Tech Focus: TAA - Blessing Or Curse? Temporal Anti-Aliasing Deep Dive
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- čas přidán 25. 06. 2024
- TAA - or Temporal Anti-Aliasing - has become the de facto standard form of anti-aliasing in video games today. It's a potent form of improving image quality and delivering effects similar to super-sampling while using a tiny fraction of your GPU's power. However, it's not without its issues and challenges and many users actively despise it. How have we got to where we are, why aren't other forms of AA used and where does it fare best? Alex Battaglia has this video for you.
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00:00:00 Introduction
00:01:00 What Came Before TAA?
00:10:34 TAA Advantages
00:15:50 TAA Disadvantages
00:23:54 Conclusion - Is TAA Good? - Hry
i missed these DF in-depth
I guess they've done so many videos that there isn't much left to analyze, but yeah it's really cool to learn more about all these graphics settings and what they really do
I wold love to see a deep dive video explaining the difference between forward rendering and deferred rendering as it is something I never manages to understand really well
TLDR:
Forward Rendering -> System processes entire logic for final pixel color directly.
Deferred Rendering -> System generates bunch of information about pixel first and does a 2nd stage where final color is calculated.
Deferred Rendering allows for more optimizations because you can avoid running logic for objects that are occluded etc. But "storing bunch of information" itself has a cost.
@@Navhkrin hey this was actually a great summary of it, makes a lot more sense now, thanks! 😁
Forward rendering: you render the geometry as is, then loop through each light and add that light contribution to the image. This is how it works in real life, where each light ray from each light source stacks on top of each other to illuminate an object. The downside is that you need to run your shading code, per each pixel, per each light, thus making the computation progressively slower the more lights you add.
Deferred Rendering: you render your scene into different images, grouped into something called the gbuffer. Each image contains some information for the scene (color, normals, depth, etc).
Then, you take that gbuffer, and by combining those previously rendered images, you calculate the lighting in one pass as a "post process" (deferred) effect on the rendered images. It's a bit harder to explain how the actual lighting is performed from the gbuffer, since it's not how light really behave in real life. But since you are basically combining a bunch of pre rendered images to create the lighting, this scales much better the more light sources you add to the scene.
It's a much more complex conversation than it can be summarised in a short comment, but I hope this helps
Actually in recent times(pretty much the last decade). We actually moved to something called Forward+ rendering. Where we directly render the fragment, but to surpass the performance limit of multiple lights/decals, we divide the screen space into frustum grid/clusters instead, each cell only calculating x amount of lights/decals.
The main reason of this paradigm shift is to avoid the excessive memory usage stemming from deferred rendering numerous buffers needed for various effects, while recent hardware can easily calculate the clustering and culling.
Though deferred rendering is not totally gotten rid of, it's still part of certain effects of the pipelines. So most recent (big budget) titles use the clustered forward+ with a touch of deferred.
@@Navhkrin Deferred Rendering essentially stores a lot of information regarding lighting information (diffuse, normal, roughness, specularity) in something called a GBuffer, which as you say has the actual lighting/shading part calculated later in the frame. It can handle a large number of lights at once, while it becomes really demanding with higher resolutions and can even cause performance issues with multisampling.
Forward Rendering has things drawn as they're queued with the lighting/shading process usually not done later. There's also techniques like Clustered Forward Renderering which attempt to fix the issue with multiple light sources, and that's what Godot and Unity uses. Interestingly enough, Doom 2016 and Eternal does use Clustered Forward Shading from what I've read. Source 2 uses forward rendering. If I recall correctly, even some of the Forza games use forward rendering as well.
I do wonder how Doom Eternal is doing raytracing in a clustered forward rendering context.
One of the best DF videos ever made. Finally I understand what all these AA options are! The 4K TAA vs 1080p TAA is such a valuable piece of knowledge for PC gamers.
@unops1archive you're prob not bright to begin with then
100% this! The monitor vs TV thing (I'm a PC gamer who plays on my TV sitting a 2-3 feet away) was also really helpful for me.
I wonder how this behaves on 1080p monitors with DSR and TAA, generally it should look better the higher you crank up the resolution, if your PC can handle it without DLSS
@@unops1archiveRemember that DSR cannot use motion vectors (not supplied by whatever it’s rescaling, as it is a universal rescaler, not built into whatever you’re rescaling), so yeah it’s gonna be way inferior to DLAA or DLSS.
So, individual frames can be scaled in much the same way that DLAA does, but they cannot use information from past frames accurately and must make guesses which will frequently be wrong, producing artefacts like ghosting.
@@mduckernz What about using DSR with DLAA or DLSS tho?
Forcing TAA on people is unforgivable. There should always be an _Off_ option.
Just like chromatic aberration which eventually became a toggle.
It got to the point that in a case I even had to read the documentation of Unreal engine in order to tweak a variable used by the engine, like why tf couldn't the devs make an in game option to change that variable, since the game is clearly capable of using other Anti AA techniques?
@@InakiArzalluz I’d imagine their top devs prefer it.
worst part is that some games look atrocious without it. NFS Heat for instance
You can't turn off the actually expensive part of TAA - the motion vectors, because other parts of rendering pipelines started relying on it, even if you're not using TAA. So they decided if you have to pay the cost of TAA anyway, might as well have it always on.
The blurriness as you said is definitely more noticeable for the average desktop user. Its especially annoying in recent CoD/WZ games where it is baked in and you cannot turn it off. The games seem like a blurry mess compared to other fps games I have played.
Hmm I thought this was just me lol
The solution that somehow helped me for games with vey blurry TAA is using Reshade and enabling CAS. It get's a lot of detail back without introducing aliasing.
Sharpening is not a fix for the in-motion blur, it only resolves the static detail loss in tiny amount.@@markyonline1
Why are you not just using driver sharpening for that game?
@@Flunkiii Can you specify please?
