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

[@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

[@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?

[@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.

[@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.

[@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.

[@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.

[@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.

[@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.

[@stephe.n]

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

[@MikeJ.73]

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

[@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

[@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.

[@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

[@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?

[@jforce321]

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

[@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

[@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

[@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

[@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

[@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.

[@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?

[@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!

[@icantcomeupwithnames469]

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.

[@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

[@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

[@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

[@altairgame]

25:20 Many "4K" games on consoles are barely hitting 1440p and on taxing scenarios going down to 1080p. No AA solution can save you from that

[@altairgame]

Millions of dolars and thousands of man-hours are spend to make high quality assets, then to be downscale and become a blur mess

[@iurigrang]

The higher pixel grid can still help with clarity, at least when compared to something like a native 1080p game with TAA. Sure it ain't the same as native 4k, but I think the point still stands.

[@Wobbothe3rd]

Actually TAA does in fact optimize the renderer. In other words, an engine that is struggling to hit 1440p would be often EVEN WORSE without TAA.

[@H3LLGHA5T]

Ai upscalers can to certain degree

[@randyrrs7028]

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

[@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?

[@DrakeTech-kh8hs]

High res is the best AA. TAA/FSR/DLSS/DLAA = Blur. You're paying attention to defects that we don't notice in motion.

[@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.

[@Nago15]

As a member of reddit's "FuckTAA" community, I loved the video! I personally didn't know about how TAA is supposed to boost performance, I always taught it is bad for performance because it makes 1080p look like 720p and 1440p look like 1080p, so I actually need to render the game on much higher resolution compared to MSAA to get the same sharpness, wasting a lot of performance, it was a real problem on my old RX 470:) And even on my 3080 Ti it can be a real pain in some VR titles. But games like Assetto Corsa Competizione almost solves the TAA problem with offering low/high/medium TAA, so you can choose between more blurry or less blurry TAA, depending on your resolution and taste. I really agree with the future proofing idea, I think most games don't need any AA at all at native 4K resolution (I'm playing on a 48" TV from 1.5m). Except the problematic ones that "forget" to disable the sharpening that is there to make TAA less blurry, even if you turn off TAA, making even a 4K image very jaggy and flickery. Sadly too many games has this issue, you also mentioned it in one of the Resident Evil 2 remake videos.

[@randyrrs7028]

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

[@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.

[@ktvx.94]

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

[@bradleydias425]

I think TAA has made blurry graphics normal. But it goes further than that. Most modern games look pretty blurry regardless.

[@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! 😢

[@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

[@devvvinparker1203]

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

[@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.

[@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.

[@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

[@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.

[@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.

[@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.

[@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

[@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?

[@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

[@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.

[@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.

[@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.

[@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

[@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

[@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

[@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.

[@90lancaster]

2014 : "But can it run Crysis !" 2024 : "But can it run Crysis !" 2034 : "But can it run Crysis !"

[@MicahtheDrumCorpsPseudoboomer]

The answer is no. Nothing was able to run Crysis, nothing can run Crysis, and nothing will be able to run Crysis for centuries.

[@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.

[@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.

[@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.

[@Cute_Maxi]

Just let me turn it OFF please

[@TheGreatOne93]

Lmao 😂 I understand and agree lol

[@h4x0y]

I miss SSAA and MSAA. I wish we could toggle off deferred rendering to get that flawless AA look on modern games, but I understand that's not a simple thing to do.

[@ChaosBahamut]

Grim Dawn lets you do so.

[@jcm2606]

@@ChaosBahamut Grim Dawn is also a relatively simple game graphically. A modern game with complex lighting would be much, much harder and would basically require the game devs to maintain two entirely different code paths since so much would need to change or be removed to support fully forward rendering.

[@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.

[@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!

[@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.

[@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.

[@ThumbdownMan]

I prefer no anti-aliasing at all. I don't mind the jaggies and actually like the sharper look.

[@Kaptime]

Problem is some visual effects are now broken without TAA as they are also dependent on temporal accumulation.

[@djayjp]

I miss these graphics explainer videos!

[@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...

[@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.

[@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.

[@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.

[@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

[@DarshanBhambhani]

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

[@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!

[@BucksterMcgee]

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

[@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

[@arthurarthur6083]

12:50 DLAA is so blurry...

[@silverwerewolf975]

yup

[@znoozaros]

Sad truth is ppl play on such slow monitors they don't notice any difference because their monitor can't produce a sharp image in motion

[@whatistruth_1]

Post processing sharpening filters work like magic here. LS1 sharpening or FxCAS. Why are you ignoring the shimmering which is far more obvious and distracting

[@znoozaros]

sharpening doesn't restore missing detail. it only makes things appear more detailed@@whatistruth_1

[@epiccontrolzx2291]

Try out DLDSR 2.25x + DLSS Quality or DSR 4.00x + DLSS Quality(no blur, no aliasing, **perfect** image quality)

[@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.

