Nicer Looking Old Games with Supersampling Antialiasing

Supersampling Antialiasing is one of the oldest methods of reducing jaggies in pixel graphics. It is very demanding on the graphics cards, but older games are less demanding and have enough headroom, even on graphics cards that are not the latest and greatest.

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[ruxandy]

I might be in the minority, but I often prefer the original image. Jaggies & shimmering never bothered me too much. I just find that most antialiasing methods (including SSAA) make the image appear softer. So I do prefer the sharper, 'aliased look'. 🙂

[firstlast]

I've been using SSAA forever on older games and I'm really happy you made a video on this subject to educate more people about how to make old games look great. I have some additional information that people might find useful.
1) While Nvidia hid the SSAA option in the official Control Panel, you can easily access it using Nvidia Profile Inspector. If you want to stick with the official Control Panel, then there is an Nvidia-exclusive option that is almost as good, which is combining MSAA with transparency AA. Select MSAA in the drivers as usual, then select 2x, 4x, or 8x Transparency Supersampling (I would avoid the much lower quality Transparency Multisampling option). This combination anti-aliases the polygons and the transparencies, but not the shaders and textures, so you get something close to the quality of full SSAA at much less cost, especially only older games with few shader effects. So to get the best quality on AMD, use supersampling. On Nvidia with the official Control Panel, use MSAA+TrSSAA. On Nvidia with Profile Inspector, use SSAA.
2) Forcing MSAA and SSAA through drivers only works on forward rendered games. Most DX9 and earlier games are forward rendered, so most of them work. Starting with DX10, deferred rendering became common and MSAA/SSAA became inefficient and difficult to implement, so the best options are to use in-game "render scaling" if available or driver-level downsampling (DSR on Nvidia and VSR on AMD).
3) In the video it is mentioned that supersampling is also known as downsampling (and many people use the terms interchangeably), but that's not exactly correct. There are three techniques that all improve quality by essentially rendering the entire scene at a higher resolution and scaling it down to anti-alias the entire image: supersampling antialiasing (SSAA), downsampling, and render scaling. The difference between these is the implementation, specifically at which point in the pipeline the technique occurs:
--a) Supersampling antialiasing (SSAA) happens during the game engine's internal 3D rendering stage, as the pixels are being calculated and drawn from the game data and state, and applies only to the 3D scene, before the 2D elements like UI and text are drawn and composited, and is therefore the most ideal technique in terms of quality (no full-frame interpolation/filtering is used since it's all pixel-level calculations), but it is also the least compatible since it doesn't work with most modern forward rendered games.
--b) Downsampling (DSR/VSR) happens at the driver level, after the full image frame has been finished by the game and, in fact, the game is not aware of it at all. The advantage is that it is compatible with all games, but the downside is that the final, fully rendered and composited image is supersampled (and generically filtered/interpolated during the 2D image downscaling process without 3D coordinate data) including the 2D UI elements and vector text fonts, which is not ideal. UI elements are slightly blurred, overlay edges are slightly blended with the 3D scene behind it, vector text (which is already anti-aliased using text-specific subpixel techniques) is generically anti-aliased a second time and looks smoother than intended (Nvidia does provide a slider to help control the blur). Worst of all, older games which didn't support UI scaling will have tiny UI and text (thankfully these games are usually old enough to support SSAA).
--c) Render Scaling, which is an option in some newer games and sometimes goes by other names like resolution scaling or even SSAA, is basically downsampling done by the game before the final image frame is passed to the driver. The 3D scene is rendered fully at a higher-than-selected resolution, then the game downsamples that image back to output resolution before drawing the 2D elements. The advantage is that the image looks more correct, closer to traditional supersampling (the difference being the supersampling oversamples pixel calculations during 3D rendering instead of downscaling and filtering the finished 2D frame after 3D rendering). The disadvantages are that it must be implemented by the game and that when implemented, developers often limit the render scaling to 200% or the equivalent of 4x SSAA, whereas driver SSAA goes up to 16x SSAA on Nvidia cards, which is insane but easily doable on older games with modern cards. At 4K resolution, 200%/4xSSAA is great, but at low resolutions like 1080p, it's not really enough to get rid of all jaggies. What matters is effective PPI, and for typical screen sizes and viewing distances, you need around 8K effective internal render resolution to hit the effective PPI necessary for a flawless image.
--d) In summation, if you want best image quality, beyond native resolution: 1) For DX9 and previous games, force SSAA through the AMD Drivers or Nvidia Profile Inspector, or at least MSAA+TrSSAA through Nvidia Control Panel. For DX10 and newer games, use Render Scaling if the game supports it, if not use driver-level downsampling (DSR on Nvidia, VSR on AMD). There is a third party tool that allows you to unlock DSR factors beyond the 4x allowed by Nvidia (which is equivalent to 4x SSAA).