Absolutely incredible video Alex, bravo! This answers so many questions I've had over the past few years regarding MSAA and TAA that it feels like you've read my mind. I've long been frustrated by MSAA options seemingly disappearing over the last decade and a half, and also remember you (or John?) mentioning off-handedly some time ago that "modern graphics just don't work without TAA"; I wanted to know _why_ that was the case but until now just treated it as a puzzling fact of life. Now I know it's because MSAA only affects geometry, and so cannot clean up edges within geometry introduced by stuff like transparency in textures (e.g. metal grates or fences) - and of course other stuff it can't help with, like pixel shaders, etc.
As someone who primarily plays games on their PC with a 1080p/60Hz monitor, I also really appreciate your look into why TAA can be perceptually worse for my use case/setup than with others. All in all, an astonishingly comprehensive video without being overly long or laborious.
Actually msaa CAN handle alpha tested objects like fences. there is this thing called Alpha to Coverage which helps removing edges in these cases
What he said about MSAA isn't quite right though.
In a forward renderer, MSAA (FSAA to be more specific) was provided by the rendering pipeline itself at no extra programming effort.
Whereas with a deferred renderer, you need to explicitly incorporate MSAA into every single shader. **Every. Single. Shader.**
This means at minimum you need a completely separate set of shaders for no-AA, **every level** of MSAA you intend to support.
That said, you can use a preprocessor to simplify the creation of the MSAA capable shaders.
And to make this all worse, in a deferred renderer, you also need to use specific texture formats that support MSAA with the exact sample count you intend to use on it.
Don't quote me on this, but I believe MSAA doesn't work if you don't do this, and blows up if you mix a MSAA shader with a non-MSAA texture and vice versa.
These MSAA shaders don't "multiply geometry resolution" but rather run multiple samples per pixel to produce the final image.
As an aside, because this is how it works in a deferred renderer, you can actually mix and match; running separate parts at different MSAA levels.
Not that games do that (except in cases where they lack a MSAA capable shader) because it's easier to just generate a consistent MSAA block.
All in all, that is the real reason MSAA died off with the advent of deferred rendering:
It requires significant extra dev time to produce both MSAA (and per level) and non-MSAA variants of shaders,
And wastes a lot of dev time when they have to hunt down bugs spawned from mismatching MSAA and non-MSAA parts of the pipeline.
if you have a good gpu i recommend downscale... DLSR desktop to 4k and if the game have it use dlss on top to go back to 1080p if you need more perf.
Deferred rendering was actually first implemented in the _Shrek_ tie-in game, of all games, for the OG Xbox. I've read that the game's graphics programmer felt that they went all out with the visuals as they weren't constrained by having to develop the game with very low-end home computers as in the case of the kids' games they used to make.
And then came _S.T.A.L.K.E.R._ by GSC which further popularised the technique, followed by _Grand Theft Auto IV_ which infamously shipped with a vaseline filter in lieu of a proper AA solution.
I've always had the impression that STALKER was foward rendered for whatever reason, even though I know it's not. I wonder why they went with it as I don't remember there being tons of light sources in the game and most of it's set in nature that would benefit from easier transparency rendering. The environment is pretty similar to Crysis 1 in terms of lighting and requirements.
GTA IV had 2x MSAA on the 360 but maybe they used it together with the blur filter.
@@marcelosoares7148 I highly doubt that tho. The Xbox 360 uses DX9 which didn't have the ability to use MSAA in deferred scenes as with DX10 and up.
@@blakegriplingph digital foundry confirmed 2xMSAA in the 360 version back in the day. I guess it depends on if you believe that or not.
GTA IV's infamous vaseline filter was actually just a completely broken Depth of Field effect, which on PC just blurred the entire screen. There are mods now that can fix it and it actually looks much better
Fantastic, thank you Alex! Been wondering for years why AA seems to have gotten "worse" from the easy no-jaggies options of pre-2010
TAA,s softening is especially noticeable in VR.
I'd have to imagine this is why Valve built Source 2 and their PBR pipeline entirely around MSAA
skyrim VR was the worst for it, reshade clears it up mostly though which is good
@@bearwynn But sadly that leaves all the PSVR players dry.
So sad.
Yeah it's a fucking blurry mess in vr. MSAA is 10 time better
I try to use super sampling in VR games lol
Love the 'Anti Aliasing' on the retro screensaver in the background. Nostalgia!
man, i can’t get over how much better the supersampling looks at 19:21 . the highlights are so clean and crisp in SSAA, while TAA looks so smoothed over and contrast-less. I love a lot of things about TAA, but this specific timestamp really made me wish playing with SSAA was more feasible.
literally, just give us the option to turn it off.
Although some games rely on TAA to do things like make dithered transparency for foliage work.
So turning that off would make horrendously flickery dithered foliage appear if devs haven't got suitable fallbacks.
unfortunately the video didn't go as in depth on this as I'd like.
SSAA is indeed very feasible. Just activate DLDSR in your Nvidia control panel and you will be able to use SSAA using Nvidia's tensor for any game that you play. This option produces slightly better results than traditional SSAA at less of a performance cost.
Only available on RTX gpu's though.
That's why I am super excited about dlss/fsr. You don't need to scale the image to native 8X, you can do it using dlss and use that result for SSAA back in 1080p. It's not that perfect, but you would get a better result. Call it DLSSAA (TM) ;)
Hah yeah you can see this in RDR2. It relies on its TAA for the foliage to not just look good, but even as an artistic choice as the foilage appears much thicker with TAA on.@@bearwynn
You can make SSAA abit cheaper in games that support reconstruction tech by setting the 'internal resolution' at or slightly above native when scaling down from a higher resolution.
In alot of UE4 games that support TAAu (It was added to engine version 4.19) I set the internal resolution to 75-80% at 4k on my 1440p monitor and it gives me a nice image quality boost over native 1440p, and that isn't even going into TAA tweaks you can do in Engine . ini
Alex, a job well done. PLEASE put out more videos like this. I learned so much. You're such a great teacher. Good work!!
