See, this is the type of thing that weirds me out. Temporal AA doesn’t look good compared to what? What do you mean “real resolution goes down”? Down from where? This is a very confusing statement to make.
I don’t know what it is that you’re supposed to dislike or what a lot of the terms you’re using are supposed to mean. What is “image quality” in your view? What are you comparing as a reference point on all these things that go up and down?
TAA looks worse than no AA IMO. It can be better than not using it with some other techniques that cause the frames to look grainy in random ways, like real time path traced global illumination that doesn’t have enough time to generate enough rays for a smooth output. But I see it as pretty much a blur effect.
Other AA techniques generate more samples to increase pixel accuracy. TAA uses previous frame data to increase temporal stability, which can reduce aliasing effects but is less accurate because sometimes the new colour isn’t correlated with the previous one.
Maybe the loss of accuracy from TAA is worth the increase you get from a low sample path traced global illumination in some cases (personally a maybe) or extra smoothness from generated frames (personally a no), but TAA artifacts generally annoy me more than aliasing artifacts.
As for specifics of those artifacts, they are things like washed out details, motion blur, and difficult to read text.
TAA only looks worse than no AA if you have a super high res image with next to no sub-pixel detail… or a very small screen where you are getting some blending from human eyeballs not being perfectly sharp in the first place.
I don’t know that the line is going to be on things like grainy low-sample path tracing. For one thing you don’t use TAA for that, you need specific denoising (ray reconstruction is sometimes bundled with DLSS, but it’s technically its own thing and DLSS is often used independently from it). The buildup of GI over time isn’t TAA, it’s temporal accumulation, where you add rays from multiple frames over time to flesh out the sample.
I can accept as a matter of personal preference to say you prefer an oversharpened, crinkly image over a more natural, softer image, so I can accept a preference for all the missed edges and fine detail of edge detection-based blur AA, but there’s no reason decent TAA would look blurry and in any case that’s exactly the part where modern upscaling used as AA has an edge because there’s definitely no washed out details when using DLSS when compared to no AA or SMAA at the same native res. You often get additional generated detail and less blur than native with those.
Compared to some older AA tech. TAA is awful in motion in games. edit: by default. if there’s a config file it can be made better edit2: sometimes no AA is clean as fuck, depends on the game and resolution
What do you mean “real resolution goes down”? Down from where?
I mean internal resolution. Playing at 1080p with DLSS means the game doesn’t render at your specified resolution, but a fraction of it. Native (for now) is the best looking.
What is “image quality” in your view?
Mostly general clarity and stuff like particle effects, textures, stuff like that I think. You can ask those people directly, you know. I’m just the messenger, I barely play modern games.
I don’t know … a lot of the terms you’re using are supposed to mean
Yeah, that’s a problem. More people should be aware of the graphical effects in games. Thankfully some games now implement previews for damn near every quality toggle.
Alright, so no, TAA doesn’t look worse “compared to some older AA tech”. For one thing our benchmarks for “some older AA tech” is MSAA used on 720p (on a good day) on consoles. MSAA did a valiant effort that generation, but it doesn’t scale well with resolution, so while the comparatively very powerful PC GPUs were able to use it effectively at 1080p60 they were already struggling. And to be clear, those games looked like mud compared to newer targets.
We are now typically aiming for 4K, which is four times as many pixels, and at semi-arbitrary refreshes, often in the hundreds on PCs. TAA does a comparable-to-better job than MSAA much faster, so cranking up the base resolution is viable. DLSS goes one further and is able to upres the image, not just smooth out edges, even if the upres data is machine-generated.
“MSAA looked better” is almost entirely rose tinted glasses.
Internal resolution with DLSS is variable. Some games have a setting to select it on the fly depending on load, but all games give you a quality selector, so it’s ultimately a matter of power to performance where you want to set your base resolution and your output resolution. DLSS is heavier than most TAA but much better. If you’re keeping output res and settings, then yeah, you’re going to lower resolution a bit to compensate the loss, probably, but you can absolutely run DLSS at native resolution (that’s normally called DLAA). It looks great, but any AA at native 4K is gonna be heavy, so you need pretty powerful hardware for that.
So the internal resolution hasn’t “gone down”. You may need to lower it in some games to hit performance, but that’s always been the case. What has changed is we’re pushing super high definition images compared to the PS3 and even the PS4 generation. 4 to 16 times bigger.
And yeah, upscaling can show artifacts around some elements, but so can old AA. Modern versions of DLSS and FSR are a lot cleaner than older ones, but it’s not a downgrade against most comparables. It becomes a matter of whether you think some of the ghosting on particles or fast motion was more annoying than fizzling on detailed areas or thin lines. If a preference for one over the other was the conversation I’d be more than happy to chalk it up to taste, but that’s not how this is often framed. And again, modern upscaling is improving much faster than older AA techniques, a lot of the artifacting is gone, not just for new games, but for older ones where newer versions of these systems can be selected even if they weren’t implemented at launch. It’s actually pretty neat.
And that wall of text is, I think, why this conversation is so obtuse and confusing these days. That’s a lot of nuance, and it’s still superficial. People just go “this looks like crap because of particles or whatever” and I guess that’s fine, but it barely correlates to anything in reality, it’s quite deeply impacted by half-remembered results that really don’t hold up as well as people remember and clarifying all this is certainly not worth the effort. Just saying it online is a lot simpler and easier, though.
