Well, if nothing else I’ve made my case.

I mean, I’m not gonna go build a Digital Foundry comparison video for you, but this type of argument is definitely what I’m talking about when I say I don’t understand what people just claiming this out of the blue even think they’re saying.

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.

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.

You said “there’s a person operating the AI” and you referred to separating “the tool from the user”.

Please do me a favor and quote the part of that comment that refers to the way the AI is made at all. The point you were parroting was pointing out that the “AI good/bad debate” isn’t a judgement of value of the technology underlying the applications, it’s an assessment of what the companies making apps with this technology are doing with it on each individual application.

I never brought up the user in this. The user is pretty much neutral. The “person operating the AI” isn’t a factor here, it’s some constant outside the debate where we assume some amount of people will use the tools provided for them in the way the tools are designed.

At this point, it should be obvious that no one is downvoting you because they believe you’re wrong. Rather, its because you’re an inflated, insecure douchebag who’s so threatened by the opinions of two federated users on the ass end of the internet, that he feels the need to write an essay about it, not to us, no, to his own ego.

And for the record, I’m not one of the believers. On a long enough timeline, you’ll be playing birthday parties dressed as a cowboy. Ai is improving while people have a bell curve. It’s only a matter of time. Cheers. I hope you find happiness one day.

Oh my god you’re still trying to have it both ways.