Temporal Anti Aliasing

"Good when the screen is so polluted and blurred you can't see anything" isn't exactly a positive point, though. FXAA doesn't fix aliasing, it just blurs it, and compared to every other algorithm the image still looks aliased somehow, only with a blurred staircase instead of a sharp anti-aliased line which is how AA should be.

I prefer no AA than FXAA blurring the image and making a mess of temporal aliasing, so the fact it has non existent performance hit is not an upside to what is essentially making the image worse.

 

Being satisfied with just FXAA is a slippery slope. If Unity wants to keep competing with other engines they should not take the stance of things being "good enough for now".

Luckily, as others have pointed out, it seems this is at least on unity's radar.

 

I understand what you mean, although I don't completely agree with you (FXAA can be better than nothing IMO), and
all anti-aliasing blurs the aliasing in one form or another. Some do it better than others though.

 

What about CTAA? This looks great!
http://www.livenda.com/ctaa.html

 

Livenda ... it's been a while They've announced realtime Global Illumination too (Called Spectra GI apparently), right? Did we saw any of this ?

 

I think their GI is still work in progress.

 

It is: https://twitter.com/LivendaLabs/status/629704883860451328

 

I wonder if a simple supersampling technique would work (render higher and downscale internally)

Is there any asset doing something similar ?

This would give the ultimate AA, but i am not sure how performance would be. I guess it will probably be an issue, otherwise it would come standard.

Livenda solution also look promising, hopefully it releases soon

 

http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/332628/

 

Thanks for the link, that is exactly what i meant

I may buy to check performance, from reviews seems that it is rather heavy, but i guess it depends on the scene and target system

 

Yes, it's heavy, we have a similar asset (in development) used in a couple of projects (one internal and one external) - the performance is as rendering at a higher resolution.

 

I see, it might be good for smaller resolutions i guess or less complex games.

I wonder if there is any work published on optimizing something like this system, that would be very interesting

 

It's good for screenshots. Why do you think AAA doesn't bother with it? it's not because it's hipster, but because it's utterly useless on consumer hardware.

The right approach is a temporal based AA that's light and good. There's a few solutions around but I can't see it being practical unless Unity exposes a bit more. So we use FXAA at the moment, and that's actually not as bad as everyone makes out, specially if you have DOF going etc.

 

There are, MSAA is one such technique. There are better AA solutions that are not nearly as taxing though, such as SMAA and TXAA.

I agree that FXAA ain't that bad, what do you think of SMAA?

 

Does DSR work with Unity games? I remember having trouble with it.

 

Is it temporal based AA not practical due to performance issue or compatibility on Unity ? Livenda i think is advrtising such a new method for Unity and looks rather good, lets hope this is delivered properly and is fast for actual use.

The blur + standard unity AA can look nice, but it is a bit on the blurry side. I use two blur layers for a more dramatic effect on both my RPG and the InfiniGRASS pics (slight one in front and a bigger on further back).

 

Or anything on console I suppose.

 

@Chman you have converted SMAA to unity, and it's even free.. Does it work with Unity 5.2?

 

Consoles holding back gaming once again.

 

You're grotesquely misunderstanding what I'm saying, so much so it's painful. Basically consoles have the same hardware feature set as desktop, just not with a $400 gpu. Therefore optimising for that is good for everyone.

It's different for a mobile, which is actually holding back Unity in some ways (ie GGX choices).

 

Works without a problem, thanks.

 

Consoles aren't holding back gaming..... yet. I still can't include as many polys as I want to make significant improvements in mesh density of skinned meshes. I have a 980ti and an AMD FX-8350 Processor. I'm thinking the skinned mesh calculations are on the processor? I guess that doesn't matter the point is we still need better hardware at an affordable price, I'm tired of faking detail through textures.

 

Any update on this?

 

Wonder how other games get away with not faking detail with textures - if this is a hardware limitation.

No disrespect intended - but Maybe your holding yourself back - or maybe it's your own limited ability.
Have you seen any modern games lately? What part of Nathan Drake is faked detail textures, where are the faked texture details on any of the content in Until Dawn? How bout the latest Doom.
Seems it's not a hardware problem - if they are able to do it.
What details are faked on the Blacksmith characters? Normal mapped surface details - those aren't faked - it was still created and sculpted, and even animated at run-time.

 

That's exactly what I meant by faking through textures. If it's detail due to normal maps or parallax height it's faked because it isn't actual geometry being rendered in full time. It's very unrealistic that we will ever get to the point where we don't need to do that any time soon. Sure maybe that geometry exists in a zbrush file but it's not in the engine. This was a pretty old post before I found that I could make skinned meshes render on the gpu vs cpu in unity but the point was that consoles aren't holding the industry back because significantly better hardware is a lot more expensive. Once significantly better hardware is closer to console prices then they will be holding us back.

 

You've been able to get essentially unlimited detail for quite a while now... Have you not heard of Tessellation and Displacement? It's the same technique used in films. Films don't just load 20m+ poly ZBrush sculpts and raytrace them, they bake displacement maps, subdivide the mesh during render time and let the map displace the polys to create those detailed shapes. You can do the same in Unity.

https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/37322
http://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/SL-SurfaceShaderTessellation.html