Tech Focus: TAA - Blessing Or Curse? Temporal Anti-Aliasing Deep Dive

[@hundvd_7]

It's a curse. Not because it's _that_ bad in itself, but because games are made with this flawed setting being on, to work in the first place. Turning it off just completely breaks many different effects in all kinds of games. That is a RIDICULOUSLY big problem

[@Aurora12488]

I believe most of the artifacts with TAA disabled are due to the expectation that temporal info will be accumulated to get rid of any undersampling and checkerboarding artifacts. I wonder, then, if then using SSAA to instead accumulate spatially instead of temporally would fix those issues? Not saying that's better than ideally having alternate implementations to TAA-dependent effects. But at least from a future-proofing perspective, it wouldn't totally just destroy games forever, just until hardware's capable of handling it. Also, I wonder if anyone's tried hacking in DLSS to hijack an older game's TAA pipeline, so at least if we're doing temporal accumulation we're getting the best looking result? And then at least that'd potentially be able to be subbed out for future DLSS4/5/6/etc. that maybe actually finally are universal wins against SSAA.

[@Oryyyt]

Super-sampling should def make a comeback. Temporal is temporary. A fad. I don't dislike it in very specific titles but SS assisted by AI I feel could produce the best images.

[@Aurora12488]

​@@Oryyyt ​ I don't think it's fair to say temporal is a fad. I don't think there is a viable future where we *don't* do temporal accumulation; it really is an effective way to get decent image quality with a significantly reduced number of samples, which is extremely important for having both good visuals and, in the future even more-so, high frame-rates that will require temporal extrapolation. Our appetite for visual novelty is always going to outpace our insistence for artifact-free visuals, and so while temporal might be "temporary" in the sense that any individual title 10 years down the line could swap its AA/SS from temporal to spatial for artifact-free accumulation, temporal solutions are going to be part of new titles for many decades to come. We mostly need to get better at it. DLSS is much better IMO than the original implementations of TAA, like we saw with Halo in this video. But future iterations will be able to do fully-fused networks processing a 4K image all at once rather than in tiles, and will likely incorporate more fine-grained movement data than just linear motion vectors. And the models behind the upscaling will get larger and more sophisticated. So we're just in an awkward time right now where DLSS is *good* , but not truly *great* . At least we're mostly past the era of TAA being legitimately *horrible* . BTW, if you have an Nvidia card you should try out DLDSR. It's like you said; using multiple samples per pixel plus a neural net to reconstruct a lower resolution image only spatially. It's pretty good, though is really taxing so is mostly good with old games.

[@ozonecandle]

something something Threat Interactive. TAA is terrible, completely, at every angle. period. It's bad for the gaming industry.

[@Aurora12488]

​@@ozonecandle My guy, we've all seen TI's videos. There's a reason DF's Alex doesn't agree with his assessment. He's not totally wrong, but throwing out temporal solutions entirely is not reasonable either. It's always going to be a trade-off between artifacts. The reality is, rendering at one sample per pixel is *massively* undersampling the underlying geometry, and throwing blur/softening filters to try to reduce aliasing is not doing anything to actually get the signal we're missing back; aliasing is just one of many symptoms, not the underlying issue. Temporal accumulation is going to be a critical technology going forward. Now, there are obviously bad and lazy implementations, but you can't honestly tell me Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart with TAA/DLSS looks worse than mid 2010s native-res titles. We're going through a bit of growing pains with base PS5 where it's not quite powerful enough to truly render at the quality we're looking for, and devs are using TAA as a band-aid for just shoddy design, but I feel like temporal AA/SS will be pretty unequivocally better than native rendering next gen. It will *never* be artifact-free, but *neither is native resolution rendering* .

[@churibman]

I wold love to see a deep dive video explaining the difference between forward rendering and deferred rendering as it is something I never manages to understand really well

[@Navhkrin]

TLDR: Forward Rendering -> System processes entire logic for final pixel color directly. Deferred Rendering -> System generates bunch of information about pixel first and does a 2nd stage where final color is calculated. Deferred Rendering allows for more optimizations because you can avoid running logic for objects that are occluded etc. But "storing bunch of information" itself has a cost.

[@churibman]

@@Navhkrin hey this was actually a great summary of it, makes a lot more sense now, thanks! 😁

[@thearcadefire93]

Forward rendering: you render the geometry as is, then loop through each light and add that light contribution to the image. This is how it works in real life, where each light ray from each light source stacks on top of each other to illuminate an object. The downside is that you need to run your shading code, per each pixel, per each light, thus making the computation progressively slower the more lights you add. Deferred Rendering: you render your scene into different images, grouped into something called the gbuffer. Each image contains some information for the scene (color, normals, depth, etc). Then, you take that gbuffer, and by combining those previously rendered images, you calculate the lighting in one pass as a "post process" (deferred) effect on the rendered images. It's a bit harder to explain how the actual lighting is performed from the gbuffer, since it's not how light really behave in real life. But since you are basically combining a bunch of pre rendered images to create the lighting, this scales much better the more light sources you add to the scene. It's a much more complex conversation than it can be summarised in a short comment, but I hope this helps

[@YuriMomoiro]

Actually in recent times(pretty much the last decade). We actually moved to something called Forward+ rendering. Where we directly render the fragment, but to surpass the performance limit of multiple lights/decals, we divide the screen space into frustum grid/clusters instead, each cell only calculating x amount of lights/decals. The main reason of this paradigm shift is to avoid the excessive memory usage stemming from deferred rendering numerous buffers needed for various effects, while recent hardware can easily calculate the clustering and culling. Though deferred rendering is not totally gotten rid of, it's still part of certain effects of the pipelines. So most recent (big budget) titles use the clustered forward+ with a touch of deferred.

[@KingKrouch]

​@@Navhkrin Deferred Rendering essentially stores a lot of information regarding lighting information (diffuse, normal, roughness, specularity) in something called a GBuffer, which as you say has the actual lighting/shading part calculated later in the frame. It can handle a large number of lights at once, while it becomes really demanding with higher resolutions and can even cause performance issues with multisampling. Forward Rendering has things drawn as they're queued with the lighting/shading process usually not done later. There's also techniques like Clustered Forward Renderering which attempt to fix the issue with multiple light sources, and that's what Godot and Unity uses. Interestingly enough, Doom 2016 and Eternal does use Clustered Forward Shading from what I've read. Source 2 uses forward rendering. If I recall correctly, even some of the Forza games use forward rendering as well. I do wonder how Doom Eternal is doing raytracing in a clustered forward rendering context.

[@fortunefiderikumo]

i missed these DF in-depth

[@kanyewest7221]

I guess they've done so many videos that there isn't much left to analyze, but yeah it's really cool to learn more about all these graphics settings and what they really do

[@AddressUnknownGT]

Alex: "TAA looks better at high FPS" Me: OK. I'll play at 1080p to get higher FPS. Alex: "TAA looks much better at high resolution" Me: ...well crap.

[@ogedaydex]

Well thats great marketing for 4090 :D

[@GruntoSkunko]

TAA looks horrible at high resolution; makes everything blurry like you're playing at a much lower res.

[@SPexHoS2137]

@@GruntoSkunko the video literally shows something else. At 4k TAA looks good. 4K only tho

[@NoCluYT]

@@GruntoSkunko at high resolutions, you shouldn't even need it tbh.

@@NoCluYT high resolutions wont solve specular aliasing (aka shimmer)

[@asdfjklo234]

Forcing TAA on people is unforgivable. There should always be an _Off_ option.

[@mbsfaridi]

Just like chromatic aberration which eventually became a toggle.

[@InakiArzalluz]

It got to the point that in a case I even had to read the documentation of Unreal engine in order to tweak a variable used by the engine, like why tf couldn't the devs make an in game option to change that variable, since the game is clearly capable of using other Anti AA techniques?

[@mbsfaridi]

@@InakiArzalluz I’d imagine their top devs prefer it.

[@Willie6785]

worst part is that some games look atrocious without it. NFS Heat for instance

[@Alexander_Sannikov]

You can't turn off the actually expensive part of TAA - the motion vectors, because other parts of rendering pipelines started relying on it, even if you're not using TAA. So they decided if you have to pay the cost of TAA anyway, might as well have it always on.

[@chy.0190]

The blurriness as you said is definitely more noticeable for the average desktop user. Its especially annoying in recent CoD/WZ games where it is baked in and you cannot turn it off. The games seem like a blurry mess compared to other fps games I have played.

[@tadsnyder2756]

Hmm I thought this was just me lol

[@markyonline1]

The solution that somehow helped me for games with vey blurry TAA is using Reshade and enabling CAS. It get's a lot of detail back without introducing aliasing.

