No Hardware Anti-Aliasing under DirectX 11?

[Gieff]

berries is referring to SGSSAA, which is supersampling using a sparse grid via nvidia Inspector. It's the highest quality AA method you can do for current games, but unfortunately it rarely if ever works in DX11 games, so we'll be SOL for that method soon . Regular ordered grid SSAA via downsampling or nvidia DSR is also no good as seekified pointed out. The UI in this game sucks in terms of scaling options, lack of dynamic scaling with resolution changes, and is not game-resolution independent. As the monitor standard continues to move towards 1440p, 4K, and 5K, hopefully they'll at least address the UI scaling problems, which will make downsampling AA methods much easier to implement.

[berries]

berries is referring to SGSSAA, which is supersampling using a sparse grid via nvidia Inspector. It's the highest quality AA method you can do for current games, but unfortunately it rarely if ever works in DX11 games, so we'll be SOL for that method soon .

Ugh well that sucks .. .is there no way to keep using the earlier than dx11 then, it comes with the expansion, right? I'd be happy to give up on the other stuff it might bring if I can keep this shimmer free and clean looking.

[Gieff]

You CAN use the original DX9 client with Heavensward to continue using SGSSAA, but you'll be missing out on:

- DX11's increased draw calls/CPU/GPU efficiency (more consistent FPS/performance on modern hardware)
- Improved skin shaders
- HBAO+ (huge improvement on soft shadows and lighting)
- Tessellation and POM which will make the ground not look boring and flat
- Realtime reflections on shiny floors and surfaces
- Uncompressed textures and normal maps (bye bye blocky artifacts on every textured/bumped surface)
- Tessellated water (real actual waves in the water instead of flat water with pretend textured waves)
- Water caustics (those cool shiny light pocket patterns you see on the bottom of water surfaces, caused by light refraction on a wavy liquid surface)

We shouldn't have to make this tradeoff, that would mean SE's work on DX11 was a complete waste for many if it doesn't include better AA options (which was one of the most requested DX11 features to begin with...)

[berries]

You CAN use the original DX9 client with Heavensward to continue using SGSSAA, but you'll be missing out on:

- DX11's increased draw calls/CPU/GPU efficiency (more consistent FPS/performance on modern hardware)
- Improved skin shaders
- HBAO+ (huge improvement on soft shadows and lighting)
- Tessellation and POM which will make the ground not look boring and flat
- Realtime reflections on shiny floors and surfaces
- Uncompressed textures and normal maps (bye bye blocky artifacts on every textured/bumped surface)
- Tessellated water (real actual waves in the water instead of flat water with pretend textured waves)
- Water caustics (those cool shiny light pocket patterns you see on the bottom of water surfaces, caused by light refraction on a wavy liquid surface)

We shouldn't have to make this tradeoff, that would mean SE's work on DX11 was a complete waste for many if it doesn't include better AA options (which was one of the most requested DX11 features to begin with...)

Oh okay, none of those say anythign to me but I'm fairly sure I won't miss any of those if I get to keep the antialiasing. But I'll wait and see, I can at least give them a try

[Laraul]

You CAN use the original DX9 client with Heavensward to continue using SGSSAA, but you'll be missing out on:

- DX11's increased draw calls/CPU/GPU efficiency (more consistent FPS/performance on modern hardware)
- Improved skin shaders
- HBAO+ (huge improvement on soft shadows and lighting)
- Tessellation and POM which will make the ground not look boring and flat
- Realtime reflections on shiny floors and surfaces
- Uncompressed textures and normal maps (bye bye blocky artifacts on every textured/bumped surface)
- Tessellated water (real actual waves in the water instead of flat water with pretend textured waves)
- Water caustics (those cool shiny light pocket patterns you see on the bottom of water surfaces, caused by light refraction on a wavy liquid surface)

You can use SGSSAA or w/e it's called w/ the DX11 client. Why wouldn't you? It's just taking an image rendered at one resolution and scaling it to another.

The DX9 client is perfectly capable of realtime reflections, skin shaders, Water caustics, and "uncompressed" textures. Uncompressed textures are no different than and uncompressed image. A PNG looks just as good an uncompressed BMP file, despite being compressed. The game doesn't include support ultra-high resolution textures, which I assume you are refering too. And unless your constantly face planting walls it shouldn't be much of a problem.

Find it funny that everyone here seems to think FXAA isn't "hardware anti-aliasing" while every other kind is. FXAA uses the GPU's pixel shaders to do a post analysis pass on the rendered image. SMAA does something very similar. Perhaps in the future, they may implement MSAA + FXAA, which would be nice. Though not necessary.

