Hello! It’s so good to see such progress being made on this project and look forward to the results.
I’d like to ask any developers, moderators and/or alpha participants, has there been any discussion or indication what type of anti-aliasing methods will be implemented for the final release?
I am extremely hopeful that they will incorporate Nvidia’s TAA. Before Fallout 4, I would always use a combination of SMAA or FXAA (and sometimes MSAA in conjunction). The pitfalls there are that SMAA requires a third party .dll to be injected into the game which can reduce performance and block online games from working properly. And the later FXAA has a high blur that can’t be justified for the amount of AA that it achieves. Additionally, adding MSAA to make up for any FXAA short comings, is more performance wasted.
When I started playing Fallout 4, I disabled FXAA and went straight to SMAA. I ignored TAA because I assumed like a lot of the manufacturer specific AA technologies, it would be cumbersome and performance killing. A bit of time passed and I decided to give TAA a try as I wasn’t happy with SMAA. It wasn’t cleaning up the image enough.
Well blow me down, TAA took all the transparency aliasing and eradicated it. It also got rid of texture crawl and aliasing shimmering. And, I noticed no performance loss - at least none that affected me. I play at 96fps/96hz and before and after TAA it was still 96.
I understand and have witnessed one of the downsides to TAA is that when in motion, it blurs the image(though not as much as FXAA!). Though I can live with that for two simple reasons:
-
When we as humans are in motion, vision is slightly blurred. And in
video games motion blur is a common feature people sometimes use any
ways. To me it seems natural. -
I’ve always said that the best graphics engines are ones that do not
induce any unnecessary distraction when rendering a scene or an
image. I believe you can have lower quality textures and a smooth
engine, and you’ll be happier than a high texture set and an
intrusive engine. A good example is TERA. The Unreal Engine 3 used
for TERA does not have any (or noticeable) shimmer, flickering,
aliasing, or interruptions in the scene rendering that distract your
eyes and brain from the experience. There is no immersion breaking
from graphical anomalies. This is a key element in providing a smooth
playing environment. Contrast that with something like the first
version of Final Fantasy XIV (or even the current ARR version) and
there was A LOT of texture crawl on the ground and the flora that
constantly appeared and ruined the image.
TAA stops all that and gives such a clean and smooth image, that it takes the graphics to a whole new level, and subsequently the immersion as well.
So here’s to hoping they can implement TAA to Kingdom Come, because there will be a lot of open world flora and leaves and trees and other surfaces that will look immensely better if they have the right type of AA transparency and coverage - and I believe TAA currently does this best.