New TAA in HDRP 9.0.0 is actually pretty good

I've just tried the new TAA in HDRP 9.0.0 and have to say it is way better than before, so good job Unity.
for the curious peeps, this is what the inspector looks like:


I do have some questions
1) What are we doing to pixels that are rejected? I am assuming we are applying FXAA, but would love to know
2) Is this the end of TAA revamp or is it still going to get new features added other than general polishing?

 

Could you backport this TXAA, light preformance pass and new realistic water shader to HDRP 7.4+?

 

I've cherry-picked the commits for 7.3.1 here: https://github.com/0lento/Graphics/tree/taa-update-7.3.1
7.4.1 here: https://github.com/0lento/Graphics/tree/taa-update-7.4.1

 

I think features that give control to users will help tremendously and the option to either blur FXAA or even SMAA is a huge plus. I hope you are not making feature decisions based on performance or short-sighted notion of "I don't think anyone needs this". If it is there we will find a good use for it. Also, the fact that Unity is losing the "quality" game in general, I think this is a must.

I think it should be backported as soon as possible as this TAA is far superior in every possible way. I am planning to use 2020.1b11, HDRP9.0.0 for the staging branch build of my already released game on Steam. The new TAA features just outweigh the possible trouble using beta builds for production, so please, backport it ASAP. Very few good things happened to Unity lately and this is one of the few. Also, Unity should be throwing money and resources into AA solutions all the time, to stay ahead, and to be relevant in the industry. I hope the higher-ups are not thinking "well it is enough for now". It should be a constant R&D, implementing improvements and features.

As for more features & suggestions

1) Sliders are clamped too tightly. Allow us to change values to extremes.

2) TAA is very sensitive to frame rate, so it might be a good thing to have low frame rate fallback or some strategy

3) Implement SSAA so that it can be turned on in parallel with FXAA, SMAA, and TAA. I know that the general consensus is that it is not useful due to its performance, but there are some parts of the game that can benefit from brief super sampling (eg cutscenes). SSAA available through asset store does not play well with HDRP and most importantly custom passes in HDRP. Don't worry about performance. We will find the best use case. Yours is to provide that option.

4) If you can, it would be nice to have a debug view, so that we can see what gets rejected, view of ghosting, and so on.

In general, excellent work, and to be frank, this should be posted as a blog. This needs to be announced at a bigger scale, and your work needs more funding and support in the future.

 

I've played with speed rejection with TAA before this official TAA rework was done. I've used fallback to FXAA and also done blur filter manually and I'd always go with more blur instead as it gives better control over the visuals (as long as you can control the blur amount). Issue with rejected pixels is that they are way more "sharp" as the part with TAA applied is blurred due to TAA algo itself, no amount of sharpen filter will get it all back.

I'd love to have configurable blur for the rejected pixels myself out of the box.

 

francescoc_unity, I've noticed that with terrain in HDRP, speed rejection values higher than 0.4 makes terrain to flicker. I think you should look into it.

 

I assume there is no hope for studios stucked with Unity 2019.4 to get these improvements?
Feature are not backported, right, but for anti-aliasing, which is an important deal breaker for game graphics, it should be backported, because the delivered quality of TAA in older HDRP is not industry standard and does not satisfy any customers and buyers.

 

Proper studios can backport features like this on their own without issues, you most likely end up running a customized SRP packages any way if you have a real production case. I already have a quick backport linked earlier here which practically didn't take much time at all to make.

 

And what about 19.4?

 

Pushed 7.4.1 branch with this here: https://github.com/0lento/Graphics/tree/taa-update-7.4.1

 

HDRP 9.0.0 is only going to be for unity 2021 right?

 

How I've understood it:
8.x = 2020.1
10.x = 2020.2.

9.x previews are a bit different story and I haven't tested if current WIP branch for 9.x.x/release even works on 2020.1 anymore, first public 9.0-preview did but it's not guaranteed that will remain that way (it definitely will not be for 2021 though, just for 2020.1 or/and 2020.2).

 

May I ask why TAA improvements are shipped so late? HDRP got called production ready way before TAA became usable speaking of quality and blurriness. Because TAA is so bad, even your own artists avoid it and therefore favouring forward rendering with MSAA like in your own series about achieving high quality visuals: Read "
Temporal anti-aliasing (TAA)" in
https://blogs.unity3d.com/2020/01/0...-render-pipeline-for-high-end-visualizations/
Btw. another bonus: Your own artists even admit that your development on hard realtime raytracing is so slow that they could not use it in the demo. "Important mention: for this demo, HDRP’s Ray-Tracing capabilities were not utilized because they were still in early preview at the time."