[@KyoukiDotExe]

Sharpening is not a fix for the in-motion blur, it only resolves the static detail loss in tiny amount.@@markyonline1

[@Flunkiii]

Why are you not just using driver sharpening for that game?

[@markyonline1]

@@Flunkiii Can you specify please?

[@AgentRupal]

I always wondered why image quality with TAA at lower fps looks worse! Got the answer

[@rokku87]

Yeah I never even thought of that but it makes perfect sense. Super good video. Wonder If the same phenomenon is true with DLSS??

[@gellister]

Yeah. To me it was in the name: temporal. Meaning that the samples were taken over time. This meant that lower framerates were disproportionately effected.

[@colemin2]

​​@@rokku87I get the sense that fsr2 greatly benefits from higher framerates, especially in fast camera motion.

[@OGPatriot03]

​@@rokku87 It's the exact same with DLSS since it heavily relies on the previous frame's data, so the less difference between frames (a natural result of a higher framerate, all things being equal) will reduce the size of the artifacts.

[@Morgan-gp3vy]

Isn't Red Dead Redemption 2 different? I was reading something on a taa mod which said that taa at 30 fps looked better because that is what the game prefered on which is the the consoles version. So to fix that the modder changed the taa values to work better at 60 fps and higher.

[@PokeDude1995]

Absolutely incredible video Alex, bravo! This answers so many questions I've had over the past few years regarding MSAA and TAA that it feels like you've read my mind. I've long been frustrated by MSAA options seemingly disappearing over the last decade and a half, and also remember you (or John?) mentioning off-handedly some time ago that "modern graphics just don't work without TAA"; I wanted to know _why_ that was the case but until now just treated it as a puzzling fact of life. Now I know it's because MSAA only affects geometry, and so cannot clean up edges within geometry introduced by stuff like transparency in textures (e.g. metal grates or fences) - and of course other stuff it can't help with, like pixel shaders, etc. As someone who primarily plays games on their PC with a 1080p/60Hz monitor, I also really appreciate your look into why TAA can be perceptually worse for my use case/setup than with others. All in all, an astonishingly comprehensive video without being overly long or laborious.

[@williamxie8791]

Actually msaa CAN handle alpha tested objects like fences. there is this thing called Alpha to Coverage which helps removing edges in these cases

[@billy65bob]

What he said about MSAA isn't quite right though. In a forward renderer, MSAA (FSAA to be more specific) was provided by the rendering pipeline itself at no extra programming effort. Whereas with a deferred renderer, you need to explicitly incorporate MSAA into every single shader. **Every. Single. Shader.** This means at minimum you need a completely separate set of shaders for no-AA, **every level** of MSAA you intend to support. That said, you can use a preprocessor to simplify the creation of the MSAA capable shaders. And to make this all worse, in a deferred renderer, you also need to use specific texture formats that support MSAA with the exact sample count you intend to use on it. Don't quote me on this, but I believe MSAA doesn't work if you don't do this, and blows up if you mix a MSAA shader with a non-MSAA texture and vice versa. These MSAA shaders don't "multiply geometry resolution" but rather run multiple samples per pixel to produce the final image. As an aside, because this is how it works in a deferred renderer, you can actually mix and match; running separate parts at different MSAA levels. Not that games do that (except in cases where they lack a MSAA capable shader) because it's easier to just generate a consistent MSAA block. All in all, that is the real reason MSAA died off with the advent of deferred rendering: It requires significant extra dev time to produce both MSAA (and per level) and non-MSAA variants of shaders, And wastes a lot of dev time when they have to hunt down bugs spawned from mismatching MSAA and non-MSAA parts of the pipeline.

[@hankstorm3135]

if you have a good gpu i recommend downscale... DLSR desktop to 4k and if the game have it use dlss on top to go back to 1080p if you need more perf.

[@mikafoxx2717]

Very true. MSAA also isn't the golden standard for antialiasing though, it was good for geometry but with specular highlights and high resolution textures now it doesn't do as much. Supersampling the entire image is really the best bet now, and upscaling is the cheapest way to do that. Of course, the higher your screen resolution the less antialiasing you need as well for it to look clean to your eyes. For a real world example, 24 megapixel cameras usually use antialiasing filters, yet 45+ mp sensors usually don't, because at usable zoom levels you'll almost never see it, and for NASA quality stuff they make the sensor outresolve the lens itself in a telescope so you can never get aliasing to begin with. It's like having 8x SSAA and for cameras it's like rendering an 8k picture on an 8k monitor (36mp) where you probably can't see the aliasing anyways even when it's there due to your eye's limitations.

[@johnnyb529]

The DLAA image at 12:39 looks way too blurry compared to the 8x SSAA. You really need a sharpening effect added via Reshade to make games with TAA look acceptable.

[@UserName-bs3gk]

TAA should not be mandatory

[@Ravenprose]

Explanations like this are a big why reason I watch DF. Thanks, Alex!

[@alcatraz6275]

Please Alex don't forget the nvidia physcs video

[@jaroslavmrazek5752]

recently played the Arkham trilogy, goddamn do i miss Physx, the carpets flying around, particles bouncing as they should, smoke looking amazing

[@Aggnog]

People buying a second low end nvidia gpu just to have physx, what a time to be alive. (it sucked)

[@Kait0s]

Physx is still being used today. Iirc, Alan Wake 2 uses it. ​@@jaroslavmrazek5752

[@jaroslavmrazek5752]

@@Aggnog Of course, the hit was huge, but i imagine with modern tech it couldve been so much better.

[@AlexanTheMan]

Tried Asylum with PhysX on my RX 6700. Framerate tanked down to the 30s unfortunately. I'm not compelled to go back to Nvidia.

[@ColinPurves]

One of the best DF videos ever made. Finally I understand what all these AA options are! The 4K TAA vs 1080p TAA is such a valuable piece of knowledge for PC gamers.

[@XZ-III]

@unops1archive you're prob not bright to begin with then

[@DanKeatis]

100% this! The monitor vs TV thing (I'm a PC gamer who plays on my TV sitting a 2-3 feet away) was also really helpful for me.

[@Eyck-head]

I wonder how this behaves on 1080p monitors with DSR and TAA, generally it should look better the higher you crank up the resolution, if your PC can handle it without DLSS

[@mduckernz]

@@80n3y4rdRemember that DSR cannot use motion vectors (not supplied by whatever it’s rescaling, as it is a universal rescaler, not built into whatever you’re rescaling), so yeah it’s gonna be way inferior to DLAA or DLSS. So, individual frames can be scaled in much the same way that DLAA does, but they cannot use information from past frames accurately and must make guesses which will frequently be wrong, producing artefacts like ghosting.

[@Eyck-head]

@@mduckernz What about using DSR with DLAA or DLSS tho?

[@Snoopey0]

Fantastic, thank you Alex! Been wondering for years why AA seems to have gotten "worse" from the easy no-jaggies options of pre-2010

[@seth4321]

Alex, a job well done. PLEASE put out more videos like this. I learned so much. You're such a great teacher. Good work!!

[@alchemystn2o]

Agree.

[@stephe.n]

Love the 'Anti Aliasing' on the retro screensaver in the background. Nostalgia!

[@csm153]

Great video Alex! I've been confused why we haven't seen MSAA in modern games and this is why.

[@blakegriplingph]

Deferred rendering was actually first implemented in the _Shrek_ tie-in game, of all games, for the OG Xbox. I've read that the game's graphics programmer felt that they went all out with the visuals as they weren't constrained by having to develop the game with very low-end home computers as in the case of the kids' games they used to make. And then came _S.T.A.L.K.E.R._ by GSC which further popularised the technique, followed by _Grand Theft Auto IV_ which infamously shipped with a vaseline filter in lieu of a proper AA solution.

[@ZalvaTionZ]

I've always had the impression that STALKER was foward rendered for whatever reason, even though I know it's not. I wonder why they went with it as I don't remember there being tons of light sources in the game and most of it's set in nature that would benefit from easier transparency rendering. The environment is pretty similar to Crysis 1 in terms of lighting and requirements.

[@marcelosoares7148]

GTA IV had 2x MSAA on the 360 but maybe they used it together with the blur filter.

[@blakegriplingph]

@@marcelosoares7148 I highly doubt that tho. The Xbox 360 uses DX9 which didn't have the ability to use MSAA in deferred scenes as with DX10 and up.

[@jc_dogen]

@@blakegriplingph digital foundry confirmed 2xMSAA in the 360 version back in the day. I guess it depends on if you believe that or not.

