VizWorld.com

CodingHorror isn’t typically a website to visit for visualization advice, but a new post over there details the many types of anti-aliasing algorithms, complete with lots of detail and examples and the original paper for the FXAA algorithm.

Pretty much all “modern” anti-aliasing is some variant of the MSAA hack, and even that costs a quarter of your framerate. That’s prohibitively expensive, unless you have so much performance you don’t even care, which will rarely be true for any recent game. While the crawling lines of aliasing do bother me, I don’t feel anti-aliasing alone is worth giving up a quarter of my framerate and/or turning down other details to pay for it.

But that was before I learned that there are some emerging alternatives to MSAA. And then, much to my surprise, these alternatives started showing up as actual graphics options in this season’s PC games — Battlefield 3, Skyrim, Batman: Arkham City, and so on. What is this FXAA thing, and how does it work?

via Coding Horror: Fast Approximate Anti-Aliasing (FXAA).

Graphics, Science algorithm, antialiasing

A new paper from the folks at Crytek and the Universidad de Zaragoza showcases a new antialiasing technique they call SMAA, or Subpixel Morphological Antialiasing.  The results are promising, as shown above.

We present a new image-based, post-processing antialiasing technique, that offers practical solutions to all the common problems of existing filter-based antialiasing algorithms. It yields better pattern detection to handle sharp geometric features and diagonal shapes. Our edge detection scheme exploits local contrast features, along with accelerated and more precise distance searches, which allows to better recognize the patterns to antialias. Our method is capable of reconstructing subpixel features, comparable to 4x multisampling, and is fully customizable, so that every feature can be turned on or off, adjusting to particular needs. We propose four different presets, from the basic level to adding spatial multisampling and temporal supersampling. Even this full-fledged version achieves performances that are on-par with the fastest approaches available, while yielding superior quality.

You can download a high-resolution video at the site below showcasing the effects of their new algorithm.  It’s impressive work, showing some beautiful results in their examples.

via SMAA: Enhanced Subpixel Morphological Antialiasing.

Graphics algorithm, antialiasing, crytek, paper