Agree.
I always wondered why image quality with TAA at lower fps looks worse! Got the answer
Yeah I never even thought of that but it makes perfect sense. Super good video. Wonder If the same phenomenon is true with DLSS??
Yeah. To me it was in the name: temporal. Meaning that the samples were taken over time. This meant that lower framerates were disproportionately effected.
@@rokku87I get the sense that fsr2 greatly benefits from higher framerates, especially in fast camera motion.
@@rokku87 It's the exact same with DLSS since it heavily relies on the previous frame's data, so the less difference between frames (a natural result of a higher framerate, all things being equal) will reduce the size of the artifacts.
Isn't Red Dead Redemption 2 different? I was reading something on a taa mod which said that taa at 30 fps looked better because that is what the game prefered on which is the the consoles version. So to fix that the modder changed the taa values to work better at 60 fps and higher.
Please Alex don't forget the nvidia physcs video
recently played the Arkham trilogy, goddamn do i miss Physx, the carpets flying around, particles bouncing as they should, smoke looking amazing
People buying a second low end nvidia gpu just to have physx, what a time to be alive. (it sucked)
Physx is still being used today. Iirc, Alan Wake 2 uses it. @@jaroslavmrazek5752
@@Aggnog Of course, the hit was huge, but i imagine with modern tech it couldve been so much better.
Tried Asylum with PhysX on my RX 6700. Framerate tanked down to the 30s unfortunately.
I'm not compelled to go back to Nvidia.
It's good to finally see someone explain exactly what's going on with different AA options, and also showing side by side comparisons to see what the differences actually look like.
I like TAA but maybe it's because I not only have the hardware for 100fps+ but I never drop below 1440p. I've noticed the ghosting but don't find it as distracting as the flickering/shimmering from no AA as well as not having as heavy of a price.
As with any technology the obvious best answer is to leave it up to the _user_ to enable or disable.
Yeah same I always play 1440p with at least 100 fps if possible so it looks great to me. But we should always have the option.
@@achillesa5894 really have you tried to turn it off and compare to it on? The Image without taa looks much sharper. when you turn on TAA it looks like you have -40 myopia
A curse, It removes jaggies at the cost of image stability and clarity. People complain about bloom looking like vasoline but TAA also does that.
Temporal technology isn't bad though, just TAA. DLSS uses temporal technology and it effectively replaces TAA. It's what TAA should have always been tbh.
I think the SSAA nomenclature is wrong: "8K" would be the equivalent of 16x SSAA 2K, as there are 16 pixel samples for every final output pixel.
Yeah, I was really confused at first
It's a shame he didn't mention sparse grid SSAA, which is higher quality and more performant.
@@drkevorkian2508 And was originated by a driver-side bug. XD
Long story short, "SGSSAA" was SUPPOSED to be nVidia's method of anti-aliasing transparent textures in a manner superior to Alpha-to-Coverage. (aka Transparency MSAA) Due to a bug though, if the number of SGSSAA samples matched the number of MSAA samples the effect would be applied on the entire screen. It was fixed, but due to how popular it was nVidia made it possible to "undo" the fix. (nVidia Profile Inspector making it much easier to do so)
@@ChaosBahamuti seem to recall years ago using this method to get proper anti aliasing into the original mass effect games. created an amazing image.
All tests used it in this video.
Really dissapointing that modern games do not offer better than ordered grid SSAA.@@drkevorkian2508
Explanations like this are a big why reason I watch DF. Thanks, Alex!
I love these kinds of videos. Thank you, Alex. Also, the script for this was great. Just enough detail for an interested layman without getting too deep into the weeds.
Keep on rocking over there. Bravo!
I was firmly the TAA ruins game's art camp. I was on a 1080p display that I sat right in front of on my desktop. It's really not that noticeable at 4k. 17:31 is a brilliant example of this. Thanks for helping me internalize why I hated TAA so much and how to work around it limitations.
I play many of the same games on the stream deck at 720p. I'll start trying 4X SMAA where available.
On a screen that small, what's wrong with simply no aa? Seems like it'd save resources
@@XZ-III some games force you to use TAA and have no option to turn it off
As a member of reddit's "FuckTAA" community, I loved the video! I personally didn't know about how TAA is supposed to boost performance, I always taught it is bad for performance because it makes 1080p look like 720p and 1440p look like 1080p, so I actually need to render the game on much higher resolution compared to MSAA to get the same sharpness, wasting a lot of performance, it was a real problem on my old RX 470:) And even on my 3080 Ti it can be a real pain in some VR titles. But games like Assetto Corsa Competizione almost solves the TAA problem with offering low/high/medium TAA, so you can choose between more blurry or less blurry TAA, depending on your resolution and taste. I really agree with the future proofing idea, I think most games don't need any AA at all at native 4K resolution (I'm playing on a 48" TV from 1.5m). Except the problematic ones that "forget" to disable the sharpening that is there to make TAA less blurry, even if you turn off TAA, making even a 4K image very jaggy and flickery. Sadly too many games has this issue, you also mentioned it in one of the Resident Evil 2 remake videos.
4k gaming was a lie, glad im still gaming on my old 1080p tv. 4ktv owners punching the air right now
Great video Alex! I've been confused why we haven't seen MSAA in modern games and this is why.
TAA's worse genre is probably fast paced PvP games, due to the fast paced nature not working well with TAA + the competitive environment.
So the fact some of these games like Halo infinite, MW3 and The Finals force it is atrocious. If theirs ever a genre you should *NOT* force it in, its that.
Have you seen the comparisons at 20:29? The more FPS you have, the less of an issue TAA becomes.
For competitive games you probably want _all the fps._ Because it's important that you see the guy before the guy sees you. Even by a split millisecond. And preferably at a higher resolution, so you can identify the silhouette of the enemy at a distance better (instead of from 3-4 pixels). Which means you can't effectively use MSAA, which would cut the frame rate in half at higher res, so some kind of post-processing is better. In this case, TAA.
