No Hardware Anti-Aliasing under DirectX 11?

[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??