There is also a complicated technique known as sparse grid supersampling or SGSSAA available on Nvidia cards that was very useful for getting SSAA-like quality at MSAA-like performance cost back in the day, but with today's more powerful GPUs I would avoid the hassles and just use the regular SSAA option for DX9 and older games.

I hope this helps anyone who is interested in making their classic games look perfect! And they will look perfect, supersampling combined with 16x AF results in amazing spatial and temporal image quality far beyond what most people have experienced in games. It's one of the reasons CGI films, even old ones, look so good and smooth even at the same resolution you play games at, they are rendered with insane levels of AA on render farms for days.

[mesterak]

Happy Friday Phil! Thanks for covering this topic. I really think these features are amazing to enable for older gameplay. It gives old games a shot at looking closer to the graphics of modern games.

[soulshinobi]

I love these kind of basic tech videos even if it's something that I already know about

[scorpian]

Great video. Definitely something thats worthwhile for older games, it makes such a big difference.

[dadgamer]

great video! i remember playing total war shogun recently on my 4k display and the text was small. so i played something like 1024 x 768 but used some super sampling option in the options and it looked really good!

[tinto]

Nice work man! Supersampling Antialiasing old school.

[InfiniteClouds]

Hey Phil! One of my absolute favorite parts about this method is that unlike cranking the resolution to 1600x1200, supersampling keeps the UI the same size! No more super tiny HUD or UI elements in older games that have high res options but were never programmed for UI scaling. Many games "full screen" UIs are at 800x600 - some are obviously less the further you go back but ALL look great with supersampling!

[uk]

Hi Phil great video as always. It is what I used in those days for lack of monitor and gpu to run ultra high resolutions

[davkdavk]

I remember it being an option to force it in older AMD drivers, and it was amazing

[jonathanellis]

I don't know man, I kind of like the more pixelated look of older games when I am retro gaming. It feels more authentic some how.

[MarcoGPUtuber]

Wow! That image quality is a...far cry from original quality.

[andreabc]

Du hörst Dich so an als wenn Deutsch dir vertraut ist. Ich finde den Kanal toll weil Du Dir die Mühe machst Benchmarks zu machen und die Unterschiede klar zum Vorschein kommen. Was mir auffällt ist, dass einiges so oder in einer anderen Form neu aufgerollt wird und von anderen Seiten beleuchtet wird. Was ich an diesem Video vermisse ist das Thema ("T&L). Das ist zwar schon einiges älter aber hat schon mit mit AA zu tun oder doch nicht?.
Grüße aus Hamburg (Germany)

[prezeskodaty]

old computer games have textures of lower quality that's why anti-aliasing was used but replacing worse textures with better quality textures in computer games will solve the problem of angular textures without anti-aliasing

[mikeclarke]

Fantastic technology, my XP machine was lucky enough to inherit a gtx 780ti, while a bit power hungry those older games look amazing.

[O.Shawabkeh]

Never had the idea to try it with a modern card.
P.S. planned to visit Salzburg region mid June, perhaps I'm lucky and you'd be there.
(and as usual, thanks for your efforts!)

[TrueThanny]

There is a potential downside to VSR which makes SSAA preferable whenever it works. If the game doesn't scale the UI properly with resolution increases, you can end up with a tiny UI that's difficult to use. That's mostly a problem with older games where SSAA can be made to work, though.

VSR also sometimes doesn't work in some games for very high resolutions, meaning you can't get the same amount of extra samples as you can with SSAA. So getting good results with an already-high resolution is more challenging with VSR.

[MOS]

Great comparison shots Phil. Lots of guys will have a single full screen before+after comparison which is a pain to really examine properly. You’ve given good back and forth sequences on uninterpolated low res/high zoom shots which really shows the difference. A+ understanding what pedantic purist viewers want to see🙂 cheers

Also re your HL2 800x600 captures: I can’t see any smearing or missing lines of pixels so it looks like a clean integer scale to 2160 vertical. But the maths says 4x doesn’t fit and 3x would give much more black letterboxing. Can you share how those clips were scaled? Maybe I didn’t examine the font uniformity for long enough…

[TrueThanny]

You can enable MSAA for transparent textures as well. It's called "Adaptive multisampling" in the AMD drivers.

SSAA is still better, but if you can't afford the hit, adaptive MSAA is pretty good.

Both are better than TAA, which is what almost all modern games have saddled us with.

[middle_pickup]

Scored a couple Dell precision machines from my office for free last week. The i7 6700 machine is getting my old 1050ti, and going to a friend so we can play Halo Infinite. The other precision machine, a third gen Intel I think, is going to be my new XP gaming machine. I'm probably going to grab one of those radeon cards for it. Really cool video! I'll have to try this.