FXAA and SMAA (not to be confused with MSAA) look okay as static images (screenshots). But in motion you're right back to jaggies.
All AA options have drawbacks. Because of the inevitability of trying to render things that don't fit neatly into a pixel matrix (screen). So just pick the one you think looks better and forget it. Just enjoy the game. Some people get too hung up on these things.
@@zdspider6778 FPS only helps with ghosting issues, nothing else. The motion blur aspect which harms visibility is why its hated in competitive games
What a great video, Alex! Very well presented. Would love more of these tech-deep dives on a regular basis.
Jedi Survivor would be another great example of BAD TAA
Unreal Engine TAA with default settings 💀
It's insane how much you can get out of it by tweaking the TAA parameters, but the defaults are absolutely horrendous.
That great game is a great example of several bad things.
@@ryanfitzgerald9833 true
Honestly, Cyberpunk as well. Despite how much of a graphical step forward the game is, the TAA implementation in it is so prone to ghosting (at least at 60 FPS) that I suspect that it's kept that way to promote the usage of DLSS.
* Jedi Survivor would be another great example of BAD
Love when these tech focus videos go up. All the hard work and time you put into them
Anti-aliasing is a balance between clarity, performance, and effectiveness, and until a perfect AA solution exists users should be able to pick their own poison that works best with their own setup & even accessibility needs.
Clarity/Performance = Not Effective (SMAA)
Clarity/Effective AA = High Perf Hit (SSAA)
Performance/Effective AA = No Clarity (TAA)
Problem is devs don't let you turn TAA off now.
No, we have a solution. MSAA
Tech is old as balls and looks great.
@@IntegerOfDoom Somebody didn't watch the video.
@@IntegerOfDoom MSAA is a great solution to aliasing, but not pixel crawl/shimmering.
If we could adaptively apply TAA to only account for that & use something like MSAA or SMAA on the rest of the image it would be ideal.
At 1440p+ SMAA is usually good enough but nowdays DLSS serves as a TAA which not only looks much better than old TAA but also improves performance unlike every other AA method.
I'm super happy to see this video considering that your original anti-aliasing video was from 5+ years ago.
I LOVE this video. I like TAA in the right games, but recently started getting frustrated with so many games being generally blurry or blobby.
I really appreciate the MSAA in Forza Horizon 5, and after this video I'm wondering how they pulled it off with modern detail and lighting and minimal performance impact, even on steam deck.
Forza Horizon 5 might use Forward + rendering
I can tolerate the blurriness. But the ghost trail is really distracting in some games :(
@@jeandelafuente1 yeah that too. I can use it on games where the camera doesn't move quickly, maybe with a controller and on the TV. Definitely not first person at the desk.
I really appreciated when FH5 implemented TAA. The MSAA doesn't work on all the trees. To my eyes the trees look like a horrible mess with MSAA.
@@john_hunter_ that makes sense. Every other AA made the power lines distracting to me, so I guess they're all I look at now lol
I absolutely love these in-depth videos! Thank you for all the time and hard work it took to put into it.
Another fanatic video from you guys, a really good breakdown of AA techniques and how they work in motion. Keep it up!
Great video! Don't ever get scared to upload to these kind of in depth videos :D
Great work as always Alex:) i think a forward/deferred rendering would be really great as well, maybe a whole game rendering series with some history thrown in there as well, a DF retro collab perhaps?
I absolutely agree.. and it would be nice to see comparison examples, of games from the before before times, at similar resolutions.. cuz it's kind of night and day actually.. now granted sometimes there's that post-processing nonsense that they started adding in, or the beginning of the time of Vaseline!
But games like Half-Life 2 before the episodes... Good example right there... By episode 2 I actually thought there was something wrong, turns out they were just being try hearts with the fog and the color correction to make it look blurry for some reason.. fortunately, despite the dilapidation of the developers console that they've done so far over the years.. it's still incredibly robust, and fixable.. unlike almost everything else in this situation...
One aspect of it is that the final frame which is shown on the display is made up of several frames called passes in which one pass (or frame) is just for diffuse lighting, one for specular, one for ambient occlusion, all of which are done for direct and indirect light bounce.
@@JackWse Can you explain specifically what you are referring to regarding Half-Life 2 and Episode Two?
Fantastic video. Really good and balanced explanation of the up and downsides. I never noticed the blur got less bad with higher resolutions, but that totally explains why I don’t turn immediately turn it off at 1440p like I did on 1080p across the board.
YES! Thank you, I was hoping you'd do this video.
Excellent video, Alex. Covered all the important aspects with amazing visual comparisons. Kudos!
In old games, I like combining MSAA 4X with DLDSR 2.25X. It looks fantastic, sharp and clean with no AA artifacts.
In a lot of old games you can use SGSSAA, which is the best form of AA you can ever get. Pretty much every DX8/DX9 game that supports MSAA can have it. 4xSGSSAA at 1080p looks better than 4K with 4xMSAA and usually runs a lot better too.
in modern games combining DLSS with DLDSR can provide pretty good value super sampling, well worth doing on people with 1080p monitors if their GPU has the power
What I like most is 4x DSR (0% smoothness) + DLSS performance. The larger framebuffer is actually handed over to the next frame. This is more accurate in motion than a 100% buffer, so much that blur is not an issue anymore. Performance and VRAM requirements may be an issue though. DLDSR + DLSS quality is the next best thing
You can use other upscalers with 50% input resolution in the same way, with similar improvements. Epic TSR has this functionality built in
i love these kinds of videos so much. they take me back to the days of spending hours in nvidia inspector and reshade trying to find the perfect AA, and scouring old forums learning about AA methods with wacky names like OGSSAA
What graphic card do you use?
