How Important Is FSAA

[Baff1 0]

Yes anything over a 3% hit for 2x FSAA at those resolutions there'd have to be something wrong on such modern hardware. What I can't reconcile is there are 37 people on these forums that claim FSAA doesn't matter to them, are willing to miss the additional detail and ability to resolve ranged targets, are in essence saying all the writhing alias artifacts don't look that bad to them, but oddest of all are willing to let substantial render capacity of their hardware go fallow...

Weird...

:j:

I'm rendering at 3860x1024.

4xAA 8xAF drops my frame rates by 30% on just 1920x1200.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/geforce-gtx-radeon,2326-11.html

In a game like ArmA, the last thing I want is lower frame rates.

Edited June 18, 2009 by Baff1

[hoak 0]

Good Lord Baff! What kind of dispaly is that?!

:eek:

[Baff1 0]

3 displays.

Matrox Triplehead2go.

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Going widescreen next for 5040x1050.

I think even if I bought a new 295 with water cooling, I'd still be thinking about scrapping FSAA on ArmA.

The game is an animal on GFX cards.

I use it on other less GFX intensive games like Crysis or GRAW, where you can't see the difference.

But I was running 2046x1600 before this and I've never really felt the need for FSAA.

Running higher resolutions lowers the jaggies and increases object distinction at range anyway.

So I go for resolution first, and if I've maxxed my monitor and still have GFX capacity spare, I up the AA afterwards.

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Edited June 18, 2009 by Baff1

[galzohar 31]

If you're hitting the 5k resolution area, then AA starts looking like it's not as important ;) however, the performance cost of such resolutions is probably much more than the performance cost of AA.

[hoak 0]

Good lord! Surely you realize this is not a typical PC, that you have substantial advantage with such resolution, and that by voting down the value of FSAA, you vet your advantage?

:)

[Hermes 10]

Wrong Question?

There is FSAA in Arma, isnt it? Fillrate Slider @150% or 200% and we got FSAA.

The Question is: Do we need AA?

Answer: YES!

Edited June 19, 2009 by Hermes

[aus_twisted 0]

Wrong Question?

There is FSAA in Arma, isnt it? Fillrate Slider @150% or 200% and we got FSAA.

The Question is: Do we need AA?

Answer: YES!

No Fillrate is not FSAA (Fullscreen Antialiasing)

[Alex72 1]

Ofcourse we need FSAA and BIS knows it.

They said they had artifacts when they tested it with ARMA2 and i bet they work on trying to minimize it. Thats my hope anyway. My friends have bigger systems than me and they cant use fillrate. I dont have a game (the few i have) without FSAA and ARMA2 is made so much harder without it. I cant make out an enemy moving in a scope etc.

I seriously hope BIS tries to add it, and i hope they succeed without it giving artifacts.

In fact they said not long ago (maybe a bit of a joke?) that if we want FSAA they can activate it. Only thing is that we will have to live with some graphical artifacts. Im sure they look into it though. It is a must for most people.

Alex

[hoak 0]

Wrong Question?

There is FSAA in Arma, isnt it? Fillrate Slider @150% or 200% and we got FSAA.

The Question is: Do we need AA?

Answer: YES!

Incorrect. In fact Fillrate doesn't even Anti-Alias or remove Alias artifacts at all. Fillrate is little more then a scaling filter that forces your video card to render at a higher resolution then is displayed then descales.

While you might confuse this with FSAA or SSAA it's not: Fillrate filters no Alias Artifacts, and it is not hardware accelerated -- in fact it's literally hardware decellerated...

While hardware accelerated AA will confer a 1-5% performance hit for 2-16x AA -- Fillrate, which not only doesn't remove alias artifacts it adds descale artifacts, has a 100-200% performance hit.

At its maximum setting Fillrate will move alias artifacts and raise their resolution slightly (but not aesthetically double them as you might assume) -- and some will find this even uglier then no Fillrate as it's not as good as 2x FSAA due to descale artifacts.

The only thing Fillrate is nice for is making nice static screenshots...

:(

[galzohar 31]

If fillrate doesn't do anything for alias artifacts, though, what DOES it do?

[Pyronick 21]

If fillrate doesn't do anything for alias artifacts, though, what DOES it do?

It's rendered at a multiplied resolution, then the frames are scaled back to a smaller resolution.

What you get is some kind of reversed blur effect.

[galzohar 31]

It's rendered at a multiplied resolution, then the frames are scaled back to a smaller resolution.

What you get is some kind of reversed blur effect.

Anything more specific? :)

I went to that website that demonstrated the effects of all graphic options via screenshots, but it compared 50% to 200% which gave pretty obvious results - I'm more interested in 100% vs 200%.

[hoak 0]

Fillrate looks much better in static shots then a from a 3D perspective with things moving where you'll see all the expected alias wiggling and crawl, and some new and interesting scaling artifacts...

[moosenoodles 0]

Anything more specific? :)

I went to that website that demonstrated the effects of all graphic options via screenshots, but it compared 50% to 200% which gave pretty obvious results - I'm more interested in 100% vs 200%.

A good way to think of it is like this..

