No Hardware Anti-Aliasing under DirectX 11?

[Gieff]

MSAA is not only expensive, but it only "filter" polygon edges. So transparent textures used in tress bushes, look totally aliased and horrible.

In DX11, there are MSAA techniques that are already proven that address texture alpha just fine in deferred engines (Crysis 3 among others). That said, I agree with you that SMAA 2Tx should also be available.

CryEngine games have the option to use FXAA, SMAA (1x, 2Sx, 2Tx, 4x), TXAA 2x-4x, and MSAA 2x-8x (with alpha coverage). THAT is what should be held as the standard for PC games. A ton of options for a ton of different hardware configurations, with their own strengths, weaknesses, and varying degrees of performance impact. It won't hurt if the OPTION is there for people who invested in their hardware to use them.

I don't want to read the excuse that SE had to leave them out so the game could work with lower end hardware. YOU CAN TURN AA AND OTHER FEATURES OFF IN THE OPTIONS FOR MORE FPS!!!

[Gieff]

Here's a link to Crytek's 2013 talk at GDC about how they met the challenges of DX11 Deferred lighting MSAA that properly supersamples textures with alpha.

http://www.slideshare.net/TiagoAlexS...sis-3-gdc-2013

They begin talking about it on page 41. Getting this to work also allows them to add SMAA 4x and TXAA, as they both utilize MSAA 2x partially. Of course, XIV does not use CryEngine, I'm just pointing out that the challenge is in fact surmountable, and it has been successfully done in the past. If SE cares as much about graphics and their artists' work as much as they say they do, why not go a little further to ensure their hard work isn't obscurred by jaggies, dot crawlies, and temporal nasty noise?

[Nekodar]

If SE cares as much about graphics and their artists' work as much as they say they do, why not go a little further to ensure their hard work isn't obscurred by jaggies, dot crawlies, and temporal nasty noise?

Would you be willing to delay HW for another month or two just for more AA options? (assuming they won't have any more at early access/launch)
Delay times pulled out of the ass just for illustration.
As demonstrated already, the DX11 version does give a visual upgrade compared to DX9. While better AA is desirable, I myself would not be willing to accept more delays just for that. It's something that can be added post-release.

[Nadirah]

No it has nothing to do with platform limitations.

You don't know that.

One of the reasons Mac clients never exist damn near is that they don't use DirectX.

[Gieff]

Would you be willing to delay HW for another month or two just for more AA options? (assuming they won't have any more at early access/launch)
Delay times pulled out of the ass just for illustration.
As demonstrated already, the DX11 version does give a visual upgrade compared to DX9. While better AA is desirable, I myself would not be willing to accept more delays just for that. It's something that can be added post-release.

I'd be perfectly fine with the release as-is if a dev there would just flat out say "Yes, we're aware that aliasing is an issue in the game affecting quality, and we are currently working with Nvidia or whomever to implement MSAA and other related methods into the DX11 client. It will be added as shortly after the HW release as possible"

So far we have heard NOTHING, not even an acknowledgement or response, and no one interviewing people at SE seem to ask the right questions to the devs or Yoshida in order to get a direct answer about the topic. It's more the complete lack of acknowledgement and the vague opacity that's bothersome, not the fact that it won't be available at HW's release. They could already have it fully working on a test build of the client, yet we have no idea if they even know what SMAA 2Tx is.

[hikariinu124]

and no one interviewing people at SE seem to ask the right questions to the devs or Yoshida in order to get a direct answer about the topic.

God this drives me nuts, the same generic questions over and over...

[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...

[Anty]

God this drives me nuts, the same generic questions over and over...

i'm pretty sure that 90% of the questions are given to the interviewers by SE (or are preselected). If i look at most interviews and compare them to what people comment on ... there is worlds in between.
But yeah, we might get additional hairstyles. isnt that what matters in the end`/sarcasmoff

[Anty]

Calling FXAA software AA is not entirely accurate. FXAA is done by your GPU Cores, it is just implemented at shader level and applied to the complete rendered scene (just like you explained) but is still done by your GPU. Calling it "Software" would imply that's being done by the CPU and that's not the case.
Now back to topic. MSAA is not only expensive, but it only "filter" polygon edges. So transparent textures used in tress bushes, look totally aliased and horrible. This is one of the advantages of FXAA, that because it works on the final scene (like a photoshop filter) it filters aliasing everywhere it finds it.

Really, the only good AA Tech that I would like to see on FFXIV, is one that applies also temporal filtering, as this is the only method that can greatly diminish the crawling/shimmering artifacts that you mention (as moving and far away).

So I would love to see, either TXAA or SMAA 2Tx implemented. TXAA is nvidia only, so that would leave us only with SMAA 2Tx.

most games don't use it anymore but i remember in 1.0 of FFXIV i used MSAA and supersampling for transparency and it looked amazing. It still was a lot softer on the hardware then full supersampling.
Right now ofc i could force SGSSAA X4 - i did that and its extremely beautiful but... well, the performance is getting a big hit, especially in raids.

[Edellis]

God this drives me nuts, the same generic questions over and over...

To be fair, Square Enix has recently started openly discussing things that most companies avoid like a plague. And they're a Japanese company, no less. Hell, during an FFXV interview, they openly called their AI stupid. The AI is like 70% of the battle system.

Meanwhile, Naughty Dog will deny TLoU's AI downgrades from its demo showings. Ready at Dawn tried the shit out of the gaming community by trying to argue 30 FPS being superior to 60.


If SE's questions are preselected, then they aren't very smart or picky about them.






Also, since we're talking about programming graphical engines

*settles in armchair*

it would be SO easy for SE to implement AA systems. Man they are such dinosaurs, amirite

Real talk, Square is sitting one one of the most impressive graphical engines shown this generation, and they don't even make PC games. I'm sure they're aware of everything brought up by you wonderful people in this thread.