebuilt game engine.

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The differences between max settings DX9 and DX11 client are quite noticeable. I would say its day - evening difference and not day and night. The textures maybe did not got a res bump but now they are uncompressed making the skin far far better looking without blocking and large squares. Also HBAO+ makes huge difference. The differences are quite big and visible. After running the bench on max and returning to the normal game I noticed the difference even more. If someone can't spot the differences he/she should make sure the bench runs on DX11 and max settings cause you have to do it manually. The bech launches as DX9 and uses the default settings we already have in game.

Oh, yeah, the tessellation and HBAO are amazing. But the complete lack of useful AA is shameful. FXAA is like rubbing vaseline on your screen and should just be brought out back and put out of it's misery.

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Originally Posted by raelgun

Due to no proper AA or render scaling options, seriously, they can add that in to the game, downsampling from a higher res to get sharper details however this mucks up the UI scaling a crap ton and forced to limit my self to 15% extra resolution otherwise the UI just cannot keep up, come on JP companies, there are resolutions that are bigger then 1920x1080p, its bloody stone age.

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OMG
#firstworldproblems

1st time I've heard such an asinine statement made about 1080p resolution.

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Originally Posted by Nimlothien

Oh, yeah, the tessellation and HBAO are amazing. But the complete lack of useful AA is shameful. FXAA is like rubbing vaseline on your screen and should just be brought out back and put out of it's misery.

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Can't you force an AA mode with profile settings if you have an Nvidia card?

My GTX 770 only lets me use FXAA as my anti-aliasing in XIV; no choice to change it to hardware.

Since the benchmark is not an installed + recognized program, there's no way to tweak it through GeForce Experience. Maybe there will be in the full DX11 client.

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Originally Posted by Gilraen

Hmm... I remember saying in past 'DX11 Coming!' thread that it wouldn't be the 'second coming' for the game. Admittedly, it was more about Square not upgrading the textures, but this is more of the same sentiment. I don't really understand why people were so convinced that the differences were going to be 'night and day'. It's just DirectX, it's not a rebuilt game engine.

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We're not asking them to rebuild anything, we're asking for Hardware Anti-Aliasing, which isn't a major adjustment.

The point of the DX11 client was to add additional graphical options, this would be another one.

No-one is asking for a miracle, just what is considered standard.

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Originally Posted by Brianmj

Can't you force an AA mode with profile settings if you have an Nvidia card?

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No you can't.
This would require a bit of adjusting as to how the game actually renders things in the scene per frame
It literally can't be forced.

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Originally Posted by Hali

We're not asking them to rebuild anything, we're asking for Hardware Anti-Aliasing, which isn't a major adjustment.

The point of the DX11 client was to add additional graphical options, this would be another one.

No-one is asking for a miracle, just what is considered standard.




No you can't.
This would require a bit of adjusting as to how the game actually renders things in the scene per frame
It literally can't be forced.

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Yup, DX11 still won't let you force AA in the nvidia/AMD control panel. And sadly Gedosato+post processing MSAA only work on the DX9 client. If not for HBAO and the amazing water I'd not bother at all with dx11

FFXIV is well known to use deferred rendering which prevents most forms of AA. They would have to re-code the engine entirely to change this method.

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Originally Posted by Kosmos992k

OMG
#firstworldproblems

1st time I've heard such an asinine statement made about 1080p resolution.

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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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Originally Posted by Nimlothien

Yup, DX11 still won't let you force AA in the nvidia/AMD control panel. And sadly Gedosato+post processing MSAA only work on the DX9 client. If not for HBAO and the amazing water I'd not bother at all with dx11

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Have you tried custom resolutions?, you can still run the DX 11 benchmark at higher resolution if you are not doing so already through the GPU drivers directly.

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=509076

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Originally Posted by Tiggy

FFXIV is well known to use deferred rendering which prevents most forms of AA. They would have to re-code the engine entirely to change this method.

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That's completely false, it's a partial code adjustment. NOT a complete engine re-write, that's a complete fallacy.

It's a simple render priority fix and a few other minor adjustments. It's not that big of a deal to adjust. I can assure you. It's something that every major company that wanted to add Hardware AA had to do.

As professionals, they're entirely aware of the process needed to do this, well within their capabilities.

I was disappointed with the lack of additional AA options in the DX11 benchmark as well. I'd love to see better AA added to the game, and/or a dev comment on the issue.

Disappointed with FXAA, it doesn't matter how great DX11 looks if jaggies are everywhere.