[@Inityx]

GTA IV's infamous vaseline filter was actually just a completely broken Depth of Field effect, which on PC just blurred the entire screen. There are mods now that can fix it and it actually looks much better

[@robinvekety4639]

To address the issue of performance hit of supersampling, if you want a clear TAA image, then you have to go 4K, and you also have to do 120+ Hz. At that point, for people with 1080p 60Hz setups, I’d argue reaching those targets are more resource intensive with TAA than just plain supersampling at their native refresh rate So we ditched SSAA because of performance, but to clear up the mess that we made now with TAA we have to go high res and high refresh rate. Seems like we are back at square one. That’s why no AA option is important. For people who don’t want TAA’s negatives, the only escape is to take a performance hit regardless, unless there is TAA off option in the game.

[@Facomaru]

Maybe I'm being paranoid here but Taa would make those 4k screen more appealing than what they really are so people would be inclined to buy those new 4k, 8k, 166hz 240hz screens. Because if you let people choose the antialiasing maybe most people would turn it off for crispy images at 1080p.

[@jwhi419]

​@@Facomarui hope you realize that no aa at 2880p would be far be better than 1080p no aa

[@Facomaru]

@@jwhi419 of course, the thing is 2k and 4k are less impacted by Taa than 1080 ( if I understand it correctly), so as there isn't no aa option for 1080 you would be inclined to go for a new screen with the new 2k 4k resolutions.

[@jwhi419]

@@Facomaru oh. That would be sinister. So much so it doesn't seem likely. Outside of the main game engine makers or nvidia. Ever worse. We wouldn't need any of these high frame rates and aa techniques if we were all using 1600p crts. They would still have huge bezels but would only be like 2 inches with modern technology.

[@PauLtus_B]

I can see the upsides to TAA. It's an AA method which works with deferred lighting and can allow cheap a transparency method like dithering to work. But it is ironic then that it needs to run at such a high resolution and fps for the end result to be worthwhile otherwise it's going to look less sharp than a much lower resolution? …so what is even ultimately even being achieved here? We could just be using more reliable render methods at a lower resolution. I can also imagine deferred lighting and post processing being adjusted so that it can include something like MSAA (I can think of ways on how to do that and I don't know much about this, I can't imagine this to be that crazy complicated).

[@Hybred]

Anti-aliasing is a balance between clarity, performance, and effectiveness, and until a perfect AA solution exists users should be able to pick their own poison that works best with their own setup & even accessibility needs.

[@Hybred]

Clarity/Performance = Not Effective (SMAA) Clarity/Effective AA = High Perf Hit (SSAA) Performance/Effective AA = No Clarity (TAA)

[@griffin1366]

Problem is devs don't let you turn TAA off now.

[@griffin1366]

@@IntegerOfDoom Somebody didn't watch the video.

[@Hybred]

@@IntegerOfDoom MSAA is a great solution to aliasing, but not pixel crawl/shimmering. If we could adaptively apply TAA to only account for that & use something like MSAA or SMAA on the rest of the image it would be ideal.

[@cooltwittertag]

​@@HybredSSAA looks singificantly worse than TAA in AA effectiveness

[@proesterchen]

I think the SSAA nomenclature is wrong: "8K" would be the equivalent of 16x SSAA 2K, as there are 16 pixel samples for every final output pixel.

[@iurigrang]

Yeah, I was really confused at first

[@drkevorkian2508]

It's a shame he didn't mention sparse grid SSAA, which is higher quality and more performant.

[@ChaosBahamut]

@@drkevorkian2508 And was originated by a driver-side bug. XD Long story short, "SGSSAA" was SUPPOSED to be nVidia's method of anti-aliasing transparent textures in a manner superior to Alpha-to-Coverage. (aka Transparency MSAA) Due to a bug though, if the number of SGSSAA samples matched the number of MSAA samples the effect would be applied on the entire screen. It was fixed, but due to how popular it was nVidia made it possible to "undo" the fix. (nVidia Profile Inspector making it much easier to do so)

[@iris4547]

@@ChaosBahamuti seem to recall years ago using this method to get proper anti aliasing into the original mass effect games. created an amazing image.

[@pottuvoi2]

All tests used it in this video. Really dissapointing that modern games do not offer better than ordered grid SSAA.​@@drkevorkian2508

[@dabuski1]

TAA,s softening is especially noticeable in VR.

[@TheLingo56]

I'd have to imagine this is why Valve built Source 2 and their PBR pipeline entirely around MSAA

[@bearwynn]

skyrim VR was the worst for it, reshade clears it up mostly though which is good

[@pacomatic9833]

@@bearwynn But sadly that leaves all the PSVR players dry. So sad.

[@everplay6963]

Yeah it's a fucking blurry mess in vr. MSAA is 10 time better

[@trackingdifbeatsaber8203]

I try to use super sampling in VR games lol

[@Novskyy621]

Jedi Survivor would be another great example of BAD TAA

[@MLWJ1993]

Unreal Engine TAA with default settings 💀 It's insane how much you can get out of it by tweaking the TAA parameters, but the defaults are absolutely horrendous.

[@ryanfitzgerald9833]

That great game is a great example of several bad things.

[@Novskyy621]

@@ryanfitzgerald9833 true

[@HunterTracks]

Honestly, Cyberpunk as well. Despite how much of a graphical step forward the game is, the TAA implementation in it is so prone to ghosting (at least at 60 FPS) that I suspect that it's kept that way to promote the usage of DLSS.

[@fh5kskalf]

* Jedi Survivor would be another great example of BAD

[@markosz22]

I don't see any positive about TAA... it's a crotch to make up for bad performance and laziness.The blurry, smudgy, unstable image ruins everything, no matter how fancy new lighting is. The fix for aliasing should have been higher resolution and now we are rendering below 1080 and expecting upscaling to do some miracle.

[@waltch5711]

What I try to do with these new games is create a higher resolution for my monitor in the nvidia control panel and then in game selecting it and then use TAA but that wont help if the framerate drops too much so then I just go with no aa with that higher resolution

[@emporioalnino4670]

TAA is cheap and looks good. It's that simple.

[@NoCluYT]

@@emporioalnino4670 people begged for optimization so a brand new shiny game could work on their 8yo computer. This is what optimization looks like.

[@dhizaes]

I still think SMAA is the best anti-aliasing technique. It can do correct edge detection for most cases. Even ReShade can do it with injected SMAA. It is a blessing. I wish companies make it more usable rather than trying to improve TAA since it is still makes everything blurry, and whatever they do, it will always have a ghosting rather minimal or not.

[@speedracer2please]

I LOVE this video. I like TAA in the right games, but recently started getting frustrated with so many games being generally blurry or blobby. I really appreciate the MSAA in Forza Horizon 5, and after this video I'm wondering how they pulled it off with modern detail and lighting and minimal performance impact, even on steam deck.

[@crestofhonor2349]

Forza Horizon 5 might use Forward + rendering

[@jeandelafuente1]

I can tolerate the blurriness. But the ghost trail is really distracting in some games :(

[@speedracer2please]

@@jeandelafuente1 yeah that too. I can use it on games where the camera doesn't move quickly, maybe with a controller and on the TV. Definitely not first person at the desk.

[@john_hunter_]

I really appreciated when FH5 implemented TAA. The MSAA doesn't work on all the trees. To my eyes the trees look like a horrible mess with MSAA.

[@speedracer2please]

@@john_hunter_ that makes sense. Every other AA made the power lines distracting to me, so I guess they're all I look at now lol

[@jforce321]

I'm super happy to see this video considering that your original anti-aliasing video was from 5+ years ago.

[@alexschmidt3034]

At 1440p+ SMAA is usually good enough but nowdays DLSS serves as a TAA which not only looks much better than old TAA but also improves performance unlike every other AA method.

[@normalrachael]

man, i can’t get over how much better the supersampling looks at 19:21 . the highlights are so clean and crisp in SSAA, while TAA looks so smoothed over and contrast-less. I love a lot of things about TAA, but this specific timestamp really made me wish playing with SSAA was more feasible.

[@bearwynn]

literally, just give us the option to turn it off. Although some games rely on TAA to do things like make dithered transparency for foliage work. So turning that off would make horrendously flickery dithered foliage appear if devs haven't got suitable fallbacks. unfortunately the video didn't go as in depth on this as I'd like.

[@angrysocialjusticewarrior]

SSAA is indeed very feasible. Just activate DLDSR in your Nvidia control panel and you will be able to use SSAA using Nvidia's tensor for any game that you play. This option produces slightly better results than traditional SSAA at less of a performance cost. Only available on RTX gpu's though.