The biggest revelation with TAA for me came from foliage and tree leaves and other transparencies, how it squashed the shimmering and flickering on that stuff in motion and brought so much stability to the final image. As more games started doing large open worlds with lots of details and flora, that stuff really became a nuisance since standard MSAA methods didn't touch that stuff at all, and FXAA basically didn't do anything but blur the screen a bit. TAA also blurred the scene, but helped so much with the aliasing on transparencies, and all you really needed to counter some blur and bring back finer detail was add some light post-sharpening.
I think Fallout 4 was the first game that really sold me on it, but at the time I remember so many people hating the "vaseline smeared" screen blur and softness because there wasn't any built-in sharpening, and most people weren't on to using pp filter injectors like sweetfx or reshade or whatever was common at the time to help out with that stuff. Eventually most TAA methods included some forced or optional sharpening on a slider, but it was a slow process there.
I wonder how the TAA in that game holds up in terms of ghosting and afterimages? I really don't remember seeing much of that stuff in Fallout 4 compared to later open world games where it was brutal like pretty much everything using UE4, and also one of the worst offenders I can remember, RDR2.
You're describing something that was kind of brushed over in this video, which is that sampling from previous frames doesn't just have the effect of reducing the spacial aliasing (due to camera jitter giving it more samples around the same pixel), it *also* has the effect of actually temporal anti-aliasing, as in it uses the *spacial* samples to reduce sampling errors in *time*.
To me this is far more important than reducing edge stair-stepping effects, even at 1440p those are pretty hard to see outside of extreme cases like telephone cables against the sky.
I can definitely still notice the TAA in fallout 4, specifically when in motion.
Standing still it sharpens up and is nice but the moment the camera starts moving the blur reappears.
The steam deck makes this incredibly obvious too
I had exactly the same experience. Fallout 4 was the first game where I remember using TAA and I used luma sharpen from reshade to fix the blurryness. And right now I'm playing Horizon: Zero Dawn with DLSS and the foliage looks stunningly good. I can easily forgive the occasional ghosting because of the superb image quality. Especially if DLAA is available like in Baldurs Gate 3.
Trees made me question things as well. Especially in Spiderman and Days Gone. When I looked at them from greater distances it looked like the game was running at 720p instead of my native 1440p. But back then I didn't know it was all the results of TAA.
I guess the solution is DLAA and other similar tech or just simply going to higher resolutions.
Oh it's great for still images, but the instant you pan that camera around your character, it's ghost town, baby! 😢
Thank you Alex, and all the DF team, for these type of tech "deepish" dives. Giving us the history of the tech alongside showing notable examples both new and old is just fantastic. I'm a PC player who shoots for his games to run about 70 fps and if possible at my screen's native resolution (3840 x 1600). So I appreciate tech such as DLSS. But I absolutely agree that these types of "cheats" should be able to be turned off so that down the line, "brute force" isn't hampered by these techniques that inherently degrade aspects of image quality.
I have much random knowledge about graphics (and have experimented with ReShade antialiasing methods) and this video still surprised me with some insights, and was very well put together. Sending these to my friends. Great video
Fantastic video, Alex! You did such a great job explaining these different technologies in a way that many people will be able to comprehend.
Excellent video, thank you. Would be interesting to get additional discussion about TAA + Sharpening.
I enabled TAA in DCS and I immediately called an ambulance because I thought I was having a brain stroke, ghosting frames and blurry overall. The ambulance personnel kindly informed me that I had just enabled TAA anti-alias on my simulator. They were cool with it though, they get a lot of calls like that
The first DF video I ever watched was Alex explaining anti-aliasing back in 2018. This feel like we've come full circle, explaining the subject of aliasing and how to counter it more in depth while also flexing the higher production value DF has gained in those last 5 years. Cheers Alex, thanks for another excellent Tech Focus. I look forward to the next one.
Such an informative, representative and great video.
Thanks, Alex!
This was a great explanation of this topic. Excellent work Alex and DF!
DLDSR + DLSS has become my favorite AA. I use it in every game that I can and the difference is night and day. Not even DLAA comes close. Developers just need to offer a wide variety of AA options because we all play at different resolutions and frame rates as well as having different preferences.
same, 1620p DLDSR with balanced or quality DLSS means awesome stable image and good performance.
Uhhhhh yes dlaa comes close, in fact it's better, it just does dlss job without rendering everything at lower resolutions, yes it's more expensive but the image quality is OBJECTIVELY better, since higher resolutions = more image quality.
i would love to do that too, but owning a high refresh rate monitor and using DLDSR doesn't seem to work, you get limited to 60hz. at the same time, i'm on a 4070 at 1440p so there isn't really a lot of wiggle room left, but would love a higher resolution + high refresh rate in older games.
Same but Red Dead Redemption 2 has been the bane of my existence. Using DLDSR with DLSS Q cleans up the image, but for some reason DLSS in that game has a huge sharpening issue when moving the camera. It goes from 0-100 sharpness whenever you move the camera, which creates an annoying shimmer effect.
DLDSR is basically supersampling as the image is being rendered above the monitors highest resolution, then scaling it down with the help of ai to fit the pixels more evenly. I use it too and I find it to be the best way to counter them jaggies.
let's be honest here: 8xMSAA and 4xSSAA are settings no sane person would use. 4xMSAA or 2xSSAA are good enough. everything more than that provides barely any visual benefit.
Loved this video. Well done Alex. Would love to see more of these type of videos from the team.
Beautiful video Alex. Explained well, as always. Thanks so much for the work!
For me, personally, I just don't like all the negatives TAA give and always use FXAA or SMAA/CMAA or I just turn off the AA entirely if they don't give me the option to choose something besides TAA. Resident Evil 4 Remake not giving me FXAA as a standalone option or SMAA at all was disappointing. Still Great Job on the Video! :)
there are more side by side comparisons with FPS counter. taa is terrible in all comparisons. it makes game run worse and look like dlss on balanced
To address the issue of performance hit of supersampling, if you want a clear TAA image, then you have to go 4K, and you also have to do 120+ Hz. At that point, for people with 1080p 60Hz setups, I’d argue reaching those targets are more resource intensive with TAA than just plain supersampling at their native refresh rate
So we ditched SSAA because of performance, but to clear up the mess that we made now with TAA we have to go high res and high refresh rate. Seems like we are back at square one.
