Any News on Antialiasing?

[Araxes]

Maybe i missed it, could be entirely possible but will there be better Antialiasing?

ATM we only got FXAA and it is probably one of the worst ones.

[Hyperia]

Maybe i missed it, could be entirely possible but will there be better Antialiasing?

ATM we only got FXAA and it is probably one of the worst ones.

A feature such as this is probably going to be a final patch note kind of thing because of the issues they will have to resolve to offer more. Their resources are stretched pretty thin with all of the various graphics enhancements requests. If I had to guess, they may add more later in the 7.X series.

[Xegodar]

Based on the screenshots we have for 7.0 so far... No, there is still no proper AA solution.

And I honestly don't understand how, after textures and shadows the horrible AA is probably the games biggest visual flaw. And one that should be easy to solve.

Like sure, playing at native 4K makes it less noticable, but other games are just so much smoother even at non native resolutions.

Also for the love of Hydaelyn please don't use FSR 1.0 like in FF16 for upscaling on console after the graphics update.

[PirateRyanG]

Ask Twitter to protest for you. They can get anti-anything going in hours.

[Sindele]

And I honestly don't understand how, after textures and shadows the horrible AA is probably the games biggest visual flaw. And one that should be easy to solve.

Unfortunately, AA left the realm of 'easy to solve' behind completely when deferred rendering took over and MSAA became largely non-viable.

Various solutions have been developed the years, but to my eye, all of them are messy and imperfect.

• FXAA's here, but as always, proves insufficient on its lonesome. It's "reliable", sure - unfortunately it's also reliably bad.
• TAA works well.. except for all the blurring and the need for post-proc sharpening.. and how different people can suffer greatly from its blurring.. so to make it not just a 'turn off at first sight', you've got to expose a bunch of not-always-trivial-to-explain individual settings.. and sometimes it still just won't look good. To be fair, modern implementations of it have improved, but it's so easy to get wrong.
• SMAA is cheap and efficient and never, ever seems to catch everything as well as you want it to. Also, any flaws - or "tactical choices" - in your pipeline can magnify its problems (just look at Elite Dangerous struggling with this for.. uh.. forever?)
• SSAA is not real. Okay, yes, supersampling is real, but it's not an algorithmic solution to AA, it's just pushing frames at higher resolutions and then scaling them down for your monitor. Which, like - at that point you've already paid into the ecosystem to run at the supersampled resolution, so just buy a 4k monitor and call it a day.
• DLSS is just SS"AA" with guessing, but now Nvidia exclusive and RTX required. Basically the only card that could possibly benefit from this while not having the capacity to supersample FFXIV is the 4060, and if you bought that, you already made a mistake. (Sorry.) Maybe if you're one of those lunatics that runs 200gb of upscaled world textures and are still trying to push >120fps? Still - Nvidia exclusive. Not likely to see the dev time.
• TSR is fascinating as an evolution of TAA.. and also an Epic homespun solution. Maybe you can convince Yoshi-P to switch to UE5? Don't know enough about it to give it a fair shake, but since it's never gonna show up here.. it's probably fine to skip over.

If I had to guess, my guess is that we're likely to see either no change or a backport of the FF16 TAA implementation, hopefully with more exposed settings.

(But for real - buy a 4k monitor or supersample.)

[Xegodar]

Unfortunately, AA left the realm of 'easy to solve' behind completely when deferred rendering took over and MSAA became largely non-viable.

Various solutions have been developed the years, but to my eye, all of them are messy and imperfect.

[...]

If I had to guess, my guess is that we're likely to see either no change or a backport of the FF16 TAA implementation, hopefully with more exposed settings.

(But for real - buy a 4k monitor or supersample.)

I'm aware that there is no magic solution. I just would've thought that in 10 years since launch they could have done SOMETHING. Like I can not remember any other game in recent memory that offered only FXAA, so I have to imagine implementing anything beyond FXAA at all, even if flawed, should be easy enough for a company like SE.

I'm mostly speaking from a console perspective where supersampling or native 4K are not an option. The aliasing can get pretty bad when the dynamic resolution drops in crowded areas and the graphics update will just make those res drops worse.
Sure TAA is not perfect, but good enough most the time, and everything is better then the choice between garbage and nothing.

I'd already be happy with the FF16 TAA solution. Now with reduced motion blur the artifacts aren't that bad anymore in that game, only the blur caused by FSR1 upscaling from really low base res is pretty bad.
Forspokens TAA + FSR2 upscaling on PS5 was really good actually, at least after the latest updates. Much sharper than FF16, game looks really good especially in the smaller DLC area.

But they really need to do something, I'm looking at the Dawntrail screenshots right now and the aliasing with the increase in foliage is just awful, no idea how the devs can be OK with that I'd rather take the TAA artifacts please.

[Kakurady]

The way hardware-assisted MSAA works is that instead of always rendering a larger image and scaling it down (supersampling), meaning samples have to be calculated multiple times per pixel, hardware-assisted MSAA only bothers evaluating multiple samples if there are multiple objects at that pixel. So it's able to provide a result close to supersampling, but with better performance. But it only works with forward rendering, where each object is directly drawn to the framebuffer with its final colors.

The issue with integrating MSAA being that FFXIV (probably) uses deferred rendering, where for each object, it's not the final pixel samples that are written to the framebuffer, but the property of the surface at that location (its position, orientation/normal vector, as well as textures providing detail). The benefit is that you can have almost unlimited number of dynamic lights, and the rendering speed is only determined by how much each light covers the scene. This is beneficial for a multiplayer game like FFXIV, since each player may initiate an effect that casts light, and there could be two hundred players on the screen. Drawback is it used to be impossible to integrate hardware-assisted MSAA: what does it mean to average the position of multiple objects at the same pixel?

As a result, FFXIV and most other AAA games have to resort to anti-aliasing based on post-processing, which tries to smooth the image at the render resolution. But you can't reconstitute information that isn't there to begin with. Methods based on machine learning such as DLSS might be able to get close, but it depends on whether it has seen similar images in its training data.

I don't know if there are any hardware supporting MSAA with deferred rendering. To me, it seems straightforward in concept, but perhaps the performance implications are just too severe.

[Araxes]

Unfortunately, AA left the realm of 'easy to solve' behind completely when deferred rendering took over and MSAA became largely non-viable.

Various solutions have been developed the years, but to my eye, all of them are messy and imperfect.
[LIST][*] SMAA is cheap and efficient and never, ever seems to catch everything as well as you want it to. Also, any flaws - or "tactical choices" - in your pipeline can magnify its problems (just look at Elite Dangerous struggling with this for.. uh.. forever?)

I cannot believe it. A fellow Elite player in FFXIV. But yes, Antialiasing in Elite was never really good but with Odyssey it got abyssmally bad.

[Larirawiel]

[*] DLSS is just SS"AA" with guessing,

No, it is not. DLSS is basically TAA with upscaling and AI generated hallucinations. Intel XeSS is similar to this but DLSS is still better.



Cheers

[Darthmenka]

I'm really hoping that the next expansion will bring antialiasing to the game. While I can appreciate the graphical upgrades (they are nice), the main issue for me is that the game still hurts my eyes with all those jagged edges.

This game has the potential to look amazing, but it truly shines when it has proper antialiasing. Currently, it's only bearable when the game goes for close-ups. In this day and age, there are so many techniques available for implementing antialiasing that there's really no excuse not to use any of them.