[@HighBoss]

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

[@BenderBendingRodriguezOFFICIAL]

A curse, It removes jaggies at the cost of image stability and clarity. People complain about bloom looking like vasoline but TAA also does that. Temporal technology isn't bad though, just TAA. DLSS uses temporal technology and it effectively replaces TAA. It's what TAA should have always been tbh.

[@kazaakas]

It kills me TAA became a standard. I'd rather see jaggies, but maybe that's because I started gaming in the nineties. Besides, with DLSS there is no need. Most games turn it off when DLSS is on luckily. Although I don't think Jedi Survivor does as it looks blurry regardless.

[@emilioestevezz]

DLSS is TAA. It's just the best implementation out right now. DLSS still has ghosting and blur issues.

[@harryarmstrong5728]

@@emilioestevezz I find that with DLSStweak mod there is always a setting that gets rid of the ghosting on games I play. Avatar would be one example, and Alex mentions the mod in his video.

[@faultier1158]

Games back then barely had any details. Jedi Academy (from 2002) looks perfectly fine on 4k without any AA, but try that in a modern game with lots of fine detail and specularity - especially foilage. The entire image is just jaggies in that case.

[@huhwhatjason]

Great video even for people who have been playing PC games since the inception SSAA. The implication of TAA working better when base frame rates are higher makes intuitive sense since TAA relies on accumulated frames, and this factoid made me go "D'oh!" for not realizing it sooner.

[@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.

[@JK-dv3qe]

I enabled TAA in DCS and I immediately called an ambulance because I thought I was having a brain stroke, ghosting frames and blurry overall. The ambulance personnel kindly informed me that I had just enabled TAA anti-alias on my simulator. They were cool with it though, they get a lot of calls like that

[@MGrey-qb5xz]

lol

[@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.

[@ctrlectrld]

I hate shimmering and flickering with a passion, so when TAA was introduced I could definitely appreciate its positives; those definitely outweighed the negatives for me, even because thanks to shader injection I could mitigate the negatives with combinations of sharpeners et cetera. Before we got TAA as we know it today, I was always very excited to use stuff like TXAA or SMAA T2X when they showed up in the options, unfortunately it was a very rare occurrence, and I never understood why. I guess that's the same reason why they didn't show up in this video as well haha. I'd be really curious to see how those stack up vs today's TAA. Talking about the negatives, something I don't get is why post process sharpening methodologies haven't improved that much to go together and try to mitigate TAA's shortcomings. Sure, that would still not bring back details that get de facto erased at times, but it would surely help in the bigger picture. I am sure DLSS already does something internally in that regard, but then the sharpener that gets put on top, usually controllable by the user in the options, is absolute dogshit. An head scratcher. Nowadays I am a big fan of DLDSR and every GPU I'll buy in the future will take DLDSR into account. Once you try it you can't just go back. In any case, this was a great video and I am happy to see Alex bringing back this type of content. More of this pls!

[@elsienova4269]

I would really like a long video by DF just explaining all the standard types of "rendering" changes customers can change in games and what they generally affect.

[@SamuelHauptmannvanDam]

I feel like there's a general argument for higher res monitors. I'm still on 1080p but it seems like having higher res, helps a lot for these technologies.

[@richardtucker5938]

It's a shame things dictate that you can't do videos like this more often, because this is peak Digital foundry. To those who want to go back to msaa etc days, i think your best hope is to throw in with the TAA concept getting as close to perfect form as possible, with deep learning.

[@Wobbothe3rd]

Ie DLSS. Best of both worlds.

[@XZ-III]

Honestly go with ai upscaling even Xess has won me over for cards that don't have dlss available

[@astreakaito5625]

It's fascinating that resolution AND framerate improves TAA. Great video! You killed it

[@MLWJ1993]

Pretty logical, given the places it gets its samples from for the anti aliasing.

[@Wobbothe3rd]

There's a very interesting lecture on Nvidia's channel about how very interesting things happen with TAA at 240fps. The image gets much sharper at very high framerates.

[@gozutheDJ]

excellent analysis! this just goes to show why 4k resolution is such a goal!

[@George-um2vc]

4K and high refresh rate is key, also adding DLSS in there. I have a 1440p monitor but a beefy PC so I use DLDSR at 4K res and combine it with DLSS, the resulting imagine of 2 passes of AI cleaning it up looks great and in many aspects better than native 4K or even 4K with only DLSS on (no DLDSR)

[@gozutheDJ]

@@George-um2vc im at 1440p as well and DLDSR is AWESOME for older games!

[@SimonBuchanNz]

Don't forget about temporal aliasing; even at 4k the "shimmer" effect of lacking some form of TAA is incredibly distracting for me.

