🎮 Why do so many videogames have bad anti-aliasing implementation? It is so easy to implement: just draw on a larger texture, then scale back to the target resolution

I've been playing Forza Horizon 4 and League of Legends lately and both games have terrible anti-aliasing; I can see pixels and cringy blur around the edges. Elden Ring is another game where anti-aliasing sucks

I understand that not every user can benefit from anti-aliasing because you need powerful graphics card; but still. Feels bad

Because there are actually many very different AA techniques, and not all can be applied depending on your engine.

MSAA is the "typical", as in, introductorily taught AA. And for pixel-heavy shaders, is very costly.

But, for example, you can't apply MSAA if you have deferred lighting, as the multisampling would corrupt vital info in the g buffers. That's why deferred lighting engines typically use temporal AA, when not using other vendor lock in like FXAA or DLSS.

The specific mode you mentioned is SSAA, but that is extremely prohibitive in anything at 1080p and beyond.

Why the fuck is Minecraft so damn pixelated?! jk, ;-)

What you suggest is horrible on performance and vram. It is simple in a small game, but if your game is on the edge. Your suggested technique will have horrible frame drops.

A frame drop make people cry harder than a bad AA.

Super sampling was there for ages. The main issue is it requires a fuck ton of resources. As if you're rendering for a resolution twice as large.

"Antialiasing is so easy"

Oh, you sweet summer child

@12bitfloat it's easy if you have an overpowered machine that can render quadruple the resolution and then downsample (average or 2x2 pixels). That would look great, but no one has such power for the overpowered games of now

@iiii As an antialiasing technique connoisseur myself I know the pain

@12bitfloat it may be naive, but it's the objectively best way of antialiasing 🤷‍♂️

@iiii It indeed is. Fortunately, if you reproject old frames and use a bit of clever shenanigans (either subpixel jittering or programmable sample locations) you can pretty much get the quality of SSAA using as little as just one sample per frame.

I've implemented a technique not long ago that uses 4x MSAA with 16 sample locations divided over 4 frames. That pretty much results in 4x SSAA + 12 coverage samples, so even better than pure 4x SSAA, and it looks absolutely stunning (if you ignore the ghosting I haven't fixed yet lol)

@12bitfloat oh my 😳