No Hardware Anti-Aliasing under DirectX 11?

[Gieff]

and do not be surprised if the minimum reqs go up over time because it will.

That's the beauty of having graphics options on PC though, the minimum reqs do not have to go up at all if these features are added. They are doing nothing at all to system performance if they are not turned on, especially the post-process forms of AA.

Even if they go through and completely re-do the textures to include higher res, as well as higher polygon geometry in models and environments, add tessellation in more and more areas to reduce nickeling, etc, the only system requirement would be additional file space for these options, since they could still retain the original game assets in there for those who cannot handle the new higher quality settings.

[raelgun]

Not what I mean really by that, sometimes they may add a more dense open world environment or want to add slightly higher res base textures to the game such as armour etc... most mmos have done this at least post WOW, not saying the increase will be big, they tend to be slight, the biggest issue is not SE supporting hardware, its the vendors supporting it, if the drivers just do not get supported etc.. its a good time to stop building the game around it as it will only make SE lives harder or any other dev really. Currently the lowest GPU is a nvidia 8800, theres no more driver support from nvidia for that, I won't be surprised if they will go up the next tier for min reqs.

[Gieff]

I see what you mean. I think in XIV's case, that would be something we may see more of when they do finally drop the PS3 version. A better reflection map for armor and an updated texture here, model there, etc, won't hurt the PS4 version much, and yeah I could see them eventually bumping up the minimum PC spec a bit, as much for moving to more modern/supported hardware vs. those minor asset improvements affecting game performance on low settings.

[Gieff]

FYI for those who are interested to learn more about the specific types of aliasing and the anti-aliasing methods that best/worst address each, this is a very cool and informative article with some great comparisons and examples: http://www.beyond3d.com/content/articles/122/1

Also, there is some very detailed information about the different types of SMAA specifically here: http://www.iryoku.com/smaa/downloads...tialiasing.pdf

[Nekodar]

When it was still believed that the DX11 version would be a separate client, I had hopes that we'd be able to force SSAA through driver settings in this fresh, modern version of the game. Now that this is no longer the case, I'm sad we'll be left with FXAA. It works well enough for some things, but transparent textures and things further away look really crap.

Judging by the benchmark, it's still a separate binary.
DX9 is 32bit binary, DX11 is 64bit binary.
Selecting DX9 or DX11 in the launcher just means you select the binary to run.
As the binaries are different, you can easily have different driver settings for them.

[seekified]

Judging by the benchmark, it's still a separate binary.
DX9 is 32bit binary, DX11 is 64bit binary.
Selecting DX9 or DX11 in the launcher just means you select the binary to run.
As the binaries are different, you can easily have different driver settings for them.

Good point, didn't think about that! Well, I will be testing all sorts of driver-enforced settings regardless, though my hopes aren't high.

[berries]

Does anyone else use this method http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost...postcount=7248? No jaggies and practically no shimmer from the shrubbery and stuff. It works for me really well and only downside for me is I need to use fullscreen mode, I'm weird and I normally do all stuff in windowed otherwise.

[seekified]

Does anyone else use this method http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost...postcount=7248? No jaggies and practically no shimmer from the shrubbery and stuff. It works for me really well and only downside for me is I need to use fullscreen mode, I'm weird and I normally do all stuff in windowed otherwise.

Haven't tried that, but then I'm not sure it'd work on AMD cards anyhow.

Another possibility for pseudo-SSAA is VSR/DSR scaling - you render the game in 4k (or 3200x1800 for some cards), it gets scaled down to your monitor's native resolution and UI scaling ingame takes care of the rest. Or rather, it hopefully will do in 3.0 since the current UI scaling isn't good enough and doesn't scale things like character names and whatnot.

[berries]

Haven't tried that, but then I'm not sure it'd work on AMD cards anyhow.

Another possibility for pseudo-SSAA is VSR/DSR scaling - you render the game in 4k (or 3200x1800 for some cards), it gets scaled down to your monitor's native resolution and UI scaling ingame takes care of the rest. Or rather, it hopefully will do in 3.0 since the current UI scaling isn't good enough and doesn't scale things like character names and whatnot.

I don't know about that pseudo something something myself, but I got so annoyed about everything shimmering when moving around that I wanted to look for a solution to it and thankfully I found that. As a bonus everything looks super clean and sharp. I guess as a another down side, it does seem to require much more from the computer, turning the camera doesn't feel as snappy when it's on. My computer is almost 3years old so I'm sure newer ones handle it better, and it doesn't really affect my gameplay anyway. For me it's 200% worth it.

[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.