[Gieff]

You can use SGSSAA or w/e it's called w/ the DX11 client. Why wouldn't you? It's just taking an image rendered at one resolution and scaling it to another.

The DX9 client is perfectly capable of realtime reflections, skin shaders, Water caustics, and "uncompressed" textures. Uncompressed textures are no different than and uncompressed image. A PNG looks just as good an uncompressed BMP file, despite being compressed. The game doesn't include support ultra-high resolution textures, which I assume you are refering too. And unless your constantly face planting walls it shouldn't be much of a problem.

Everything I denoted there is in direct reference to the SE FFXIV devs discussion of new features (along with comparison images for each) specific to the DX11 build of XIV. Whether or not these features can be done in DX9 in general, they (or the improvements to them) will not be in the DX9 version of XIV. Here's the youtube video of the DX11 feature reveal straight from Yoshida himself https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRqW...BurcuOzyurkmez

I DID mean uncompressed, as they have denied any implementation of higher resolution textures. In the current game, it is known that textures use a lossy compression (often faster to encode and decode than lossless methods such as .png. I know this from experience in 3D animation and VFX dealing with png textures and image sequences.) and there's a lot of garble and compression artifacts visible, especially in the normal maps. I'm not making this stuff up, this was all revealed in that live DX11 reveal and subsequent interviews asking about DX11 client specific features.

Yes FXAA is done by the GPU hardware so you're right there. While SMAA uses a similar process it is a far superior method and algorithm for not only detecting legitimate aliasing, but also refraining from falsely blurring additional information such as text and texture details. Further it uses improved blur shapes to cover diagonal aliasing and other shapes not present in FXAA or the original MLAA algorithm it's based on. And this is BEFORE you add in the more advanced SMAA methods such as 2Tx (adding badly badly needed temporal anti-aliasing), 2Sx (multisampling to cover sub-pixel aliasing), and SMAA 4x which covers nearly everything.

How many times do I have to make the argument (backed up with references and detailed papers in previous posts) that FXAA is NOT ADEQUATE as a form of AA and that this game deserves more improved and modern OPTIONS for anti-aliasing to suit many different hardware configs and player preferences??

[seekified]

The UI in this game sucks in terms of scaling options, lack of dynamic scaling with resolution changes, and is not game-resolution independent. As the monitor standard continues to move towards 1440p, 4K, and 5K, hopefully they'll at least address the UI scaling problems, which will make downsampling AA methods much easier to implement.

Indeed. I heard somewhere (not sure if it's official or not) that the UI scaling is being reworked for 3.0, so with any luck it'll be improved. Still, considering my 290 cards don't officially do 3840x2160 in VSR (and any non-2:1 scaling looks like crap) it'd be nice if the game client was actually responsive to forced driver settings so I could use SSAA instead.

[Naraku_Diabolos]

Remember that the devs have stated that more graphical options will be added in the future when newer cards get more features. They will probably port to DX12 later on. I read that it took one online company 6 weeks to port from DX11 to DX12 for their game.

[raelgun]

Remember that the devs have stated that more graphical options will be added in the future when newer cards get more features. They will probably port to DX12 later on. I read that it took one online company 6 weeks to port from DX11 to DX12 for their game.

Hoping UI scaling is fully inline to where it should be, they really only scoped this game out at 1920x1080 p for some reason. Also with this, DX 12 will be nice, but currently no GPU out at the moment actually supports that we know of of FULL DX12 features, we won't see this come about for another few years, I would predict when the next gen of consoles arrive which would use this kind of hardware in the first place. So really looking at another 5 years minimum for SE to even consider it due to the install base even on the PC side of things.

The important note in that is FULL before people go off on one, the 970+980 and the modern AMD cards are rumoured to be using only partial of DX 12 features, Nvidia side of things a bit more so far.

[Nekodar]

... Also with this, DX 12 will be nice, but currently no GPU out at the moment actually supports that we know of of FULL DX12 features, we won't see this come about for another few years, I would predict when the next gen of consoles arrive which would use this kind of hardware in the first place. So really looking at another 5 years minimum for SE to even consider it due to the install base even on the PC side of things.

The important note in that is FULL before people go off on one, the 970+980 and the modern AMD cards are rumoured to be using only partial of DX 12 features, Nvidia side of things a bit more so far.

What exactly is "full" dx12?
Support for all Feature_Levels under DX12, with every feature at max tier?
nVidia Maxwell 2 architecture supports FL 11_0, 11_1, 12_0 and 12_1 iirc at at least minimum tier for each FL. (edit: should be noted also that DX12 feature level 11_1 and DX11 feature level 11_1 are slightly different as well, afaik)
AMD have more Tier 3 support for features, but lack Feature_Level 12_1...