 

before i go down the rabbit hole and find a snake.....i enabled TAA in 2019.3 because i actually wanted the blur on some fast moving objects in a static scene (which is to say the camera isnt moving) and as long as i hit 60fps it was working well for that, the problem was that every other moving object was blurred and looked bad. so what i'd want to know is does this new TAA work more, or maybe less, how i'd want? or is there some other trick to blurring certain moving objects?

 

Realistic water shader? which one is that ?

 

It wasn't released yet with SRP.

 

Can we get some TAA love for URP?

 

Could this be backported to HDRP 8?

 

Presumably this branch https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/Graphics/tree/HDRP/water-version1

The PR was made before the SRP repo changed so it no longer exists, but you can see a screenshot of the PR from that time here https://imgur.com/a/w9L59Mx

 

ah that one

 

Is it possible to merge this with 7.4.1?

 

Since the LTS just came out, and antialias is pretty important for image quality, adding it to 19.4/7.x.x would be nice, since we don't want to skip the LTS just to get a few extra features.

 

You could do it manually yourself but it's kind of a niche release. Unity drops 2020.1 support next fall/winter anyway (TECH streams have super short support period) and then we are looking to use HDRP 10 anyway (which already has this change) with 2020.2.

As for official releases, Unity has been really clear on this: they won't backport it.

 

Could someone point me how to test hdrp 9.x or later? Did you test it from package manager or directly from github?

 

There's HDRP 9.0.0-preview.33 now in Package Manager that has this. You need 2020.1 and enable Preview Packages from Project Settings->Package Manager for the preview package to show up.

 

Oh thank you! That new option in project settings is what helps me.

 

What's the different between 2020.1b and 2020.2a for HDRP? or none?

 

I do not know id HDRP 10.x is working with Unity 2020.1 but I know that HDRP 10.x has early version of decal layers and clouds.

 

Does anyone tried this TAA on PS4? I see artifacts like motion vectors is not rendering. It works good in editor and in windows build. I use deferred only and TAA, Unity 2020.1.6f1 and HDRP v9.0.preview-54.

 

Great! Thank you for answer!

 

Really good quality on the new TAA. Looks stunning compared to the old version ! Also, the overall performance is improved and the volumetric adjustments are superb!

Really good update.

 

Don't see this TAA settings in 10.0.0p27, but see changes in shaders. Again, you hide all settings? Why?
And still, new TAA is eye-bleeding blurry. My simple mod to TAA shader in 7.4.1 have much more better quality.

 

Would this be officially, coming to URP any time soon?

 

So what's the point of LTS if major fixes like this aren't going to be ported over?

 

>point of LTS
>aren't going to be ported over
Yes, this is a main point of LTS. Don't port anything new in it.

 

Nah they port stuff to LTS all the time, but it’s usually bugs.

 

The person above said they won't port anything new to it. LTS will only get SDK etc compatibility upgrades and bugfixes, no new features. No reason to argue about wording here.

 

To return to original topic - I still have some issues with TAA, which may just be shortcomings of the technique...
It is not an instant technique, it takes a few frames to catch up and slightly blurs fast movement it seems. Also over darkens/sharpens edges where there is high contrast.
So I often find SMAA more useful though wish it could fix its shortcomings with some material edges/transparency

None of the AA techniques are perfect for a single frame rendered to a render texture - like a HQ screenshot.
Probably only down sampling a high-res shot might work.

 

Agreed. My experience is even with the changes ... I can't actually use it, since it still makes things blurry with no exposed way of dealing with this.

I'm not editing the render pipeline code to do this, I'll just stick with other options sadly. Here's hoping they actually expose things we can tweak in the future.

 

Hi @francescoc_unity - It's a shame the fast speed rejection setting didn't make it into HDRP 10 for the 2020.2 release, are there plans to bring this feature in to the 2020 hdrp/release cycle?

 

But it is there? If I remember right, you need to have High preset enabled for TAA to see the option.

 

You are 100% right, thanks, wasn't clear it didn't apply to medium

 

If you want to see what the different presets do, you can check the LOW_QUALITY, MEDIUM_QUALITY and HIGH_QUALITY defines here:
https://github.com/Unity-Technologi...ssing/Shaders/TemporalAntiAliasing.shader#L33

I think this is part where Unity could improve their documentation as I don't think the docs explain any of the TAA settings(?): https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/c...Anti-Aliasing.html#temporal-anti-aliasing-taa
It's not just TAA, different quality settings are not explained for other PP AA algos either.