How games fake smooth graphics

A look at how games engines use anti-aliasing to create smooth graphics.

💭 All views are my own 💭

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[carecoable]

This was a very, very simple and effective way of explaining each of the AA algorithms! Amazing work as always!

[Scorpwind]

Just to clarify on the FuckTAA subreddit:

TAA and other temporal methods of anti-aliasing have immense blurring and smearing issues especially in motion. Issues, that have been there since their inception and are now being forced on people. The clarity that you lose with them is incredible. That subreddit is actively trying to bring this to people's attention, find alternative AA methods that would work in modern games as well as provide workarounds for those that wish to turn it off.

[ACDC]

I don't reall know how I found your channel, but this is the first video I watched. I have seen all the different approaches in their short form flying around but never put any meaning to it. You were presenting everything very good to follow and in an appealing way. Thanks for your content!

[tristanwegner]

I left out the harsh drawback of FXAA. It blurs ALL hard contrasts, even wanted ones, so textures become blurry, which especially bad in textures with text. Your video makes it sound like the best AA mentioned.

[harshitjoshi]

Just wanna say this was the best video i have watched on this topic ! Thankyou for making this

[ButcherTTV]

This is the best video ive seen on the comparisons. Good job

[bsaintnyc]

This video got me. Its the most succinct explanation of AA solutions. Subbed.

[JMPDev]

Your shoulders moving up and down while talking is hypnotic. Thanks for the video!

[Thornskade]

I could never understand the introduction of TAA to modern gaming. Every game's image quality only seems to suffer from this featuring smear and blur where I would genuinely prefer pixel stairs. Games that are considered to look great like Red Dead Redemption have this awful smear to them and make me feel like I need glasses due to all the blur. I really need the industry to go back to the drawing board and fix this since to me it's insufferable

[catcanhack]

yo man great video i was just researching about anti aliasing and found u have made new vid thanks man

[akrturuus]

Tell us about anisotropic filtration and why x16 is a maximum?

[BerkeHitay]

Very informative video, I hadn't come across a place that explained the methods for Anti-aliasing in such a concise and accurate way. Thank you. However, in my humble opinion a little less movement south of the shoulders would help improve your presentation. It can get somewhat distracting.

[Kaptime]

Going from a target resolution of 1080p -> 2160p made me change my opinion on TXAA. In my opinion, TXAA is very blurry and destroys texture detail at FHD (needs something like fidelityfx CAS applied to help) but at 4K TXAA looks massively better and is a nearly perfect solution given your framerate is stable + high enough to avoid ghosting. MSAA, SMAA and FXAA are all just simply not worth it, they all either don't solve the problem or they introduce image quality problems (MSAA shimmering etc). Upscaling techniques are also a mixed bag... DLSS has noise problems (try any setting and look at the banding + extreme noise on the gold sash of Lara's Paititi outfit in SOTTR), FSR 2 is a blurry mess on any setting and not worth using, FSR 1 looks better than FSR 2 at Ultra-Quality but then everything below Ultra-Quality is a noisy mess. Insomniac's in-house interlaced upscaler does a better job than the interlaced setting in the recent RE Engine games.

[marksmithcollins]

How are your arms moving under the camera

[ripnephils]

I really like your videos but this perspective with you close seems you're rapping into the camera and that distracts me.

[Barnardrab]

Does 4K monitors make this problem disappear?

[zdspider]

- FXAA is the worst of them all. It applies it _everywhere, _ including in places where you DON'T want, like textures, text, fine grain detail. It turns a night sky full of stars into blobs and splotches. No, thank you. Maybe only as a last resort, if other AA options prove to be too demanding. While FXAA is worst, it's also the fastest.
- MSAA has had hardware support since the 90's and only deals with _geometric_ aliasing, doesn't do shit for texture or specular aliasing.
- TAA is better. Much better than FXAA because it uses a temporal approach (temporal, as in, across multiple frames rendered at different times). It provides almost a "cinematic" look. The fact that there's an r/FuckTAA bothers me. People are idiots.
- TXAA is Nvidia's approach to TAA. It combines MSAA with a temporal filter, similar to what TAA does.
- SSAA is probably "the nicest" in terms of quality, but the performance hit is not worth it because the other options do basically the same thing (more or less) at a quarter of the cost.