Full Screen Antialiasing is called to improve output image quality. Before
we'd just provided you with performance of this technology, but now
we decided to expand this section and provide quality features as
well. In this issue we continue our examination on a number of new
cards. There's various sorts of antialiasing (as well as anisotropy)
:-). Moreover, various companies implement their own AA. We won't
describe the details of various antialiasing kinds here, but will
sum them up.
So, what is antialiasing and how is it used? To answer this, we
should turn to physics and linguistics. The latter is simple: "anti"
is clear and "aliasing" is jaggies. As the monitor features
a number of pixels vertically and horizontally, vertical or horizontal
lines will appear perfect, following one another. But if the line
is a kind of diagonal, it will look jaggy, because pixels are organized
in the 2D matrix, limited by the screen resolution. So what should
we do, if we can't change our monitors? Still user's eyes and mind
can be tricked. This is done by various antialiasing algorithms. As
the task is clear, the algorithm is as follows. As pixel color is
encoded in 8 to 32 bits (there can be more, but human eye won't distinguish
64-bit color from 32-bit, for example) it can be substituted. For
example, there are two colors, white and black. They are contrary
and produce a clear BORDER=1 when near. So, if we draw a black line
on the white background, it won't be straight (unless vertical or
horizontal), but jaggy. To make it more perfect, we need to paint
borders over, i.e. blend colors. In the given case, it's a blend of
black and white. As a result, we'll get gray color on the both sides
of displacement points. In most cases we'll save the original line
color, but sometimes the new one may replace the original. The size
of matrix is important as well. For example, if it's 800x600, jaggies
will be more obvious, comparing to 1600x1200 with lesser displacement.
I.e., larger matrix corresponds to higher capacity and smaller pixels.
Actually, it's more of a whim to use antialiasing at 1600x1200, comparing
to 800x600. But everything is more complex.
To confuse you even more ;-) here are excerpts from NVIDIA
World articles with our additions. During antialiasing each pixel
is divided into subpixels. Pixel color is averaged with some formula,
given subpixel colors. At that, though physical resolutions remains
the same, the effective resolutions becames considerably higher. Two
most popular approaches include supersampling and multisampling. Both
are based on defining pixel color by blending subpixel (sample) colors,
though samples are generated differently. Supersampling is the simplest
and straightforward method. The image is calculated in virtual resolution,
several times higher than the actual. After that it's scaled and filtered
to the original resolution. The color of each pixel is defined using
several subpixels. This enables to improve image quality considerably,
but resultes in several times higher graphics card load and thus performance
falloff. The reason is that it needs to calculate several times more
colors for a pixel instead of one, for example, AA 2x2 at 800x600
will require the calculation of 800x2 x 600x2, i.e. 1600x1200. Multisampling
is a more complex and intellectual approach or rather a tool. The
idea is very simple as well: why stupidly calculate N subpixels for
each pixel, if we can reuse already calculated ones again and again
to form several resulting pixels. On the other hand, no AA is needed
in some image parts, so why use several subpixels, if one is enough?
Vice versa, some parts require very good AA, so we need to calculate
many more subpixels there. This enables not only to save resources
significantly, but also to obtain better AA quality! The tool can
be used as one likes, and performance and quality depend on the implementation,
selected by graphics card or game developer.
Now let's get to specific implementations of makers' AA. Let's start
with the most unusual and original solution of Matrox. FSAA supported
by Parhelia-512 is currently unique and is close to ideal. Essentially,
it's supersampling with up to 16 calculations per pixel. But it's
performed ONLY (!) for polygon BORDER=1 dots (3-5% of a typical scene).
The advantage is clear: unlike multisampling, it doesn't keep redundant
data in memory and transfer them over the bus! The total frame buffer
size increases slightly, up to by a factor of two even with the max.
16x setting. A special fast rendering pass is used to determine BORDER=1
pixels, when graphics card marks only BORDER=1 polygon pixels in a
separate buffer without calculating textures and painting intermediate
pixels. Besides, as only borders are processed, there's no texture
sharpness losses, peculiar to FSAA and some hybrid MSAA techniques.
Nowever, this intellectual AA can still produce artefacts in some
cases. Besides, it can't correctly process borders mixed with transparent
polygons (like clouds, glass, fire).
NVIDIA AA is clearly described in articles at NVIDIA World. We are not going to post them again, but just provide the links to them. The basic article is here. This newer article describes NVIDIA AA technologies.
As for ATI AA, it's reviewed here along with other companies' antialiasing.
Let's now finish with theory and move to the performance.
We conducted the tests on our Pentium4 and Windows XP testbed using Unreal 2: The Awakening and Serious Sam: The Second Encounter.
AA disabled results are marked red
But we must know what we spend the performance for. As you can see the falloffs are rather great, we'd like to know if we really need it. Here are the screenshots from the tests, indicating the actual quality of different antialiasing modes.
