Deferred Rendering: Please No!

Here's a video from the SMAA guys showing the differences between FXAA/MLAA, SMAA and MSAA/CSAA side-by-side. The effect of anti-aliasing is demonstrated clearer in motion than in a screenshot.

http://vimeo.com/31247769

You will see SMAA is a very reasonable trade-off for a deferred rendering system, but there are still shimmering edges. At least it's better than FXAA/MLAA.

http://forums.uberent.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=695917#p695917
Some info pertinent to this thread.

You ever can do post process AA.

These are still post effects and post effects cannot remove aliasing, they can only mask it often with some other downside to image quality.

SMAA T2X and 4X are better but actually use supersampling. Which is still going to be impractical under deferred. TXAA likewise uses MSAA, and is another of nvidia's vendor lockin features that is practically useless because half the playerbase can't use it.

SMAA 1x does not even qualify as antialiasing, as it does not really remove jaggies. FXAA at least blurs the image enough to mask it.

Yes.

Speaking of vsync, native triple buffering is essential. Not as important in an RTS to be sure, but still lower input lag is always good.

bmb - I'm curious, what are some recent games you do like rendering wise? I'd be surprised if they weren't all some form of deferred rendering.

You hit the nail on the head. Most all recent games use deferred. And all of them suffer for it.

There are games that are very pretty, certainly. Crysis 3 is stunning. But they all alias like hell. Deferred can look shiny, but it comes at a cost of image quality.

Far Cry 2 looked amazing. The art style was maybe a bit dull. But in terms of actual image quality everything from the shadows to the vegetation was perfect. I've never seen better filtered shadows. Not a jaggy in sight on ultra. Not one. I don't know if Far Cry 3 also got infected. Haven't really seen it yet.

And for all its shortcomings supcom 2 had great graphics, again perfect shadows, and a generally crisp detailed image.

Yes, it's important to distinguish spatial aliasing and temporal aliasing. Temporal aliasing is visible as crawling and flickering in motion, not so obvious on screenshots but distracting in motion. FXAA does not take care of temporal aliasing.

Aside from the vendor lock-in, there's heavy blurring. TXAA is designed to improve on FXAA eliminating temporal aliasing at the cost of sharpness.

TXAA Demo, removing temporal and spatial aliasing: http://www.geforce.com/whats-new/articl ... world-txaa

Although TXAA convincingly eliminates both types of aliasing, the comments show complaints about the softened image: "you feel like your character needs glasses".

Indeed, SMAA 1x does not remove temporal aliasing.

• SMAA 1x: includes accurate distance searches, local contrast adaptation, sharp geometric features and diagonal pattern detection.
• SMAA S2x: includes all SMAA 1x features plus spatial multisampling.
• SMAA T2x: includes all SMAA 1x features plus temporal supersampling.
• SMAA 4x: includes all SMAA 1x features plus spatial and temporal multi/supersampling.

The SMAA injector is limited to SMAA 1x. For the higher modes SMAA needs to be integrated. The question is, is the performance hit of SMAA T2x and SMAA 4x in a deferred rendering context acceptable for players of PA?

SMAA T2x, for little additional cost, offers a very attractive tradeoff for any kind of rendering engine (deferred or forward), avoiding 2x multisampling while still reconstructing subpixel detail. SMAA S2x and SMAA 4x are the best options regarding image quality. We believe that SMAA will finally enable deferred engines to match the antialiasing quality of forward rendering engines.

-- Taken from Jimenez's paper: http://www.iryoku.com/smaa/downloads/SM ... iasing.pdf

Given that Crysis 3 supports SMAA 4x (as well as MSAA, FXAA and TXAA), doesn't it produce acceptable results? Demo:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l82CyLEJBJM