No Hardware Anti-Aliasing under DirectX 11?

[hikariinu124]

FFXIV is now Nvidia GameWorks, where's my TXAA support Squenix and Nvidia?

Too busy giving us shiny floors apparently.

[Darkshade]

Bumping because this deserves more attention.

[Kosmos992k]

Says the person that has not tried it, I am down sampling FF14 right now and check my link above, the evidence is right there, the reason to down sample is that many games are not being released with hardware AA, so the next best thing is to down sample, these type of hardware handle is just fine and are designed to have games cranked up a notch while still maintaining performance.
Also jaggies make the image quality look bad, making the image sharper improves the fidelity, theres always ways to improve the image quality and going beyond 1080 p is part of that and this has always been true, its been a proven fact, why you are contesting this I have no idea, us PC players can benefit from the extra bits of DX 11 AND increased resolution, we can have all of the cake and eat it.

I'm contedting your assertion that a process that by definition *reduces* the data in the image somehow results in increased fidelity, which by definition it cannot do.

[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.

[Illya]

You guys...

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...caling-options

The UI in this game does not scale. What is actually happening is the devs are creating fixed size steps of different UI elements. There are only a few of these steps, and it's really hard to get more because the devs are sitting there creating them one by one for every UI element in this game. Squenix for some reason uses fixed pixel bitmaps for all overlay UI elements in this game. That's why the UI isn't freely scalable or resizable.

This is why the UI in the game is so random, some things have different steps you can choose, but other things like the NPC dialogue bubbles and the nameplates over players and NPCs *NEVER* scale. Above 1080p and player names become microscopic on the screen. Most UI elements which can be resized go up to 140% which might be barely enough for 1440p. There is no UI size large enough for 4K resolution period.

[Ladon]

You guys...

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...caling-options

The UI in this game does not scale. What is actually happening is the devs are creating fixed size steps of different UI elements. There are only a few of these steps, and it's really hard to get more because the devs are sitting there creating them one by one for every UI element in this game. Squenix for some reason uses fixed pixel bitmaps for all overlay UI elements in this game. That's why the UI isn't freely scalable or resizable.

This is why the UI in the game is so random, some things have different steps you can choose, but other things like the NPC dialogue bubbles and the nameplates over players and NPCs *NEVER* scale. Above 1080p and player names become microscopic on the screen. Most UI elements which can be resized go up to 140% which might be barely enough for 1440p. There is no UI size large enough for 4K resolution period.

Oh, I understand you now.

Yeah nameplates aren't UI elements (from a technical perspective), they are actually just flat textured surfaces so they aren't going to scale unless they create a new set of assets that kick in after the game is set over a certain resolution.

And yeah the actual UI is LUA and it likely uses fixed steps since at one point they wanted to open up the UI to modding (is this actually ever going to happen?). I'm guessing they couldn't really vectorize the UI to allow for true scaling because then modding would end up too programmable.

They really do need to add a 200% scaling step for 4k resolutions though. But as you mentioned, 140% should keep you good at 1440p and for supersampling you really don't need more than 50% scaling for good results so 1080p and 1200p users should be fine, but it's going to be an issue if your base resolution is any higher.

[Furyhunter]

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.