That was a good read op but your showing the differences between no AA and hardware AA. I'm still not sold on the whole hardware AA should be here because I still haven't seen an example of how hardware AA is better then software AA.
A comparison of no AA vs AA gameplay is a drastic improvement but show me a comparison of what software vs hardware AA looks like

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Originally Posted by Hali

That's completely false, it's a partial code adjustment. NOT a complete engine re-write, that's a complete fallacy.

It's a simple render priority fix and a few other minor adjustments. It's not that big of a deal to adjust. I can assure you. It's something that every major company that wanted to add Hardware AA had to do.

As professionals, they're entirely aware of the process needed to do this, well within their capabilities.

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Regardless if I was wrong about it being a complete rewrite doesn't change the fact they'd have to rewrite the engine at least in part. Focus on the important part is the message instead of nitpicking.

I assure you that your assumptions about how minor it is are exactly that. Assumptions. You know literally nothing about the renderer to even make that determination. You have absolutely no idea how much work it is. Yet you talk to me about fallacies.

It might be theoretically easy, but in the end you know nothing about what is actually under the hood. Also try to remember this is on multiple systems. You have no idea how the different renderer are intertwined with other parts of the engine. All you have are assumptions.

FFXIV is now Nvidia GameWorks, where's my TXAA support Squenix and Nvidia?

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Originally Posted by IveraIvalice

That was a good read op but your showing the differences between no AA and hardware AA. I'm still not sold on the whole hardware AA should be here because I still haven't seen an example of how hardware AA is better then software AA.
A comparison of no AA vs AA gameplay is a drastic improvement but show me a comparison of what software vs hardware AA looks like

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I can't show the difference between No AA, Hardware AA and FXAA in FFXIV, because we don't have it. That's why this thread exists.

I'm sure there are plenty of examples online comparing something like FXAA to MSAA

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Originally Posted by Tiggy

Regardless if I was wrong about it being a complete rewrite doesn't change the fact they'd have to rewrite the engine at least in part. Focus on the important part is the message instead of nitpicking.

I assure you that your assumptions about how minor it is are exactly that. Assumptions. You know literally nothing about the renderer to even make that determination. You have absolutely no idea how much work it is. Yet you talk to me about fallacies.

It might be theoretically easy, but in the end you know nothing about what is actually under the hood. Also try to remember this is on multiple systems. You have no idea how the different renderer are intertwined with other parts of the engine. All you have are assumptions.

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Regardless if I was wrong about it being a complete rewrite doesn't change the fact they'd have to rewrite the engine at least in part.

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I assure you that your assumptions about how minor it is are exactly that. Assumptions

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I do it for a living, so yes I can assure you that it's a simpler task than you think it is.

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You know literally nothing about the renderer to even make that determination.

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There's only one Deferred Rendering Method. Occasionally there's a few extra layers depending on the lighting/shading system in place, but the method still results in the same thing.

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It might be theoretically easy, but in the end you know nothing about what is actually under the hood. Also try to remember this is on multiple systems.

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It's an almost identical process for DirectX and OpenGL, as I said there's only one real method for Deferred Rendering, it doesn't differ. The same adjustment needs to be made.

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You have no idea how the different renderer are intertwined with other parts of the engine.

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Now I'm pretty sure you're unaware of what you're discussing, because this is the most vague use of "I'm trying to make it seems like I know what I'm discussing" If I've ever seen one.

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You have absolutely no idea how much work it is. Yet you talk to me about fallacies.

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Sadly not, I have a degree and several projects converted from DirectX 9 > DirectX 11 to prove the point. It's not as drastic a change as you think, and it's minimal at best. Yes it's work, but it's no substantial work to the point where you'd sit and go "Oh god, this'll take us two months!!"

At most a few shaders may need recompiled and adjusted, but that's unlikely at best. It's a simple task that wouldn't require a large time investment, but time is short for the Development team. That's why this is a request, no-one is forcing them to do, no-one is demanding it. The point of the thread is to express that there's a want for it, not a need

Haven't tried the benchmark yet but if there are no new aa options that's kind of a let down. I've been playing with a sweetfx profile and disabling it is shocking at how blurry fxaa makes the base game.

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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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Why spend money on something that can render at higher resolutions only to downsample the crap out of it?

Yoshi has said before that resolution doesn't replace image quality, and he's right.

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Originally Posted by Kosmos992k

Why spend money on something that can render at higher resolutions only to downsample the crap out of it?

Yoshi has said before that resolution doesn't replace image quality, and he's right.