That’s why no AA option is important. For people who don’t want TAA’s negatives, the only escape is to take a performance hit regardless, unless there is TAA off option in the game.
This was really informative, great work. This explains really well why TAA became the de-facto standard for antialiasing, how older methods managed AA, and why some people are more bothered by it than others. I think the best way forward from here would be an option to increase the render resolution of things that would be rendered at lower resolutions to be smoothed out by TAA, like Jesse's hair in Control. That way, you can turn TAA off for more clarity and just increase resolution on things that would normally be undersampled to make a better image, albeit at the cost of more render costs.
Wow Alex, thank you so much for this video! It's a very good explanation of where AA comes from and why technology has changed (and had to change) over the years. The examples are simple and absolutely on point, which makes it easy to follow along. ❤
I just want a way to turn Anti-Aliasing off. I prefer the crisp look of having jaggies, and I'd rather not lose frames. Just let me disable TAA!
I'm at the point where I hate antialiasing everywhere now. It's just blurring the image, it's removing detail. I've always hated it for text rendering, too.
Totally agree, the advantages of AA of all types is compromised too much. I’d rather sharpness, jaggies and all then a blurred, soft mess.
This is why DF is the best video games tech analysis channel
For these videos absolutely ... For other kind of videos not so much, but i understand they need to make money,etc.
@@majormononoke8958 what other kinds
@@teffhk the ones he hallucinated
@@krazyfrog links? or video titles?
I absolutely love this type of content. Great job Alex.
Please continue with these types of videos!
Finally another tech focus video again. Was missing that type of video already. Awesome work Alex.
Just let me turn it OFF please
Lmao 😂 I understand and agree lol
This video does a great job explaining why did previous AA methods get retired - for the many who don't understand - and there's a lot.
The entire community of r\pcmr needs videos like this or this hobby is donezo.
@@timmyp6297 There is an entire subreddit dedicated to that view, called "FuckTAA". They claim that all temporal AA solutions, including DLSS, are ruining modern graphics. A rather misguided view IMO.
Games are complex so people want to find something easy to latch onto that they can blame instead of actually figuring out what's wrong. Same goes for so many graphical effects
@@creopictures Ehh theyre are more just along the "purist" line. PCMR is blatantly uneducated I think almost intentionally. FuckTAA are entitled to their opinions.
@@creopictures Funny you should mention that subreddit. Alex made a post on that sub asking for opinion for the cons of TAA last year so they are not entirely useless. Also I found that the subreddit sometimes give good alternative to minimizing the effect of bad TAA in modern game (render scale, DLAA, DLDSR, disable forced TAA). Sure they could be more realistic about the existance of TAA in modern games but the reason the sub exist at all is the fact that many games ship with broken TAA.
That was awesome! Thank you for this very informative breakdown. All the various AA approaches have always been very mysterious to me.
I love this!!! Such a great informative video about different AA options!
When TAA became more popular, it felt like 4K became what 1080p used to look like with sharper aliasing, to where even 4K with TAA just feels too blurry to me now. I hope a shift happens to where sharping aliasing is looked to be developed in the future, because it feels like we've been sitting at TAA aliasing for a while now.
It goes even deeper though than aliasing solutions, renderers as a whole since a lot of games and engines switched to a deferred renderer focus, just typically look (to me) more muddy, though that's not to say some forward renderer game examples haven't also got more 'blurry' in this way too IMO.
Have you improve the lightning, lens or camera of your webcam? feels different and definitely better.
Fantastic video. Love more technical deep dives!
Love these deep dives, so interesting. Great work!
I miss these graphics explainer videos!
8K -> 1080p is 16xSSAA. Not 8x. Per axis the factor is 4x. 4x4 OGSSAA is called 16x SSAA
Some additional context which probably only adds to the confusion:
1080p is 1920x1080 = 2,073,600 pixels
4K is 3840x2160 = 8,294,400 pixels
The question is whether a 4x increase in pixel count is indeed referred to as 4x MSAA, or whether this would be considered 2x MSAA (since each axis is doubled).
Idk, historically AA has never been counted "per axis", maybe something has changed in recent years. As far back as I can remember it always meant full pixel count multiplier. Means 4K to 1080p = 4xAA. 8k to 1080p = 16xAA.
PS Edited embarassing arithmetics. 😁
@@kosmosyche 8K is 16x the pixel count of 1080p.
@@AlanTwoRings Shit, you are absolutely right, of course. I answered without thinking. 🤣
@@barrydingle3830 chill
Really top-notch video, Alex! Your deep dives remind me of early 2000’s Beyond3D articles and I think we need more!!!!
Extremely informative video, thanks Alex! I wish something like this existed a couple years ago when I first got into PC gaming and was faced with a pleather of AA solutions, took a while to figure out what I preferred.
The bad thing about TAA in most games is that it kills motion clarity if it is not implemented properly. And even the best implementations of TAA still will harm motion clarity, but it might not be super egregious at least. In other words it could make a 4k title look like a 1440p title whenever the game is in motion. I think that TAA is here to stay, which regardless of what I said is neither good nor bad. TAA implantation slowly but surely seems to have been improving over time. I'm hoping that as hardware improves TAA will be phased out and replaced with something better similar to how MSAA and FXAA are getting more and more rare.
4k gaming was a lie, glad im still gaming on my old 1080p tv. 4ktv owners punching the air right now
@@randyrrs7028 if your still on a 1080p tv, you have no reference for how bad of an experience your having. 4k tv owners are laughing at you right now.
@@mryellow6918 half these games 1080p on these next gen systems so sony and microsoft are laughing at you right now. PS5/series X promised 4k 60, even had 8k stamped on boxes.
@@randyrrs7028 why would i be talking about a game running on a console at sub 4k resolutions when talking about 4k gaming?
