No Hardware Anti-Aliasing under DirectX 11?

[PotatoTree]

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

[Catwho]

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.

[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.

[Hali]

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.

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.

[Ladon]

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.

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.

[Illya]

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.

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

[Ladon]

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

I'm sorry, what?

[Tiggy]

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

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.

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.

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.

[Hali]

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.

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.

There are methods to avoid a complete pipeline rewrite, I even posted one.

Not to mention that the lighting engine would in fact need a total rewrite

It would not. I can provide several sources on that to prove the fact if you want.

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.

This wouldn't require singling out objects in the scene marked for forward rendering instead of deferred rendering. As I've said in my original post this simply isn't required. COMPLETE Hardware AA under Deferred Rendering has been supported for a very, very long time under DX10 (onwards).

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.

There's several methods to applying MSAA to a Deferred scene which DOES NOT require beastly changes or complete re-writes. It requires adjustments. All of the current methods to get around this simply require working around the system already in place. (Which exactly what we did), several methods don't do this flawlessly, others do.

I can list each one we testing several projects using ONLY deferred rendering if you'd like, it'll take me some time to read up on it again to make sure I'm not spouting complete nonsense.

And to top it all off, DX11 really offers nothing in the way of performance enhancements that will alleviate this issue.

Hardware AA has had a negligible performance impact, 6-10 years ago, the performance difference was notable, through your average high end system today? No.

As others have already mentioned, if you have the hardware, supersampling is going to be a better option here

Supersmapling is even more performance intensive. You've literally gone back a step MSAA/TXAA would barely scathe a 1/5th of the performance impact of Supersampling the scene.

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.

By default, no. With a bit of adjustment. Yes.

Please see the sources I provided on the topic. This hasn't been an issue since Dx10 first rolled out.

MSAA and family are not options because the renderer does not allow for it.

If you refer to my original post, a very easy to add adjustment fixes this issue without affecting anything already in the scene.

[Anty]

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.

Witcher 3 has a combination of 2 anti-aliasing techniques... you have a shit load of leaves trees bushes around and there is zero flickering no matter what time of the day.
i don't care about a special method, but there are great methods out there and ARR does one of the poorest jobs in these terms.

I mean the game flickers on the ground textures also, it makes me crazy. most of my GPU-power goes to forced other anti-aliasing techniques, which is ridicolous. And especially for SE. I mean they are that much into graphics. but the flickering and aliasing is more then just horrible...