[@Heruwath007]

That's why I am super excited about dlss/fsr. You don't need to scale the image to native 8X, you can do it using dlss and use that result for SSAA back in 1080p. It's not that perfect, but you would get a better result. Call it DLSSAA (TM) ;)

[@TheStupidGuyWithBlip]

Hah yeah you can see this in RDR2. It relies on its TAA for the foliage to not just look good, but even as an artistic choice as the foilage appears much thicker with TAA on.@@bearwynn

[@219SilverChoc]

You can make SSAA abit cheaper in games that support reconstruction tech by setting the 'internal resolution' at or slightly above native when scaling down from a higher resolution. In alot of UE4 games that support TAAu (It was added to engine version 4.19) I set the internal resolution to 75-80% at 4k on my 1440p monitor and it gives me a nice image quality boost over native 1440p, and that isn't even going into TAA tweaks you can do in Engine . ini

[@happydappyman]

12:23 This example of why DLAA/TAA is "better" is a perfect example of whats wrong with it. Look at the text on the bottom right of the screen, or the text above the staircase. As soon as the scene starts moving it becomes immediately blurry and unreadable with DLAA enabled. I'd rather take the extremely minor shimmer of the vertical line. Of course, SSAA has a massive performance impact. But the problem is the same.

[@xSaintxSmithx]

TAA is one of those things that break immersion for me. Cyberpunk can look damn near photorealistic... until you start moving. Same goes for draw distance and pop in. Everything looks fine till you start moving. Games will always look like games as long as image stability remains tenuous.

[@devvvinparker1203]

Love when these tech focus videos go up. All the hard work and time you put into them

[@peterscott2662]

In old games, I like combining MSAA 4X with DLDSR 2.25X. It looks fantastic, sharp and clean with no AA artifacts.

[@Broformist]

In a lot of old games you can use SGSSAA, which is the best form of AA you can ever get. Pretty much every DX8/DX9 game that supports MSAA can have it. 4xSGSSAA at 1080p looks better than 4K with 4xMSAA and usually runs a lot better too.

[@bearwynn]

in modern games combining DLSS with DLDSR can provide pretty good value super sampling, well worth doing on people with 1080p monitors if their GPU has the power

[@normaalewoon6740]

What I like most is 4x DSR (0% smoothness) + DLSS performance. The larger framebuffer is actually handed over to the next frame. This is more accurate in motion than a 100% buffer, so much that blur is not an issue anymore. Performance and VRAM requirements may be an issue though. DLDSR + DLSS quality is the next best thing You can use other upscalers with 50% input resolution in the same way, with similar improvements. Epic TSR has this functionality built in

[@MajoraZ]

I just want a way to turn Anti-Aliasing off. I prefer the crisp look of having jaggies, and I'd rather not lose frames. Just let me disable TAA!

[@uooooooooh]

I'm at the point where I hate antialiasing everywhere now. It's just blurring the image, it's removing detail. I've always hated it for text rendering, too.

[@-GeordieDan-]

Totally agree, the advantages of AA of all types is compromised too much. I’d rather sharpness, jaggies and all then a blurred, soft mess.

[@hamzakhalil-gs7oc]

Blurriness of a AA is easily bypassed by adding a sharpness and clarity filter, I do it all the times and the image is super crisp even at 1080p, both should already come with nividia freestyle or AMDs equivalent but devs should also add the sharpen option in there games. Blurriness from AA was a big annoying thing for me literally unable to properly play games but no longer for me now thanks to nividia freestyle and lossless scaling

[@PauLtus_B]

@hamzakhalil-gs7oc At that point you're just trying to recreate detail that you removed first.

[@PauLtus_B]

I'd argue that SSAA is without visual downsides, and MSAA could still be working well. They're still trying to smooth things out based on more data. Any after effects AA, like FXAA and TAA is literally just blurring the image at places to reduce aliasing, so really just getting rid of detail.

[@rodrigoferreiramaciel4815]

This video is literally a gem. The amount of detail and attention in explaining these concepts is in a level most teachers would be jealous of.

[@rogerschutt3626]

8K -> 1080p is 16xSSAA. Not 8x. Per axis the factor is 4x. 4x4 OGSSAA is called 16x SSAA

[@ScyrousFX]

Some additional context which probably only adds to the confusion: 1080p is 1920x1080 = 2,073,600 pixels 4K is 3840x2160 = 8,294,400 pixels The question is whether a 4x increase in pixel count is indeed referred to as 4x MSAA, or whether this would be considered 2x MSAA (since each axis is doubled).

[@kosmosyche]

Idk, historically AA has never been counted "per axis", maybe something has changed in recent years. As far back as I can remember it always meant full pixel count multiplier. Means 4K to 1080p = 4xAA. 8k to 1080p = 16xAA. PS Edited embarassing arithmetics. 😁

[@AlanTwoRings]

@@kosmosyche 8K is 16x the pixel count of 1080p.

[@kosmosyche]

@@AlanTwoRings Shit, you are absolutely right, of course. I answered without thinking. 🤣

[@kylixion_6359]

​@@barrydingle3830 chill

[@Oddweevil317]

DLDSR + DLSS has become my favorite AA. I use it in every game that I can and the difference is night and day. Not even DLAA comes close. Developers just need to offer a wide variety of AA options because we all play at different resolutions and frame rates as well as having different preferences.

[@8Paul7]

same, 1620p DLDSR with balanced or quality DLSS means awesome stable image and good performance.

[@brenohenrique9743]

Uhhhhh yes dlaa comes close, in fact it's better, it just does dlss job without rendering everything at lower resolutions, yes it's more expensive but the image quality is OBJECTIVELY better, since higher resolutions = more image quality.

[@psychedeliqueee]

i would love to do that too, but owning a high refresh rate monitor and using DLDSR doesn't seem to work, you get limited to 60hz. at the same time, i'm on a 4070 at 1440p so there isn't really a lot of wiggle room left, but would love a higher resolution + high refresh rate in older games.

[@Kait0s]

Same but Red Dead Redemption 2 has been the bane of my existence. Using DLDSR with DLSS Q cleans up the image, but for some reason DLSS in that game has a huge sharpening issue when moving the camera. It goes from 0-100 sharpness whenever you move the camera, which creates an annoying shimmer effect.

[@ItsCith]

DLDSR is basically supersampling as the image is being rendered above the monitors highest resolution, then scaling it down with the help of ai to fit the pixels more evenly. I use it too and I find it to be the best way to counter them jaggies.

[@zodwraith5745]

It's good to finally see someone explain exactly what's going on with different AA options, and also showing side by side comparisons to see what the differences actually look like. I like TAA but maybe it's because I not only have the hardware for 100fps+ but I never drop below 1440p. I've noticed the ghosting but don't find it as distracting as the flickering/shimmering from no AA as well as not having as heavy of a price. As with any technology the obvious best answer is to leave it up to the _user_ to enable or disable.

[@achillesa5894]

Yeah same I always play 1440p with at least 100 fps if possible so it looks great to me. But we should always have the option.

[@BastianRosenmüller]

@@achillesa5894 really have you tried to turn it off and compare to it on? The Image without taa looks much sharper. when you turn on TAA it looks like you have -40 myopia

[@normalrachael]

i love these kinds of videos so much. they take me back to the days of spending hours in nvidia inspector and reshade trying to find the perfect AA, and scouring old forums learning about AA methods with wacky names like OGSSAA

[@yusufhatake1377]

What graphic card do you use?

[@happybuggy1582]

This is why Overwatch and Left 4 dead is sharper than every game bc doesn’t have TAA.

[@alandiegovillalobos]

Please explain!

[@TDawgBR]

Thank you Alex, and all the DF team, for these type of tech "deepish" dives. Giving us the history of the tech alongside showing notable examples both new and old is just fantastic. I'm a PC player who shoots for his games to run about 70 fps and if possible at my screen's native resolution (3840 x 1600). So I appreciate tech such as DLSS. But I absolutely agree that these types of "cheats" should be able to be turned off so that down the line, "brute force" isn't hampered by these techniques that inherently degrade aspects of image quality.

[@aL3891_]

Great work as always Alex:) i think a forward/deferred rendering would be really great as well, maybe a whole game rendering series with some history thrown in there as well, a DF retro collab perhaps?

[@JackWse]

I absolutely agree.. and it would be nice to see comparison examples, of games from the before before times, at similar resolutions.. cuz it's kind of night and day actually.. now granted sometimes there's that post-processing nonsense that they started adding in, or the beginning of the time of Vaseline! But games like Half-Life 2 before the episodes... Good example right there... By episode 2 I actually thought there was something wrong, turns out they were just being try hearts with the fog and the color correction to make it look blurry for some reason.. fortunately, despite the dilapidation of the developers console that they've done so far over the years.. it's still incredibly robust, and fixable.. unlike almost everything else in this situation...

[@mbsfaridi]

One aspect of it is that the final frame which is shown on the display is made up of several frames called passes in which one pass (or frame) is just for diffuse lighting, one for specular, one for ambient occlusion, all of which are done for direct and indirect light bounce.

[@bricaaron3978]

@@JackWse Can you explain specifically what you are referring to regarding Half-Life 2 and Episode Two?

[@ClarkWasHere1]

If TAA is ubiquitous, and PC player's playing with monitors more than TVs, I'd LOVE for developers to allow PC players access to the parameters so we can tailor it to our tastes. PC is all about the options after all!

