Gadgetory

you guys have been asking for this fast as possible' episode for the better part of a year so I guess it's time to deliver for starters if you don't know what anti-aliasing is at all yet or you need a quick refresher please check out our overview video here or if you've disabled annotations then use the link in the video description moving along all methods of anti-aliasing fall into one of two groups the first increases the sample rate which means it renders the scene at what is effectively a higher resolution then down samples to the display resolution effectively smoothing lines and the second blurs edges or other contrasts do shading and textures and is known as post AAA or post-processing since the blurring occurs directly after the render process NSAA and SSA a both fall under the first category super sampling anti-aliasing also known as full scene anti-aliasing or FSA a was the first type of AAA available with early video cards it is best used on photorealistic images as it makes them appear softer and more lifelike but for line art or diagrams it actually decreases the quality and makes them appear fuzzy especially for horizontal and vertical lines SSA has a huge computational cost so most real time applications like games have moved away from this method typically FSA goes up to 4x but if you have horsepower to spare there's a modified version for SLI users which can crank up the sample rate up to 16x or even 128 X if you are running cuadros in US a lot just in case your neck gets tired and you want to put them in your computer or something NSAA or multi sampling anti-aliasing is similar to FSA a but it only super samples the edges of polygons and calculates textures at once per pixel which significantly cuts down on the required processing power the main downside however is that it doesn't prevent aliasing that appears with thin rendered polygons caused by blending textures or pixel shaders after a few more advances in super sampling techniques CSA a or coverage sample anti-aliasing was released along with the GeForce 8 series graphics cards from Nvidia it produced images that rivaled the quality of 16x MSAA while only causing a slightly higher performance hindrance than Rex NSAA it accomplished this by simply detecting whether or not a polygon is present and then using that information to judge where it needs to use super sampling so let's move over to the second type of anti-aliasing post a a or post processing a great example of this is FX a a or fast approximate anti-aliasing this technique was developed by Timothy Lots under Nvidia it gets rid of jaggies or jagged edges by smoothing the edges on each pixel on the screen directly after each pixel is rendered including those in blended textures and pixel shaders the smoothing directly after pixels are rendered part is huge as most anti-aliasing techniques have to analyze a 3d model as a whole to smooth the edges rather than smoothing each pixel individually fxaa judges wearing edges by comparing the depth between two pixels and smooth their edges according to their relative depth unfortunately this technique does make some textures appear soft and must be applied before heads up display elements are rendered so that they remain sharp and clear FXAA was such an improvement over previous techniques that Kotaku actually claimed that FXAA made all previous forms of anti-aliasing obsolete with its speed and accuracy NVIDIA has also since added TxAA or temporal anti-aliasing which is a film style anti-aliasing technique designed to reduce temporal aliasing crawling and flickering seen in motion when playing games and this is a very complex form of AAA which combines down sampling and blurring it uses a lot more performance than fxaa its implementation differs from game to game and it's only available on GPUs from the kepler family or higher well line this you might be saying this is all well and good but what if I'm a member of team red or what if my graphics card doesn't natively support some of the AAA methods you've mentioned in this video well that's a great question not every graphics card has native support for each method of anti-aliasing but you can usually add one in yourself it won't always work as easily or as well as a developer implemented solution but you can actually download plenty of drivers that will add in anti aliasing techniques some of which are more advanced than what the developer may have added one such solution is SM AAA or sub-pixel morphological anti-aliasing this combines morphological anti-aliasing a post processing technique that identifies aliasing based on patterns and blends colors around to diminish that aliasing with super sampling like NSAA or SSA a to sharpen the entire scene it is natively supported in some games and many users have seen market improvements in visual quality when adding SMA a to games like Skyrim many of them claim that it provides the smoothness of FXAA without the performance hit but of course your mileage may vary so there you have it as usual it comes down to personal preference and you'll want to do some experimentation to see what works best for your eyes on your rig in your games happy fragging speaking of friggin lynda.com well I guess lynda.com can't really help you with fragging but they can help you with a wide variety of other skills they have thousands of courses with new ones added every week and each course is taught by an industry expert so you know that the information provided is correct and relevant whether you want to learn about programming photography or video editing so you can create awesome content like what we release here on tech quickie although if you compete with us we'll come and we'll cut you lynda.com has you covered you take each course at your own pace so whether you're breezing through four lectures a day or only fitting in one a week you can expand your knowledge on your own schedule plans start at a very reasonable twenty-five dollars per month which is less than a dollar a day for all you math whizzes out there but if you want to try out Lynda comple tlie free they're offering a seven day trial to all tech quickie viewers so head over to lynda.com slash tech wiki to check that out guys thanks for watching like if you liked dislike if you disliked leave a comment if you have suggestions for future fast as possible and as always don't forget to subscribe