See, this is the type of thing that weirds me out. Temporal AA doesn’t look good compared to what? What do you mean “real resolution goes down”? Down from where? This is a very confusing statement to make.
I don’t know what it is that you’re supposed to dislike or what a lot of the terms you’re using are supposed to mean. What is “image quality” in your view? What are you comparing as a reference point on all these things that go up and down?
TAA looks worse than no AA IMO. It can be better than not using it with some other techniques that cause the frames to look grainy in random ways, like real time path traced global illumination that doesn’t have enough time to generate enough rays for a smooth output. But I see it as pretty much a blur effect.
Other AA techniques generate more samples to increase pixel accuracy. TAA uses previous frame data to increase temporal stability, which can reduce aliasing effects but is less accurate because sometimes the new colour isn’t correlated with the previous one.
Maybe the loss of accuracy from TAA is worth the increase you get from a low sample path traced global illumination in some cases (personally a maybe) or extra smoothness from generated frames (personally a no), but TAA artifacts generally annoy me more than aliasing artifacts.
As for specifics of those artifacts, they are things like washed out details, motion blur, and difficult to read text.
TAA only looks worse than no AA if you have a super high res image with next to no sub-pixel detail… or a very small screen where you are getting some blending from human eyeballs not being perfectly sharp in the first place.
I don’t know that the line is going to be on things like grainy low-sample path tracing. For one thing you don’t use TAA for that, you need specific denoising (ray reconstruction is sometimes bundled with DLSS, but it’s technically its own thing and DLSS is often used independently from it). The buildup of GI over time isn’t TAA, it’s temporal accumulation, where you add rays from multiple frames over time to flesh out the sample.
I can accept as a matter of personal preference to say you prefer an oversharpened, crinkly image over a more natural, softer image, so I can accept a preference for all the missed edges and fine detail of edge detection-based blur AA, but there’s no reason decent TAA would look blurry and in any case that’s exactly the part where modern upscaling used as AA has an edge because there’s definitely no washed out details when using DLSS when compared to no AA or SMAA at the same native res. You often get additional generated detail and less blur than native with those.
Compared to some older AA tech. TAA is awful in motion in games. edit: by default. if there’s a config file it can be made better edit2: sometimes no AA is clean as fuck, depends on the game and resolution
I mean internal resolution. Playing at 1080p with DLSS means the game doesn’t render at your specified resolution, but a fraction of it. Native (for now) is the best looking.
Mostly general clarity and stuff like particle effects, textures, stuff like that I think. You can ask those people directly, you know. I’m just the messenger, I barely play modern games.
Yeah, that’s a problem. More people should be aware of the graphical effects in games. Thankfully some games now implement previews for damn near every quality toggle.
Alright, so no, TAA doesn’t look worse “compared to some older AA tech”. For one thing our benchmarks for “some older AA tech” is MSAA used on 720p (on a good day) on consoles. MSAA did a valiant effort that generation, but it doesn’t scale well with resolution, so while the comparatively very powerful PC GPUs were able to use it effectively at 1080p60 they were already struggling. And to be clear, those games looked like mud compared to newer targets.
We are now typically aiming for 4K, which is four times as many pixels, and at semi-arbitrary refreshes, often in the hundreds on PCs. TAA does a comparable-to-better job than MSAA much faster, so cranking up the base resolution is viable. DLSS goes one further and is able to upres the image, not just smooth out edges, even if the upres data is machine-generated.
“MSAA looked better” is almost entirely rose tinted glasses.
Internal resolution with DLSS is variable. Some games have a setting to select it on the fly depending on load, but all games give you a quality selector, so it’s ultimately a matter of power to performance where you want to set your base resolution and your output resolution. DLSS is heavier than most TAA but much better. If you’re keeping output res and settings, then yeah, you’re going to lower resolution a bit to compensate the loss, probably, but you can absolutely run DLSS at native resolution (that’s normally called DLAA). It looks great, but any AA at native 4K is gonna be heavy, so you need pretty powerful hardware for that.
So the internal resolution hasn’t “gone down”. You may need to lower it in some games to hit performance, but that’s always been the case. What has changed is we’re pushing super high definition images compared to the PS3 and even the PS4 generation. 4 to 16 times bigger.
And yeah, upscaling can show artifacts around some elements, but so can old AA. Modern versions of DLSS and FSR are a lot cleaner than older ones, but it’s not a downgrade against most comparables. It becomes a matter of whether you think some of the ghosting on particles or fast motion was more annoying than fizzling on detailed areas or thin lines. If a preference for one over the other was the conversation I’d be more than happy to chalk it up to taste, but that’s not how this is often framed. And again, modern upscaling is improving much faster than older AA techniques, a lot of the artifacting is gone, not just for new games, but for older ones where newer versions of these systems can be selected even if they weren’t implemented at launch. It’s actually pretty neat.
And that wall of text is, I think, why this conversation is so obtuse and confusing these days. That’s a lot of nuance, and it’s still superficial. People just go “this looks like crap because of particles or whatever” and I guess that’s fine, but it barely correlates to anything in reality, it’s quite deeply impacted by half-remembered results that really don’t hold up as well as people remember and clarifying all this is certainly not worth the effort. Just saying it online is a lot simpler and easier, though.