[@Wobbothe3rd]

Many games let you do this, lots of indie FPS let you play with the internal TAA settings, like Turbo Overkill for example. What I've found it's that it's REALLY HARD to find a perfect setting for everything in the game, that's why modern AAA games adjust the setting per effect (even per shader!). There are no easy answers, just different sets of tradeoffs.

[@nankinink]

Most people would argue that the devs are lazy

[@BucksterMcgee]

I absolutely love these in-depth videos! Thank you for all the time and hard work it took to put into it.

[@bluedragon219123]

For me, personally, I just don't like all the negatives TAA give and always use FXAA or SMAA/CMAA or I just turn off the AA entirely if they don't give me the option to choose something besides TAA. Resident Evil 4 Remake not giving me FXAA as a standalone option or SMAA at all was disappointing. Still Great Job on the Video! :)

[@ImotekhtheStormlord-tx2it]

there are more side by side comparisons with FPS counter. taa is terrible in all comparisons. it makes game run worse and look like dlss on balanced

[@Giftless]

@@ImotekhtheStormlord-tx2it dlss uses TAA in any quality setting

[@Alcatraz760]

Good point, the disadvantages of TAA are far more noticeable on lower resolution, closer distance monitors that PC gamers use, hence why virtually all TAA hate comes from PC. But sadly, since most devs are console focused, where on a TV far away, TAA will continue to be the used with no consideration for others.

[@pyide]

The biggest revelation with TAA for me came from foliage and tree leaves and other transparencies, how it squashed the shimmering and flickering on that stuff in motion and brought so much stability to the final image. As more games started doing large open worlds with lots of details and flora, that stuff really became a nuisance since standard MSAA methods didn't touch that stuff at all, and FXAA basically didn't do anything but blur the screen a bit. TAA also blurred the scene, but helped so much with the aliasing on transparencies, and all you really needed to counter some blur and bring back finer detail was add some light post-sharpening. I think Fallout 4 was the first game that really sold me on it, but at the time I remember so many people hating the "vaseline smeared" screen blur and softness because there wasn't any built-in sharpening, and most people weren't on to using pp filter injectors like sweetfx or reshade or whatever was common at the time to help out with that stuff. Eventually most TAA methods included some forced or optional sharpening on a slider, but it was a slow process there. I wonder how the TAA in that game holds up in terms of ghosting and afterimages? I really don't remember seeing much of that stuff in Fallout 4 compared to later open world games where it was brutal like pretty much everything using UE4, and also one of the worst offenders I can remember, RDR2.

[@SimonBuchanNz]

You're describing something that was kind of brushed over in this video, which is that sampling from previous frames doesn't just have the effect of reducing the spacial aliasing (due to camera jitter giving it more samples around the same pixel), it *also* has the effect of actually temporal anti-aliasing, as in it uses the *spacial* samples to reduce sampling errors in *time*. To me this is far more important than reducing edge stair-stepping effects, even at 1440p those are pretty hard to see outside of extreme cases like telephone cables against the sky.

[@bearwynn]

I can definitely still notice the TAA in fallout 4, specifically when in motion. Standing still it sharpens up and is nice but the moment the camera starts moving the blur reappears. The steam deck makes this incredibly obvious too

[@RealFlicke]

I had exactly the same experience. Fallout 4 was the first game where I remember using TAA and I used luma sharpen from reshade to fix the blurryness. And right now I'm playing Horizon: Zero Dawn with DLSS and the foliage looks stunningly good. I can easily forgive the occasional ghosting because of the superb image quality. Especially if DLAA is available like in Baldurs Gate 3.

[@valentinvas6454]

Trees made me question things as well. Especially in Spiderman and Days Gone. When I looked at them from greater distances it looked like the game was running at 720p instead of my native 1440p. But back then I didn't know it was all the results of TAA. I guess the solution is DLAA and other similar tech or just simply going to higher resolutions.

[@Gorgutsforcongress]

Oh it's great for still images, but the instant you pan that camera around your character, it's ghost town, baby! 😢

[@bluesharpie9744]

I have much random knowledge about graphics (and have experimented with ReShade antialiasing methods) and this video still surprised me with some insights, and was very well put together. Sending these to my friends. Great video

[@DanielGriffiths]

Wow, the games look so much clearer even with no AA. TAA makes everything look so… blurry. I’d easily choose slight shimmering or slightly broken effects over a massively blurred image any day.

[@RicochetForce]

Daniel, we play video games. They move. TAA is the best AA solution for motion in games to date.

[@StopBlurryGames]

@@RicochetForce TAA is good for SLOW motion and looks like SHIT during everything else.

[@RicochetForce]

@@StopBlurryGames You know what looks like shit? Every other than geometry shimmering worse than a goddamn PS1 game with every slight movement of the camera.

[@StopBlurryGames]

@etForce That's a less than 1080p problem+developers not giving a shit about other kinds of AA(geometric detail, mipmaps etc). Not a lack of TAA problem.

[@Ingel_Riday6690]

I love these kinds of videos. Thank you, Alex. Also, the script for this was great. Just enough detail for an interested layman without getting too deep into the weeds. Keep on rocking over there. Bravo!

[@RegalPixelKing]

The bad thing about TAA in most games is that it kills motion clarity if it is not implemented properly. And even the best implementations of TAA still will harm motion clarity, but it might not be super egregious at least. In other words it could make a 4k title look like a 1440p title whenever the game is in motion. I think that TAA is here to stay, which regardless of what I said is neither good nor bad. TAA implantation slowly but surely seems to have been improving over time. I'm hoping that as hardware improves TAA will be phased out and replaced with something better similar to how MSAA and FXAA are getting more and more rare.

[@randyrrs7028]

4k gaming was a lie, glad im still gaming on my old 1080p tv. 4ktv owners punching the air right now

[@mryellow6918]

@@randyrrs7028 if your still on a 1080p tv, you have no reference for how bad of an experience your having. 4k tv owners are laughing at you right now.

[@randyrrs7028]

@@mryellow6918 half these games 1080p on these next gen systems so sony and microsoft are laughing at you right now. PS5/series X promised 4k 60, even had 8k stamped on boxes.

[@mryellow6918]

@@randyrrs7028 why would i be talking about a game running on a console at sub 4k resolutions when talking about 4k gaming?

[@randyrrs7028]

@mryellow6918 i have a RX 6800 XT and I can barely play at 4K 60 even with FSR, I just realized that I'll always need a high-end GPU for that. I thought 4K gaming would be more mainstream after all these years... 8 years ago I was playing brand new games at 1080p 60 with a low end GPU for $200. Now you can barely play at 1080p with $300. And 4K starts to make sense from $1000 and up. Things only get worse every year.

[@teffhk]

This is why DF is the best video games tech analysis channel

[@majormononoke8958]

For these videos absolutely ... For other kind of videos not so much, but i understand they need to make money,etc.

[@teffhk]

@@majormononoke8958 what other kinds

[@krazyfrog]

@@teffhk the ones he hallucinated

[@teffhk]

@@krazyfrog links? or video titles?

[@ktvx.94]

Funny how we started upsampling the render resolution and now we're upscaling from a lower one.

[@eu-rn1xb]

25:21 bro, you are right that TTA at 4K is good. But look at "NO AA/4K". It's pretty good too. So do we actually need TAA at 4K? I doubt it

[@M_CFV]

in motion its jaggy city with no AA at 4k. You can use DLDSR on a 1440p screen to eliminate that somewhat, as its a fancy SSAA

[@eu-rn1xb]

with AA I will have blurriness. The advantage is not obvious@@M_CFV

[@sleeplessindefatigable6385]

This was really informative, great work. This explains really well why TAA became the de-facto standard for antialiasing, how older methods managed AA, and why some people are more bothered by it than others. I think the best way forward from here would be an option to increase the render resolution of things that would be rendered at lower resolutions to be smoothed out by TAA, like Jesse's hair in Control. That way, you can turn TAA off for more clarity and just increase resolution on things that would normally be undersampled to make a better image, albeit at the cost of more render costs.

[@biquiba]

In Starfield if you remeove TAA via mod you can see much more detail in that lady's face, I forgot her name, the Mars Mining Ops Boss. It's the very 1st thing you see in the game.

[@Koozwad]

girlbosses

[@mauromerconchini]

The first DF video I ever watched was Alex explaining anti-aliasing back in 2018. This feel like we've come full circle, explaining the subject of aliasing and how to counter it more in depth while also flexing the higher production value DF has gained in those last 5 years. Cheers Alex, thanks for another excellent Tech Focus. I look forward to the next one.