[@sesad5035]

Bruh, I'm at 1366x768p.

[@temanor]

Finally a good deep dive into Anti-Aliasing. I have heard them be explained before, but never really understood them well.

[@epiccontrolzx2291]

SSAA is technically not "dead". Many modern offer a "Render Resolution" option that goes up to "200%" or "2.0". Pushing your Render Resolution past 100% is just "SSAA". You can also do this by just manually switching your game resolution to one that's higher than your default resolution. In my opinion, combining this "SSAA" and DLSS Quality still provides the best AA possible today bar none. The second best option is DLDSR + DLSS Quality

[@pottuvoi2]

A good quality SSAA is dead. All these render resolution methods have ordered grid sample positions, which is bad.

[@AbysmalEnd]

With AMD I use the super sampling feature in the Adrenaline software and then use FSR. It makes the image so much better while still keeping FPS great.

[@ABaumstumpf]

"With AMD I use the super sampling feature in the Adrenaline software and then use FSR." So you are using 2 techniques that are fighting each other and give worse results ... why exactly?

[@AbysmalEnd]

@ABaumstumpf try it out before you assume the worst. The image quality is a lot better. Super sample at the driver level and FSR in the game.

[@bubberlad]

@@ABaumstumpf you won't get worse results at all. it'll be ssaa+taa basically.

[@ABaumstumpf]

Na it is strickly worse: You are using 1 setting to increase the render-resolution and then downsample it (throwing away a lot of information), and then using another to upscale it again. There is no benefit to doing so. It literally is just making performance and quality worse. You might want to just try using normal settings instead of failing in an attempt to be "clever"..

[@Wobbothe3rd]

Again, if you can afford to supersample then obviously you have excess resources. For the purposes of this discussion supersampling methods shouldn't even count as "AA", like duh, OBVIOUSLY you can just render at a higher resolution, that's not even worth discussing.

[@adamschnulle687]

Great video! I wish you wouldve talked about nvidias DL DSR a little bit though. I wouldve loved to hear your thoughts on that.

[@Broformist]

They already have a video about that.

[@adamschnulle687]

@Broformist I actually saw that after I commented. I wonder if anything changed. I'm at a weird 32x9 resolution and dldsr doesn't work for anything other than 16x9 last time I checked I think?

[@Broformist]

I don't know about that but one thing I disagree about in DLDSR video is the recommendation to use it with 50% Smoothness. It should always be 100% Smoothness when using DLDSR, unless you like artificially sharpened image. Even at 100 it's still a little sharpened compared to regular 4x DSR at 0%. @@adamschnulle687

[@epiccontrolzx2291]

@@adamschnulle687 That's strange, I've heard people mention this but they're usually from much older posts(at least 2+ years ago). I'm here with DLDSR at 21:9 working flawlessly. It's worth noting that DLDSR *does not* scale based on your "native" resolution, it's scaling off the *highest* (vertical) resolution your monitor is reporting. You may have to use the custom resolution utility to remove whatever resolution your driver sees as the highest. For 1440p 32:9 , I' m guessing there's a 2160p 16:9 causing incorrect DLDSR resolution options

[@adamschnulle687]

@epiccontrolzx2291 thanks big dawg. I'll have to try it now, it's been awhile. I'm at 5120x1440.

[@robbieshand6139]

TAA is horrible. I had often wondered why modern games look blurry compared to the crisp, sharply detailed images of older games, and now I know. The smoothing from TAA also destroys image details like specular highlights. It's just shit.

[@matthewparsons7294]

Perhaps it was about 10 minutes longer than it needed to be, but very valuable. Biggest takeaway is how the negative impacts are felt the most the more low-end you go. (Resolution and FPS). I first really noticed the TAA "smear" on titles on lower end hardware with dynamic resolution - games like Shadow of Mordor or Titanfall 2 would drop resolution aggressively to keep 60 fps and it was a mess. Now I know why.

[@kaylee42900]

it'd be cool to see some comparison to DL-DSR. It lets you use more realistic DSR factors (like 1.78 and 2.25) but then apply AI tensor tech on top. I've been able to use it even in some modern game and it looks quite good.

[@ChaosBahamut]

A DLDSR vid was already done.

[@Veptis]

Have you improve the lightning, lens or camera of your webcam? feels different and definitely better.

[@Djunkin]

When TAA became more popular, it felt like 4K became what 1080p used to look like with sharper aliasing, to where even 4K with TAA just feels too blurry to me now. I hope a shift happens to where sharping aliasing is looked to be developed in the future, because it feels like we've been sitting at TAA aliasing for a while now. It goes even deeper though than aliasing solutions, renderers as a whole since a lot of games and engines switched to a deferred renderer focus, just typically look (to me) more muddy, though that's not to say some forward renderer game examples haven't also got more 'blurry' in this way too IMO.

[@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.