Think of it as a cheap way to pretend you have just bought a larger resolution useable pc screen :D

that is all it does :D upscales your render resoultion so u seem to loose the jaggies a little cause of higher res, and then downscales it to port it into your "set viewable" screen res.. its like stuffing a big screen with nicer clarrity at high cost back into your smaller screen. But unfortunataley your poor cards at times have cardiac fits due to it not really being able or wanting to deal with such increases in resolution "rendering". Its a cop out plain and simple, for a trick in use today now along with HDR/Bloom options, mainly otherwise known as....

"youve been consolized"

:D

[maruk 80]

What we call Fillrate Optimizer (from version 1.02 it will be simply two separate combo boxes for rendering and interface resolutions in advanced video options) is FSAA in case you render to higher resolution than your physical monitor resolution, it's real supersampling with uncompromised visual quality.

Another, more common method of FSAA is MSAA (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multisample_anti-aliasing for detailed explanation) which is visually inferior to proper supersampling (as offered by fillrate optimizer) but takes much less GPU resources. MSAA is not yet fully supported in ARMA 2, however, it's already possible to experiment with it in version 1.02 by using FSAA=1; option in arma2.cfg (or higher numbers for higher level of MSAA but generally higher number here will need more GPU performance with the same render target resolution) with some limitations (shadows don't work at all, also some special effect like rotational blur or water don't work correctly) and it shows great potential in combination with our fillrate optimizer to improve performance/visual quality of Arma 2 significantly in various scenarios.

No Fillrate is not FSAA (Fullscreen Antialiasing)

[hoak 0]

Wowow! A post from the Boss! Fans new to ArmA take note, you rarely see this elsewhere, but here you get reminders that the Developers and even the Lead Developer CEO follow the interests and concerns of their Fans.

What we call Fillrate Optimizer (from version 1.02 it will be simply two separate combo boxes for rendering and interface resolutions in advanced video options) is FSAA in case you render to higher resolution than your physical monitor resolution, it's real supersampling with uncompromised visual quality.

I'm a little confused: Fillrate doesn't quite look or perform like SSAA -- why not just call it SSAA? Is there a limit to 2x Fillrate in 1.02 or can it go higher?

MSAA is not yet fully supported in ARMA 2, however, it's already possible to experiment with it in version 1.02 by using FSAA=1; option in arma2.cfg (or higher numbers for higher level of MSAA but generally higher number here will need more GPU performance with the same render target resolution) with some limitations (shadows don't work at all, also some special effect like rotational blur or water don't work correctly) and it shows great potential in combination with our fillrate optimizer to improve performance/visual quality of Arma 2 significantly in various scenarios.

Well that's good news! Limitations aside many just don't have the system resources to render double their drawn resolution. Is ArmA II using some kind of MRT approach to render which causes the issues with with MSAA?

[Helmut_AUT 0]

With 1.02, I get artifacts even when shadows are disabled when using FSAA=1. It shows how great the game could look like, so I really hope FSAA makes it into 1.03

At least it's great to see the Boss himself reading these threads.

[hoak 0]

Well this should warm some hearts that are still concerned or have doubts, and may have missed this as it was buried in another thread:

FSAA is not fully supported yet (that's why you can have some shadows problems ...), you cant tweak it in the options menu. You can get it worked by changing value in your ArmA2.cfg file. :)

FSAA=0; Disabled

FSAA=1; Low

FSAA=2; Medium

FSAA=3; High

FSAA will be completely supported in one of the futures patchs :)

old_snake is a BI Developer so things are looking digity for the future.

:bounce3:

[Balgorg 10]

FSAA is extremly useful for targeting enemies far away. Without FSAA you cant differ an enemy from a moving tree. I don´t understand why this feature wasn´t implemented from the beginning...

Pls BI make it available in 1.02! :(

I agree with this, I have a low res old monitor, so removing jaggies and improving the visual appearance is a must for me. It woked well with Arma, so why not Arma 2 ?

[Alex72 1]

It IS in now. Patch 1.02 made it happen. Has to be activated in the ARMA2.CFG for now. Its not completely polished yet i think as some report shadows gone with it and some report getting artifacts. And then you have others like 2 of my friends saying it looks awesome and runs like a dream.

Alex

[hoak 0]

I'm curious: has anone tried using low settings of both Fillrate and FSAA together with the 1.02 patch? What are the aesthetic results and performance like as far as alias artifacting?

:confused:

Edited June 22, 2009 by Hoak

[lockjaw-65- 0]

I just tried this and it works well but I have lost shadows. So I am hoping they sort this soon..

[Mc Speedfreak 10]

as i am playing with a 26" screen it is in valuable to me.

once my third screen is fixed i will try ARMAII on soft TH. at those sizes FSAA is a must.

yes- i would love the shadows enabled ... but it is the lesser of 2 evils as it were..

[trickster1982 10]

It would depend on how recently i bought my gaming rig & how much i'd spent on it as to whether i'd be bothered about FSAA,my current rig cost me about £1200 a year & a half ago,so although im kinda disappointed i cant run this game maxed out,i accept it because things move on quickly in PC gaming!If i'd spent the same money about a month ago & couldnt run this game on very high i would probably be spitting bile though

[Wynthorpe 10]

FSAA is now enabled and running!