What is SSAA (Anti-Aliasing) & why you should NOT use it!

Let's give a top view about Super Sampling Anti-Aliasing (SSAA) on what is does and why you should not use it... Mostly

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#ssaa #supersampling #beyondthehype

Welcome to Beyond The Hype. Where we savor the beauty of games by taking it slow. Aiming to show the beauty in games through is graphics and ambiance, sounds and worlds. New and old games excluding the hype, and only for the enjoyment of this amazing art form. Come with us, as we explore that which we love but hardly take time to slow down to truly enjoy and admire what makes games, games!

[farisshahab]

Thanks mate it helps alot. Now I understand what is SSAA. Your guide is simple, to the point and easy to understand keep it up

[garybeharrie]

im glad you made a nice quick video on this! thanks!

[MeteCanKarahasan]

I'm sure you are considering SSAA also increases texture filtering and enables 64xAF for instance, if you paired 4xSSAA with 16xAF. That is never excessive.

[socialreport]

It's wrong, it should be used, if your gpu is capable of running it. SSAA is one of the best AA, definitely better than DLSS/FSR.

[Johnnybomb]

msaa in combination with sgssaa was/is the cleanest form of anti-aliasing, as it almost completely eliminates aliasing on polygonal objects and also transparent textures, with minimal blurring. Unfortunately it became unusable with modern forward-rendered games, and doesn't work beyond dx9 api.

[ThePeca]

Ok, but supersampling at 4k is something completely different then like rendering at 1440p and playing at 1080p. And for some people (including me) its totally sensible. Lete explain : I have an average (a bit older, but not too bad machine), on that i have a Ryzen7 2700x, 32gigs of ddr4 memory, and that is paired with an OC 2080ti, on a high refresh 1080p display. In my case the cpu is holding the graphics card back (it was allready a bottleneck with a 1080ti too), so by enabling Supersampling and on top of that even maxing out any other anti-aliasing on 8x or 16x i dont give up any performance, the FPS stays the same, but the visuals are night and day. That is because the GPU has such a performance headroom over the CPU that it barely hovers at 50-55% utilisation at 1080p. So by turning every setting to max/ultra, enabling supersampling (from 1440p to 1080p) and on top of that enabling another AA option to the max the GPU is still only at 75-80% utilisation, as the CPU is the one maxed out long ago giving 160frames a second for the GPU to process. 4k is another thing of course, its very performance costly in the first place, and then the SMALLEST resolution the GPU has to work with is actually 4k. I honestly thing that 4k doesnt worth it at all, except when you have money to burn

[Mewzyc]

i love using SSAA. visually better than TAA. if you have the computing power, its no issue. use x4 SSAA in Tomb Raider

[jndominica]

That's what anti-aliasing is. You can do multi-sample, but when there is an edge on almost every pixel, that will turn out about the same. You will be able to enable after 10 years with video adapters from the future. Think about how far back in time you need to go to find games that work comfortably with it.

[Bucks]

Nice educational video. Never would've known that on my own.

[paulkelleway]

If on a 1080p monitor then 2-4x SSAA (Super Sampling AA) will render the entire image at 2x or 4x 1080p and then downscales it to 1080p, this effectively antialiases the entire image rather than just edges, in my experience this is far superior to any other form of AA. It’s cleaner, crisper and gives the impression that you are looking at a higher resolution image than 1080p, other AA methods don’t give that impression.
The downside to SSAA is it will use a lot more power, for example, in 1080p with 4x MSAA my 6950xt only draws about 45 watts of power at 60fps, but with 4xSSAA it uses around 140 watts of power at 60fps, so SSAA will use about 3x power compared to MSAA but it looks at least twice as good, if you don’t mind the extra power draw and want the best image quality, SSAA can’t be beaten. Obviously you need a fairly powerful GPU to run SMAA at 4x on a 1080p monitor because you are actually rendering the image at 4k.

And yes I know I’m using a 6950xt, I should be running higher res anyway, but I did this purely for an example and hope it helps someone understand differences.

For reference I tested the above using Automobilista 2 at 60fps locked.

[DepressedGameR]

SSAA is better than FXAA and SMAA or TAA is the best option but isnt always available, look at TAA in Days Gone - it makes the game look like garbage and blurry often not allowing textures to load up properly ...so i prefer SSAA and an impact hit on performance rather than TAA for the video - you explained everything very nicely . i subscribed .. :P

[vooglebum]

Thanks for this enlightening vid. Now I know its dire effects on the game. Awesome info.

[Seacat]

I regret that SSAA disappeared. It could help play older games with much better quality. I hate to see aliasing in Source games.

[princeofliyue]

this video is not for perfectionist gamers who put visual fidelity to max settings in any game!!! i use SSAA 4x in any game i can get 60fps stable frametime!!! if i dont then il wait another 40 years until Nvidia and AMD make more billions of dollars and decide to get rid of upscaling and frame generation brain washer!!! i wish we can game at 4k, but the sad thing is even the RTX4090 can even mantain some games at 60 fps on 1080p!!! meybe in a few more generation we can raw on 4k, but until then...

[frm]

so in the beginning you say as a disclaimer "its not how fast the game runs" and then go on to saying how fast it runs

[ImperialDiecast]

so what do you recommend instead? FXAA? MSAA? TAA? DSR?

[Quanziam]

I'd only use SSAA if my GPU is heavily underutilized.

[lorenzovertemati]

It depends on the resolution and the game, in 1080p if possible I always arrive more advanced antialiasing, in 1440p as well, instead in 2160p (4k) it depends but usually I do

Flicker is something that bothers me too much, then using the nis envy (gtx 1070) I lower the resolution

[Phoenix]

What's the performance hit to SSAA 2x?

[ΣωτηρηςΓεωργιου-ξθ]

There is an external device, like adapter or something, to provide a SSAA or some other type of AA for PS3-4-5 consoles bc Mclassic+Mcable it's completely useless????