The future of Anti-aliasing

With the maturation of the current generation of consoles, developers are constantly looking for new ways to improve the performance of their video games. Obviously a platform capabilities be measured primarily in terms of potential graphic: being able to return an image of high quality is now a prerequisite for success in today's market the video game. To get this result, a management technique of three-dimensional objects look came to the aid of the developers for a long time, namely the antialiasing.

You present the odious serrated edges of the objects when they are represented in diagonal? Those are the so-called artifacts, genuine enemies of the quality of the image to be deleted at all costs: to do so, over the years have developed various techniques that have solved more or less successfully.

The most known and used surely that of multi-sample Anti-Aliasing (MSAA). If implemented properly can give excellent results but at a very high price of system memory and bandwidth of the graphics processor. In addition to this, the techniques of shading and rendering most recent titles are sometimes incompatible with the traditional MSAA managed by DirectX 9 or priced at very high consumption of RAM on a PC with DirectX 10 and 11.

The point on the Board of several developers and designers to precisely this: how to get from upcoming games results similar to those of expensive hardware antialiasing without penalising performance?

Many games in the recent past they used to obtain this result different techniques; what recently met for the audience of developers was the Morphological Anti-Aliasing (MLAA), developed by SCEE Advantaged Technology Group and used in titles of considerable importance. Among the many, God of War 3, Little Big Planet 2, Shift 2: Unleashed, Portal 2, Alice: Madness Returns and the next Battlefield 3. The MLAA an algorithm that tries to detect edges similar in conformation by applying a blur effect in relation to the agreement. It is a system based on search predefined edges that can do a good job when it finds one that matches perfectly to the schema set.

When the filter applies only to the edge question yields a result simply outstanding: sometimes however are filtered edges are not perfectly matching such a surface with a little texture. The end result then loses in quality.

Although smaller than the multisampling, demands in terms of computing power the MLAA are still high: why so far only been used on the PlayStation 3. However, the same algorithm is going to be brought on PC and Xbox360 with a variant called Jimenez MLAA, named after its creator Jorge Jimenez.