@mryellow6918 i have a RX 6800 XT and I can barely play at 4K 60 even with FSR, I just realized that I'll always need a high-end GPU for that. I thought 4K gaming would be more mainstream after all these years... 8 years ago I was playing brand new games at 1080p 60 with a low end GPU for $200. Now you can barely play at 1080p with $300. And 4K starts to make sense from $1000 and up. Things only get worse every year.
Good point, the disadvantages of TAA are far more noticeable on lower resolution, closer distance monitors that PC gamers use, hence why virtually all TAA hate comes from PC. But sadly, since most devs are console focused, where on a TV far away, TAA will continue to be the used with no consideration for others.
Thank you Alex & DF for this amazing video, I always wanted to know the differences of these technologies and just understanding them in general and now I do!
A really really interesting video on some gaming tech! Thank you for this. Helps me and others know a bit more about how these things work and what to pick in the HUGE selection of PC game settings we have nowadays!
Thank you for the video breaking down the benefits, flaws, and context of TAA.
I'm one of those in the camps who can't stand it - and now I know it may be worsened by avoiding the pursuit of >60fps, and being closer to my screen.
Thank you also for advocating for TAA to be able to be disabled, effect quality raised, and alternatives provided - I think there is also room to examine hybrid AA approaches where effect shaders like hair and shadows have their effects passed through something like TAA, without applying the same effect to the whole image.
Yes, I agree that a hybrid approach would be ideal, as it's clear from 26:25 that certain elements are being designed with TAA in mind.
Alex: "TAA looks better at high FPS"
Me: OK. I'll play at 1080p to get higher FPS.
Alex: "TAA looks much better at high resolution"
Me: ...well crap.
Great video! Important information at the perfect level of depth. Also, I love the Halo, Wolfenstein, etc. music in the background.
That's the content I'm subscribed to the channel for. Great video Alex!
Back in the 3dfx days the AA that the Voodoo 5 5500 card did looked amazing. It was a type of supersampling, but the way they did it was a bit different. Say you gamed in 800x600 and chose 4x AA. It did not render in 1600x1200 and downsample to arrive at the final 800x600 resolution. It rendered four different images at 800x600 with slightly jittered origins, and then averaged those four images to get the final image. This is one way of doing rotated grid supersampling. But for whatever reason, this was quite superior to how Nvidia and ATI/AMD do supersampling. To this day no AA methods they use came close to the results 3dfx got with their method. I got my 5500 when they first came out, and stayed with it until the GeForce 3 finally drew me away from it. The very first time I fired up a game I was disgusted with how bad the AA was in comparison the 3dfx card. But by then the performance penalty wasn’t acceptable, hence the move to the GF3. After living for years with the 3dfx’s superior AA it was painful to go without it, and to this day I cringe constantly at all the aliasing artifacts that I have to look at every day when gaming. I had hope when Nvidia bought 3dfx’s IP that they would eventually put their AA method to use in a GeForce card, but unfortunately that never happened. It would be so nice to have actual good AA again, but I doubt the day will ever come.
If you look at the building shot at 17:27 you can see in the non-AA shots at both resolutions that there are bright lines disappearing and reappearing around the window frames and the horizontal lines on the side of the building near them. These horizontal lines popping in and out of existence seem to be dealt with rather well in the TAA shots, but for whatever reason these types of artifacts are horribly prevalent with MSAA and even SSAA methods, when they should not be. 3dfx’s method did away with those kinds of artifacts wonderfully. But you still see tons of polygon popping with horizontal and vertical stuff with today’s cards and MSAA/SSAA for whatever reason. It sucks. It is so annoying.
Now with TAA and other temporal solutions like dlss [which seems okayish] and fsr, it's even wore. Every game looks worse in motion because of ghosting and everything looks blurrier than they should be. Yeah the shimmering issues have been fixed, but at what cost?
@@RiasatSalminSami One can hope that cards eventually get so fast that supersampling becomes easy. I’d pay big bucks for a solution similar to 3dfx’s that used more than one chip and they just do the same job in parallel with jittered origins and combine the results into the final image.
Youre looking at the aliased past through nostalgia tinted glasses. Ironically, most TAA solutions do exactly what you describe with jittering, but more efficiently. Supersampling isn't really "AA" in this context, because if you have the horsepower to supersample you could be pushing the actual quality of the rending harder. Pixel quality > pixel quantity.
@@Wobbothe3rd There was no nostalgia involved when I removed the 3dfx card for the first time and installed the GF3. Literally five minutes passed between one and the other and the difference was plain as day. Unfortunately TAA suffers from ghosting, and so is rendered useless in my opinion.
In Starfield if you remeove TAA via mod you can see much more detail in that lady's face, I forgot her name, the Mars Mining Ops Boss. It's the very 1st thing you see in the game.
girlbosses
Love these tech deep dives, please do more on other aspects of real time rendering!
Agreed, the deep technical videos are definitely some of the best DF content!
Thoroughly enjoying this video Alex. Your demonstrarions here are fantastic. I learned a lot.
When I first booted up Forza Horizon 5 on my PC a couple years ago, I was blown away by the clarity MSAA provided. Sure, there was a little bit of shimmer on stuff MSAA couldn't hit, but there was zero ghosting, zero artifacts, and pin-sharp clarity on geometric edges. After years and years of bad TAA implementations, I realized just what we were missing out on. Even now, MSAA is much better in that game than normal TAA.
It really wasn't until DLAA dropped that we finally got a TAA implementation that doesn't have any of the issues TAA normally has, while being clearer and more stable than MSAA.
Try that in RDR2, you'll be unpleasantly surprised.