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Says the person that has not tried it, I am down sampling FF14 right now and check my link above, the evidence is right there, the reason to down sample is that many games are not being released with hardware AA, so the next best thing is to down sample, these type of hardware handle is just fine and are designed to have games cranked up a notch while still maintaining performance.
Also jaggies make the image quality look bad, making the image sharper improves the fidelity, theres always ways to improve the image quality and going beyond 1080 p is part of that and this has always been true, its been a proven fact, why you are contesting this I have no idea, us PC players can benefit from the extra bits of DX 11 AND increased resolution, we can have all of the cake and eat it.

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Originally Posted by Illya

FFXIV is now Nvidia GameWorks, where's my TXAA support Squenix and Nvidia?

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Too busy giving us shiny floors apparently.

Bumping because this deserves more attention.

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Originally Posted by raelgun

Says the person that has not tried it, I am down sampling FF14 right now and check my link above, the evidence is right there, the reason to down sample is that many games are not being released with hardware AA, so the next best thing is to down sample, these type of hardware handle is just fine and are designed to have games cranked up a notch while still maintaining performance.
Also jaggies make the image quality look bad, making the image sharper improves the fidelity, theres always ways to improve the image quality and going beyond 1080 p is part of that and this has always been true, its been a proven fact, why you are contesting this I have no idea, us PC players can benefit from the extra bits of DX 11 AND increased resolution, we can have all of the cake and eat it.

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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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Originally Posted by Hali

That's completely false, it's a partial code adjustment. NOT a complete engine re-write, that's a complete fallacy.

It's a simple render priority fix and a few other minor adjustments. It's not that big of a deal to adjust. I can assure you. It's something that every major company that wanted to add Hardware AA had to do.

As professionals, they're entirely aware of the process needed to do this, well within their capabilities.

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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.

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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Originally Posted by Ladon

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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LMAO what the hell are you talking about, the UI in this game literally doesn't scale at all

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Originally Posted by Illya

LMAO what the hell are you talking about, the UI in this game literally doesn't scale at all

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I'm sorry, what?

http://i.imgur.com/tNzJ8vc.png

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Originally Posted by Illya

LMAO what the hell are you talking about, the UI in this game literally doesn't scale at all

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False, by default it scales with the resolution. This can be seen in story dialogue boxes and AH sales message that have no existing settings to change their size. You can put the ps4 version side by side with a pc box, both running 1080p and see that the UI for the ps4 is running at 720 wheras the pc version will have a 1080 scaled UI. The scaling is there it's just generally not obvious.

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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.

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Thank you. This is what I was getting at but didn't feel like arguing the details since I didn't think he'd listen anyway. This is hardly trivial.

You guys...

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...caling-options

The UI in this game does not scale. What is actually happening is the devs are creating fixed size steps of different UI elements. There are only a few of these steps, and it's really hard to get more because the devs are sitting there creating them one by one for every UI element in this game. Squenix for some reason uses fixed pixel bitmaps for all overlay UI elements in this game. That's why the UI isn't freely scalable or resizable.

This is why the UI in the game is so random, some things have different steps you can choose, but other things like the NPC dialogue bubbles and the nameplates over players and NPCs *NEVER* scale. Above 1080p and player names become microscopic on the screen. Most UI elements which can be resized go up to 140% which might be barely enough for 1440p. There is no UI size large enough for 4K resolution period.

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Originally Posted by Illya

You guys...

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...caling-options

The UI in this game does not scale. What is actually happening is the devs are creating fixed size steps of different UI elements. There are only a few of these steps, and it's really hard to get more because the devs are sitting there creating them one by one for every UI element in this game. Squenix for some reason uses fixed pixel bitmaps for all overlay UI elements in this game. That's why the UI isn't freely scalable or resizable.

This is why the UI in the game is so random, some things have different steps you can choose, but other things like the NPC dialogue bubbles and the nameplates over players and NPCs *NEVER* scale. Above 1080p and player names become microscopic on the screen. Most UI elements which can be resized go up to 140% which might be barely enough for 1440p. There is no UI size large enough for 4K resolution period.

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Oh, I understand you now.

Yeah nameplates aren't UI elements (from a technical perspective), they are actually just flat textured surfaces so they aren't going to scale unless they create a new set of assets that kick in after the game is set over a certain resolution.

And yeah the actual UI is LUA and it likely uses fixed steps since at one point they wanted to open up the UI to modding (is this actually ever going to happen?). I'm guessing they couldn't really vectorize the UI to allow for true scaling because then modding would end up too programmable.

They really do need to add a 200% scaling step for 4k resolutions though. But as you mentioned, 140% should keep you good at 1440p and for supersampling you really don't need more than 50% scaling for good results so 1080p and 1200p users should be fine, but it's going to be an issue if your base resolution is any higher.

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.