No Hardware Anti-Aliasing under DirectX 11?

[Darkshade]

Bump. This is important to me. At least would be nice if someone could tell the devs that we on PC would like the option for true hardware FSAA.

[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??

[Gieff]

One thing I didn't see in this thread so far, and as another followup, has anyone tried forcing SGSSAA on the DX11 Heavensward Benchmark?

Typically Nvidia Inspector anti-aliasing compatibility keys that work in DX9 games and builds of games do not work in DX11 games or DX11 builds of a game. Nvidia has not issued many if any official compatibility keys for forcing MSAA/TrSSAA/SGSSAA in DX11 games despite large petitions from Nvidia Inspector users, and no one has had much luck finding them on their own for DX11 games. I would be very pleasantly surprised if the XIV DX9 SGSSAA compatibility key (0x004012C5 for 4xSGSSAA as discussed here: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost...postcount=7248 ) actually works in the DX11 Heavenward Benchmark. If it works there it will most likely work in the actual game, as was the case with the original 2.0 benchmark.

[Entropic]

Bump, we need better aliasing features.

[Gieff]

Alright so I tried SGSSAA in the DX11 client...no dice as I predicted. To those who are unfamiliar with Sparse Grid Super Sampling, it is not the same method as forcing Downsampling per se (where you just run the game at a higher resolution and it scales down to fit your monitor). SGSSAA is an Nvidia trick using a little program called Nvidia Inspector. It lets you tweak the heck out of the driver settings in order to do a lot more vs the standard NV control panel. SGSSAA forces a game to take 4 samples per pixel on the entire image, but offsets those samples by rotating them within the pixel to better analyze and blend pixel color on slight diagonal lines and sub-pixel aliasing, and eliminates temporal aliasing. It's the ultimate AA quality, and it does NOT change the screen resolution to do so, so the UI elements remain untouched.

Sadly, you can't use it in the DX11 client, the compatibility key code doesn't work and DX11 binaries require different key entries anyway.

[Anty]

still no news on "we are working on other AA solutions" or something?
i just entered Dravanian hinterlands (its ok at night lol) and i had a flicker fest...

It's really hurting my eyes. It is bar far worst thing i have ever seen.
the bad textures are the main reason for it. but a proper AA tequnique would fix it...

can we please have an answer to this problem? its there since 1.0!!!! - yet it was fixable easier due to normal MSAA - therefore we had better options to get rid of the jaggies...

We get answers almost imediately when it comes to haircuts but the net is full of problems with shimmering, flickering and bad anti-aliasing. its not 1995... we are half way to 2016...

the game did improve so much the characters are even better now... but somehow it makes the jaggyness of the rest of the world even more obvious lol

[Codevine]

Yeah, I agree. This has been my biggest downside to the game, yet. It's just aliasing and flickering everywhere without any proper tools to reduce it. Just adding ingame supersampling/downsampling would be very nice.

[Gieff]

There is currently an "ask your questions" for the next Letter from the Producer Live" letter thread. http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/forums/1304

Those who agree with the need of improved anti-aliasing options for FFXIV, please post said concerns! The only way it'll happen is if enough people ask for it where they have the best chance to be heard. It may be ignored but there's a better chance of it being addressed there than waiting for a dev who speaks English to actually find/read this thread.

[Nekodar]

There is currently an "ask your questions" for the next Letter from the Producer Live" letter thread. http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/forums/1304

Those who agree with the need of improved anti-aliasing options for FFXIV, please post said concerns! The only way it'll happen is if enough people ask for it where they have the best chance to be heard. It may be ignored but there's a better chance of it being addressed there than waiting for a dev who speaks English to actually find/read this thread.

It's enough with one post per concern, and have people "like" that post.
That makes it more likely to be brought up than having a hundred posts about the same thing.

[Zyrusticae]

Just going to state for the record that DSR with the smoothness cranked up works really effectively at reducing aliasing, almost to the level of SGSSAA, though obviously with a bigger performance hit and annoying UI scaling issues.

Would still love to see official TXAA support tho (which conveniently doubles as SGSSAA support in games that have it). Seems really weird that it's omitted considering it's basically a standard feature in Nvidia-supported games these days.