Lol no, DLAA is better than taa but still crap
Idk boss msaa did not look great in fh5
Nah, MSAA doesn't anti aliases inside alpha textures, it doesn't get all edges, it's too expensive etc. I don't like MSAA. Too expensive for not truly AAing the image. Supersampling/downsampling is the way to go if you want a heavy performance AA. I love TAA, though like you say, there are tons of bad implementations. My biggest gripe with games in 360/PS3 era was the shimmering, specular and shader aliasing, and what not. Sure, TAA is blurry and adds some ghosting but it fixes that. At this point DLSS is the best. Better than even DLAA simply due to performance bump you get. Simple fact is games move, they're in motion, so you NEED a temporal component to truly anti aliase the image.
MSAA needs to be done at a 4k resolution to be worthwhile imo. Below 4k, TAA is superior, especially when it comes to foliage.
I think the important thing to remember is that there is no perfect anti-aliasing, or any image treatment methods for games in general. Everything comes at a compromise, and we've been living with those compromises a lot longer than people tend to think.
People want a perfect solution to everything forgetting that games need to be able to run on their systems. They don't realize why older effects were thrown away. In fact many older games people sometimes praise had issues at launch or still do but we've brute forced past them
@@crestofhonor2349 Plus a lot of AA implementations will vary from game to game. Like Max Payne 3 is probably the only Rockstar game on PC that ran fine back then and is running even better now. But the 8x MSAA implementation is still super demanding even on modern hardware. Alan Wake 1 came to PC the same year and there the 8x MSAA is running fine today.
People have no idea that everything in games is a compromise..
I think saying "people don't understand that everything is a compromise" is a cop-out answer, because I think most people understand the compromise that TAA is making - but they aren't given the option to disable it and play with jaggies but without smearing/blur.
@@Zman6258 But as Alex mentioned in the video: You aren't ONLY going to get jaggies. You're going to get a dramatically uglier looking final image because developers are building their games and assets around TAA.
Alex, thank you very much for that Video. As always you have done a amazing Job. You Guys at DF are killing it, thank you!
As always, these Tech Focus videos are very well put-together and presented. Awesome work.
Casually left out SHARPENING...
Bright Memory: Infinite has set the TAA standard, this video didn't mention it...
Your deep dive video fixing shimmering in The Witcher III is a forgotten relic now? AKA Sharpening over TAA?
25:20 Many "4K" games on consoles are barely hitting 1440p and on taxing scenarios going down to 1080p.
No AA solution can save you from that
Millions of dolars and thousands of man-hours are spend to make high quality assets, then to be downscale and become a blur mess
The higher pixel grid can still help with clarity, at least when compared to something like a native 1080p game with TAA.
Sure it ain't the same as native 4k, but I think the point still stands.
Actually TAA does in fact optimize the renderer. In other words, an engine that is struggling to hit 1440p would be often EVEN WORSE without TAA.
Ai upscalers can to certain degree
4k gaming was a lie, glad im still gaming on my old 1080p tv. 4ktv owners punching the air right now
Seriously one of the best videos in quite sometime. Excellent in almost all aspects
Really great explanation! Glad I have a better understanding of all the different forms of anti-aliasing we don't use as much today.
Your Tech Videos are such a treat, Alex! Thank you so much, that must've been a lot of work. Seeing the BFBC2 Menu again gave me instant nostalgia. What a blast in mp. Could you make another tech focus video explaining what shaders are and why they need to be compiled? I hear about shaders a lot but don't seem to recall that shader compilation were an issue ten years ago.
Were all shaders precompiled during the DX8-DX11 days?
Shaders are small programs that the GPU executes to perform some work, whether it be deciding where a vertex is placed on screen, deciding what colour a pixel should be, or even doing arbitrary work in compute shaders. While shaders are written in high level shading languages such as HLSL or GLSL, they need to be compiled to the native machine code of the user's own GPU at some point. That compilation is done by the driver and involves not only compiling the shader to the native machine code of the user's GPU, but it also involves setting up some "state" that may or may not influence the compilation such as whether depth testing should be used when rendering the object, what the blending equation should be when blending the rendered object into the screen or even the type of geometry used by the object.
During the DX8-DX11 days the driver was typically responsible for deciding when this compilation should take place, but this led to performance within a given frame being unpredictable even if the overall performance across all frames was okay with minimal stuttering. Because of this, DX12 and Vulkan both changed things to instead make the developer responsible for deciding when this compilation should take place, simplifying the driver to just take the _result_ of that compilation which, on paper, causes performance to be more predictable within a frame since compilation takes place at a known time and position within the code. In practice, developers seem to be struggling to design systems to efficiently handle compilation, so they instead seem to be compiling just before the shader is used which leads to stuttering as the compilation is taking place mid frame without any overlap with other work.
Should cover everything.
@@jcm2606 Thanks jcm! Exactly what I needed! :)
It's a good thing the PC has reshade where you can use a sharpening filter that helps with TAA softness by a mile.
Sharpening and unsharp masks also introduce a lot of ringing artifacts, though. Not ideal.
immerse sharpen is fine, i even use adaptive sharpen still in some modern games since theres little to no grain @@Unethical.Dodgson
Thank you ! I understand so many things about the quality displayed I get from games now !
sweet video Alex. I'm pretty techy in most areas but never looked into AA. Needed a refresher course.. this was perfect. Most people on tech videos are unbearable in my personal opinion but can always listen to you. Very clearly spoken and not an annoying c**** either. thanks
brilliant video
Wow, the games look so much clearer even with no AA.
TAA makes everything look so… blurry.
I’d easily choose slight shimmering or slightly broken effects over a massively blurred image any day.
Daniel, we play video games. They move.
TAA is the best AA solution for motion in games to date.
@@RicochetForce TAA is good for SLOW motion and looks like SHIT during everything else.
@@StopBlurryGames You know what looks like shit? Every other than geometry shimmering worse than a goddamn PS1 game with every slight movement of the camera.
@etForce That's a less than 1080p problem+developers not giving a shit about other kinds of AA(geometric detail, mipmaps etc).
Not a lack of TAA problem.
Such a great, informative video as always, thank you so much!!
Not much to say other than this is a great video! Thanks for the hard work putting it together Alex!