[@GuyManley]

I was firmly the TAA ruins game's art camp. I was on a 1080p display that I sat right in front of on my desktop. It's really not that noticeable at 4k. 17:31 is a brilliant example of this. Thanks for helping me internalize why I hated TAA so much and how to work around it limitations. I play many of the same games on the stream deck at 720p. I'll start trying 4X SMAA where available.

[@XZ-III]

On a screen that small, what's wrong with simply no aa? Seems like it'd save resources

[@SNOUTxTOUT]

@@XZ-III some games force you to use TAA and have no option to turn it off

[@TheLingo56]

@@XZ-III You can still see lots of jaggies on a Steam Deck and it's rough with no AA

[@AndyGilleand]

Correction: 8K to 1080p would be 16x SSAA. That's 4x * 4x

[@Gittun]

Fantastic video. Really good and balanced explanation of the up and downsides. I never noticed the blur got less bad with higher resolutions, but that totally explains why I don’t turn immediately turn it off at 1440p like I did on 1080p across the board.

[@darksylinc]

Hi Alex! Excellent video! I wish you had asked me for comments though :) I think there is a brief way to summarize the core of what Temporal is: - I have to run 1000 instructions per pixel to look good - What if instead of running 1000 instructions; I ONLY RUN 250 AND ON THE NEXT FRAME I PICK UP FROM WHERE I LEFT OFF? - So we need to render at least 4 frames to get the final result - Problem is, if objects or camera are moving; the pixel "moved", so we can't pick it up - Solution to that is Motion Vectors, which try to guess where our pixel was last frame - If the guess is correct, we get a beautiful picture - If the guess is wrong, we get a blurry image (because we're picking up someone else's work and mixing it with our own) And that... is temporal. The quality of TAA boils down on how many frames we spread out the work and how good the guessing algorithms are; which boil down to the quality of the Motion Vectors. Motion Vectors are really hard to get right. For example an object moving is easy, but what about that object's shadow? What about materials with scrolling textures? If we forget adding MV to these, then they'll be blurry. And what about pixels that are now offscreen? And that's why it's called "Temporal". Because it spreads work over time. In a way, temporal is a form of cheating. But on the other, as you said, it would be impossible to achieve the quality we have arrived to without it.

[@Wobbothe3rd]

Great post!!!

[@Zyxlian]

Your post just made me realize something. The point of ray tracing is to be more accurate with lighting and reflections, and to reduce the amount of work-arounds or hacks that need to be done for accurate lighting. But then we have TAA, upscaling, and dithering tech doing the exact opposite by creating new hacks to make up for the ray tracing performance loss. We are just swapping some hacks for others. I preferred when I could choose for games to not be blurry.

[@darksylinc]

​ @Zyxlian Yes and no. What you said is true. However raytracing replaces tricks done in rasterization. Those tricks are often really far from how things work in real life, and break apart when used in other contexts (e.g. give more control of the camera to the user and suddenly reflections break spectacularly). But Temporal is just a hack to compensate for the lack of processing power. Which means in the future w/ more processing power you can just remove the temporal aspect and it will run with crisper quality. The same cannot be said of the rasterization tricks. Give it unlimited performance and those tricks will still break spectactulary given the wrong camera angles; as it is a fundamental problem w/ the trick. (personally I also prefer crisp over blurry 9 times out of 10. IMO Detroit Become Human comes to mind that pulled TAA off, but it is a slow-paced game, almost interactive movie-level, so it worked well there)

[@donkeyy8331]

they should pin your comment

[@RenanRF77]

Honestly one of the best videos in the channel. I had a basic knowledge of some concepts, but this video explained so much more, with great examples. Props Alex.

[@alyessamaddox7022]

I think the important thing to remember is that there is no perfect anti-aliasing, or any image treatment methods for games in general. Everything comes at a compromise, and we've been living with those compromises a lot longer than people tend to think.

[@crestofhonor2349]

People want a perfect solution to everything forgetting that games need to be able to run on their systems. They don't realize why older effects were thrown away. In fact many older games people sometimes praise had issues at launch or still do but we've brute forced past them

[@backtoklondike]

​@@crestofhonor2349 Plus a lot of AA implementations will vary from game to game. Like Max Payne 3 is probably the only Rockstar game on PC that ran fine back then and is running even better now. But the 8x MSAA implementation is still super demanding even on modern hardware. Alan Wake 1 came to PC the same year and there the 8x MSAA is running fine today.

[@nankinink]

People have no idea that everything in games is a compromise..

[@Zman6258]

I think saying "people don't understand that everything is a compromise" is a cop-out answer, because I think most people understand the compromise that TAA is making - but they aren't given the option to disable it and play with jaggies but without smearing/blur.

[@RicochetForce]

@@Zman6258 But as Alex mentioned in the video: You aren't ONLY going to get jaggies. You're going to get a dramatically uglier looking final image because developers are building their games and assets around TAA.

[@EpicPianoArrangements]

1:59 - Erm, if 4K to 1080p is 4xSSAA, wouldn't 8K to 1080p be 16xSSAA since there are 16 times as many pixels as the 1080p image... not 8xSSAA as stated in the video?

[@aarondbrown1991]

Oh man, if you think it looks bad on a flat screen, you should see it in VR! I’m constantly flabbergasted by how many native VR titles even have it as an option, although it’s much more pervasive in the ports. It’s like smearing a thin layer of petroleum jelly across your eyeballs.

[@Hybred]

TAA's worse genre is probably fast paced PvP games, due to the fast paced nature not working well with TAA + the competitive environment. So the fact some of these games like Halo infinite, MW3 and The Finals force it is atrocious. If theirs ever a genre you should *NOT* force it in, its that.

[@zdspider6778]

Have you seen the comparisons at 20:29? The more FPS you have, the less of an issue TAA becomes. For competitive games you probably want _all the fps._ Because it's important that you see the guy before the guy sees you. Even by a split millisecond. And preferably at a higher resolution, so you can identify the silhouette of the enemy at a distance better (instead of from 3-4 pixels). Which means you can't effectively use MSAA, which would cut the frame rate in half at higher res, so some kind of post-processing is better. In this case, TAA. FXAA and SMAA (not to be confused with MSAA) look okay as static images (screenshots). But in motion you're right back to jaggies. All AA options have drawbacks. Because of the inevitability of trying to render things that don't fit neatly into a pixel matrix (screen). So just pick the one you think looks better and forget it. Just enjoy the game. Some people get too hung up on these things.

[@Hybred]

@@zdspider6778 FPS only helps with ghosting issues, nothing else. The motion blur aspect which harms visibility is why its hated in competitive games

[@ThreatInteractive]

@@zdspider6778 "But in motion you're right back to jaggies" That's a LIE. Jaggies are eliminated, it's specular aliasing that needs an alternative(which exist).

[@zdspider6778]

@@ThreatInteractive If you'd ever implemented FXAA into a game engine or renderer you'd understand. Understand why there's a need for some kind of TAA (TAA = temporal anti-aliasing - "temporal" as in, in motion, between frames). Because the same pixels, when rendered slightly next to the previous ones, will shift. The edges will suddenly change. And cause jaggies in different places if you focus your view on an edge.

[@xuerian]

Thank you for the video breaking down the benefits, flaws, and context of TAA. I'm one of those in the camps who can't stand it - and now I know it may be worsened by avoiding the pursuit of >60fps, and being closer to my screen. Thank you also for advocating for TAA to be able to be disabled, effect quality raised, and alternatives provided - I think there is also room to examine hybrid AA approaches where effect shaders like hair and shadows have their effects passed through something like TAA, without applying the same effect to the whole image.

[@Viperspider1]

Yes, I agree that a hybrid approach would be ideal, as it's clear from 26:25 that certain elements are being designed with TAA in mind.

[@Friedeggonheadchan]

16:30 This isn't really the reason why TAA looks softer. It is sort of the right ballpark, but not specifically the jittering of the frames that causes it. It's rather just an inherent property of the algorithm that does it, namely the feedback, accumulation over time, which leads to writing to and reading from the same buffer over many frames. Specifically this sampling of the same data over and over is often done with just a bilinear filter, which leads to about -6dB signal loss at nyquist on average per round if no corrective steps are taken. Just a single round of bilinear sampling doesn't cause too many problems, but since the sampling is effectively performed in the order of 10 or more times for each source frame that is fed into the history buffer, the high frequency loss at and near nyquist really starts to add up. Better filters improve the results tremendously, but the tradeoff of course is performance. I've found that simply using a carefully chosen cubic filter (that doesn't have significant or any ringing) retains the high frequency information much better. Even so however, a recursive algorithm that continually resamples the image will inevitably suffer from some loss, and will inherently have worse sharpness characteristics compared to simply resolving only one time (as in in the regular super sampling case for an example).

[@azazelleblack]

I appreciate your honesty presenting both viewpoints. It's admirable to see, and more people should do it. Personally, I'll stick with SSAA as I have used for a very long time, but obviously not everyone has that option.

[@ДмитрийФролов-э3ю]

16:55 More copium about "if you sit at 2 meters distance you won't notice the difference". If you sit at this distance, you'll want to sit closer to see better that's how it is. And with bad blurriness doesn't matter how close you are - you'll want to squint your eyes to no avail.

[@ClaytonMacleod]

Back in the 3dfx days the AA that the Voodoo 5 5500 card did looked amazing. It was a type of supersampling, but the way they did it was a bit different. Say you gamed in 800x600 and chose 4x AA. It did not render in 1600x1200 and downsample to arrive at the final 800x600 resolution. It rendered four different images at 800x600 with slightly jittered origins, and then averaged those four images to get the final image. This is one way of doing rotated grid supersampling. But for whatever reason, this was quite superior to how Nvidia and ATI/AMD do supersampling. To this day no AA methods they use came close to the results 3dfx got with their method. I got my 5500 when they first came out, and stayed with it until the GeForce 3 finally drew me away from it. The very first time I fired up a game I was disgusted with how bad the AA was in comparison the 3dfx card. But by then the performance penalty wasn’t acceptable, hence the move to the GF3. After living for years with the 3dfx’s superior AA it was painful to go without it, and to this day I cringe constantly at all the aliasing artifacts that I have to look at every day when gaming. I had hope when Nvidia bought 3dfx’s IP that they would eventually put their AA method to use in a GeForce card, but unfortunately that never happened. It would be so nice to have actual good AA again, but I doubt the day will ever come.

[@ClaytonMacleod]

If you look at the building shot at 17:27 you can see in the non-AA shots at both resolutions that there are bright lines disappearing and reappearing around the window frames and the horizontal lines on the side of the building near them. These horizontal lines popping in and out of existence seem to be dealt with rather well in the TAA shots, but for whatever reason these types of artifacts are horribly prevalent with MSAA and even SSAA methods, when they should not be. 3dfx’s method did away with those kinds of artifacts wonderfully. But you still see tons of polygon popping with horizontal and vertical stuff with today’s cards and MSAA/SSAA for whatever reason. It sucks. It is so annoying.

[@RiasatSalminSami]

Now with TAA and other temporal solutions like dlss [which seems okayish] and fsr, it's even wore. Every game looks worse in motion because of ghosting and everything looks blurrier than they should be. Yeah the shimmering issues have been fixed, but at what cost?

[@ClaytonMacleod]

@@RiasatSalminSami One can hope that cards eventually get so fast that supersampling becomes easy. I’d pay big bucks for a solution similar to 3dfx’s that used more than one chip and they just do the same job in parallel with jittered origins and combine the results into the final image.

[@Wobbothe3rd]

Youre looking at the aliased past through nostalgia tinted glasses. Ironically, most TAA solutions do exactly what you describe with jittering, but more efficiently. Supersampling isn't really "AA" in this context, because if you have the horsepower to supersample you could be pushing the actual quality of the rending harder. Pixel quality > pixel quantity.

[@ClaytonMacleod]

@@Wobbothe3rd There was no nostalgia involved when I removed the 3dfx card for the first time and installed the GF3. Literally five minutes passed between one and the other and the difference was plain as day. Unfortunately TAA suffers from ghosting, and so is rendered useless in my opinion.

[@gamergod9182]

let's be honest here: 8xMSAA and 4xSSAA are settings no sane person would use. 4xMSAA or 2xSSAA are good enough. everything more than that provides barely any visual benefit.

[@pronstorestiffi]

As someone who has just completed 3 games from 2009 on a 360 with no aa, saying it was awesome to go back to a modern game on PC with AA is an understatement.

[@marcelosoares7148]

What games did you play? Some games on the 360 used MSAA.

[@pronstorestiffi]

​@@marcelosoares7148Wolverine Origins and Terminator Salvation both UE games, terrible performance. Sub 30fps often, tearing and jaggies and shimmering galore. The other game was Wolfenstein from 2009. Ran better but not perfect. Quite a lot of jaggies in that one too. But that title may use MSAA.

[@wertywerrtyson5529]

360 games look fine if displayed at 4k60 like Forza Horizon. Unfortunately very few games got a 4k60 patch. Still playing 360 games with the official VGA cable and a CRT monitor the games can look surprisingly decent even at a low resolution. A lot sharper than on a modern display.

[@ka7al958]

360 and PS3 games look better in term of clarity than some modern games, at least for the 720p titles that had MSAA, they're a bit blurry, but things aren't just a mesh of pixels like in FSR 1 titles, same with old cube maps or planar reflections, i was playing the Force Unleashed and the whole level has soft mirror reflections on the ground with no SSR garbage occlusion and looks way cleaner.

[@crestofhonor2349]

@@ka7al958 Not really. There is a ton of clarity lost in those low resolutions. Using stuff like DLDSR and turning off TAA will make modern games look just as clean if not cleaner

[@swylll]

This is the most perfect video about anti-aliasing history I've ever seen. For many years I want to tell people around me about the different results of TAA when using different input and output devices. I use controller to play games on TV but many people use mouse and keyboard to play games on hd monitors so they may never have a chance to experience the good implementation of TAA. That's why I can never explain the benefit from TAA when I talk to them.

[@mathdantastav2496]

dam, this was a very good unbiased video, I expected it to be biased towards TAA beeing good knowing Alex's opinion on TAA, but its actually not, good job

[@DarshanBhambhani]

FXAA- the jaggy one SMAA - the less so jaggy one MSAA SSAA- the laggy one TAA - the blurry one

[@N0N0111]

Casually left out SHARPENING... Bright Memory: Infinite has set the TAA standard, this video didn't mention it... Your deep dive video fixing shimmering in The Witcher III is a forgotten relic now? AKA Sharpening over TAA?

[@mightematt6266]

The discussion around TAA makes me feel like I'm constantly being gaslit. I appreciate the lack of jaggies, but every image that was shown with TAA looks as though the entire image was rendered at the next resolution down. 4k renders look like 1080p, 1080 looks like 720. To me, this is simply not worth the tradeoff. The amount of money and hardware that goes into rendering 4k just to get the same clarity output that we had 15 years ago feels like the biggest scam in the industry. You mentioned the leaps in console generations, and I couldn't disagree more. I honestly don't feel like console games in totality look any better than they did on 360 and PS3. The latest Forza Motorsport being a good example. I don't even think it meets the visual quality of the previous games, let alone beats them. It just looks like they cranked the effects to their most unoptimized ultra settings, and compensated by dropping the resolution to 720p. Cyberpunk has all the pretties enabled, but has about as much detail as rendering it on a flip phone. This is also why I don't really stan DLSS. People say that it's better than native, but that's simply not true. Native without TAA always has noticeably more detail than even quality DLSS. The only reason it gets so much praise is largely because TAA is so bad. DLSS absolutely does help to alleviate some of the the detail loss and mostly keeps the anti-aliasing intact, but still can't compete with the inherently jagged output of pixel-perfect native. Regardless, I agree with your conclusion that we need options, and appreciate you taking the time to make the video!

[@Wobbothe3rd]

You have no idea what you're talking about. Most games with DLSS already have TAA that you can't turn off. These comments really read like people just addicted to whining... it really sounds like you're repeating things you read on Reddit.

[@mightematt6266]

@@Wobbothe3rd Yes. That's precisely why I said "The only reason it [DLSS] gets so much praise is largely because TAA is so bad." The claim that DLSS is better than "native" is because native in almost all cases runs forced TAA. Native without TAA still retains more absolute detail, and DLSS only receives such high praise because its desperately working to claw back the detail crushed by TAA. Now, DLSS still retains most of the anti-aliasing work, and that definitely counts for something. However the end result is still lower absolute detail when compared to straight native without TAA, while both techniques still introduce temporal instability in the form of artifacting, as mentioned in the video. TAA solves edge shimmer while introducing other forms of instability, and the tradeoff is a significant downgrade in clarity. Many options are still the best solution, but I personally don't view the tradeoff as being even close to worth it.

[@epiccontrolzx2291]

@@mightematt6266 If you have GPU headroom, try DLDSR 2.25x + DLSS Quality, it solved this issue for me so no more tradeoffs. Using DSR 4.00x + DLSS Quality is the *peak* in my opinion but it's much more expensive to run

[@randyrrs7028]

4k gaming was a lie, glad im still gaming on my old 1080p tv. 4ktv owners punching the air right now

[@randyrrs7028]

The ps6 should be able to run every UE5 game at 4k60fps but when the next gen UE6 comes out it will most likely struggle to run those games at 4k and the same cycle is gonna repeat and we'll need a ps6 pro

[@HighBoss]

Excellent video, thank you. Would be interesting to get additional discussion about TAA + Sharpening.

[@DerDoctorKix]

I wonder why the TAA in Hunt: Showdown looks so bad. If you don't move it basically does nothing. It really seems like they forgot the whole frame jiggling part.

[@InnuendoXP]

My biggest peeve with deferred rendering is it was apparently the reason why parallax occlusion mapping stopped featuring in many games & we were back to flat cardboard ground & walls until tessellation came along.

[@AGTS10k]

Wait, really, that's why? I had no idea! But why is POM not compatible with deferred? I love POM textures where they are implemented. I remember first encounteringthem in TimeShift from 2007, and I was floored by how my shots leave holes in walls and stuff, even despite the effect breaking down at oblique angles or at the edged (because these are not the real geometry). Also, the amount of details in POM textures was just astounding, like those 3D-appearing bricks on walls... It's sad that we don't see POM as much nowadays.

[@JohnDoe-ip3oq]

Yeah I always wondered why graphics went downhill after dx9.

[@Wobbothe3rd]

Tessellation goes wayyyyy back, long before either deferred rendering or parallax mapping.

[@dyelon13]

That’s interesting, The Finals which just came out makes heavy use of POM. Which was surprising because I see it used so rarely

[@InnuendoXP]

@@Wobbothe3rd yeah of course, but used to replace what parallax mapping's function was in real-time game rendering, took a little while before GPUs came along that could offer that.

[@MDSlayerTK]

MSAA was weird back in the day. When you start seeing aliasing then you notice it everywhere and it was funny that MSAA took out a chunk of performance and yet fences and wiring was still so jaggy. Running old games like half life 2 and resident evil 5 with 8xAA and you still see quite a lot of aliasing in transparencies etc. First time i experienced temporal AA and all those fences and wires in games were so clean. It was quite shocking how clean and almost life like the image quality becomes. But yeah it can be blurry or traily. Maybe we can have the ultimate AA method some day that looks crisp and jaggy free everywhere.

[@Koozwad]

use SGSSAA or similar to fix transparency aliasing

[@MDSlayerTK]

@Koozwad too many compatibility issues with that.

[@Koozwad]

@@MDSlayerTK Yeah, but when it works...

[@TubularAnde]

It's frustrating that as you describe visual fidelity in modern games to have moved from being driven by geometric detail to texture and shading detail, that we have moved towards anti-aliasing techniques that sacrifice a lot of this new detail in the name of image stability. The impact of resolution on TAA's quality is a massively important point, and my anecdotal experience aligns quite closely with your findings. I had always preferred MSAA/SSAA where possible, and was frustrated by their absence or infeasibility in modern deferred-rendered games, but my 'breaking point' for frustration with TAA was trying to play Battlefield V on a 1080p monitor. Aliasing was definitely reduced by TAA, and image stability in specular highlights and foliage was greatly improved, but at the cost of making the overall resolve so blurry as to be essentially unplayable; enemies at distances greater than 50m or so would simply melt into the environment, and the per-frame (if that's the right word?) resolution of undersampled and accumulated lighting and volumetric effects made attempts to disable TAA via .ini tweaks result in a crunchy checkerboarded mess. The only thing that made the experience tolerable was an upgrade to a 1440p monitor and a 7900XT which raised both the frame rate and resolution to the point that detail that would previously have been discarded or homogenised was once again intelligible. Maybe the way to approach performance and image quality analysis in newer games might be some new metric of combined spatiotemporal resolution (or something, I'm not Geordi La Forge). Apologies for the blog post and thanks for the video. Meticulous work as always Alex and DF team! I'm excited to see what bespoke®️ content™️ is coming our way next!

[@nitaiginzburg8689]

Killer video. Explaining issues people debate on reddit endlessly, pin pointing the differences in their point of view and preferences... Very well done!

[@DanKeatis]

I've been a PC gamer for a while now but there's SO much I don't understand. DF is a fantastic resource for demystifying things like this and making graphics options screens less bamboozling.

[@prycenewberg3976]

"Tech Focus: TAA - Blessing Or Curse?" Curse. It blurs the entire F*ing screen and acts like a bad motion blur. It's also an excuse to not include good AA that can reduce shimmering without smearing Vaseline all over the screen. It's a curse.

[@mjn5016]

Devs forcing TAA is one of the worst modern trends. I hate paying alot of Money for a good screen only for them to blur the game again.

[@MicahtheDrumCorpsPseudoboomer]

Developers are forcing TAA? The horror! Disclaimer: I haven't invested in any modern gaming hardware or watched any of Digital Foundry's modern videos, aside from this video, Anti-Aliasing, and Ray Tracing. Therefore, I know few of the horrors that gamers on modern hardware must countenance.

[@joshywoshy18]

Implying that the criticism is petty doesn’t invalidate it. A bad practice is a bad practice regardless of how it relates to other issues. You clearly don’t play games if you don’t care whether a game has TAA or not, so I don’t really know why you’re even here.

[@SyntaxDaemon]

Man, finally a clear voice on TAA, objective and fair. I've been saying these things for years in conversations with limited success. I look forward to sharing this video with people going forward.

[@jsVfPe3]

YES! Thank you, I was hoping you'd do this video.

[@electricblue8196]

What I don't get is why SMAA isn't seen that much anywhere, compared to blurry FXAA

[@djayjp]

I miss these graphics explainer videos!

[@RowanSteyn3D]

i find that TAA makes red dead 2 unbelievably blurry on PC, thank god they added dlss support, game looks amazing with the right HDR settings at 4k

[@oldschoolmk7056]

Am I the only one who thinks that the TAA looks WAY BETTER than the DLSS implementation in that game? Just compare the railroad with TAA and DLSS. The DLSS image is shimering so much it looks like it came from Siberia. Plus, with TAA you can increase the resolution scale which makes the image SUPER CRYSTAL CLEAR. I play at 1440p btw.

[@RowanSteyn3D]

@@oldschoolmk7056 yea red dead 2 is a bit finnicky with TAA and resolutions it varies a lot, if you look up red dead 2 best anti aliasing settings by lordbugbug you can see how weird it is, i agree with you though the first time i tried dlss in the game it looked worse, had to change some other settings

[@mryellow6918]

@@oldschoolmk7056 dlss isnt native like default taa is tho.

[@oldschoolmk7056]

@@mryellow6918 yes, but @RowanSteyn3D said that DLSS makes the game look amazing, when in fact looks much worse than with TAA.

[@LeeLee-fi7mx]

Would love to see a comparison between FSR 2 and TAA at lower resolutions. In almost every game I play at 1080p on my handheld console, TAA looks way better than any quality level of FSR.

[@crestofhonor2349]

FSR is upscaling from a lower resolution. I think a better comparison would be TAAU vs FSR

[@mryellow6918]

if you actually match the resolutions, i can tell you for a fact it does not.

[@LeeLee-fi7mx]

Try Forza 5 at 1080p. Fsr 2, even at quality, has so much shimmering at aliasing while taa looks better. Same thing for dead space remake.

[@mryellow6918]

@@LeeLee-fi7mx fsr at quality at 1080p isnt 1080p dude. its 831p

[@crestofhonor2349]

@@LeeLee-fi7mx That's because FSR 2 is upscaling from 720p while TAA is 1080p

[@emredesu]

Great video! As a desktop user and on my Steam Deck, I always go for FXAA or MSAA because I can't bear how playing with TAA makes me feel like my myopia is acting up again.

[@AryK6227]

The blurring in movement with TAA is attributed to a method for addressing some problems it has called "neighborhood clamping", and is especially noticeable on TAA implementations that use a history buffer for accumulating samples over time.

[@registeredblindgamer4350]

I like good SMAA+good MSAA. It gives such a clean resolve. Better than FXAA+MSAA.

[@vangoth0104]

great SMAA settings makes the image have a incredible looking

[@H3LLGHA5T]

FXAA was trash from the beginning

[@Šarūnas8-8]

Just managed to disable TAA in devil may cry 5 and the game looks 20x times better.

[@isned2000]

This is a really awesome video, these tech focus videos are great overviews of complex graphics topics. I really do agree that there needs to be better alternatives for people that get motion sick or otherwise object to TAA, or at least mitigate of its worst artifacts. That is a big challenge though, modern rendering requiring TAA to not look noisy is even worse problem than really discussed in the video, depending on the techniques used the image might not even be legible without TAA. According to the devs of Dreams in a 2015 SIGGRAPH talk a frame of that game before TAA is basically white noise.

[@trys13]

Thank you ! I understand so many things about the quality displayed I get from games now !

[@stalkholm5227]

I'm coming to terms with jaggies as I get older, and consistent jaggies are less distracting than inconsistent AA solutions. Motion blur doesn't add a lot of value for me, pixel blur doesn't add much value, either. TAA too often feels like a loss of fidelity to me.