(03-11-2014, 12:36 PM)NaturalViolence Wrote: Wind waker is probably the one exception since it uses a two pass rendering system to create the DoF effect. I don't know of any games that would see a similar benefit.
Just about every game sees benefits from this. AA is more efficient yes but at the cost of quality, and when you have performance overhead anyway it's better to downsample and get the best quality you can.
Any game that isn't sprite based will absolutely have huge benefits from downsampling, it's the entire philosophy behind the fantastic PC tool GeDoSaTo which lets you render at any arbitrary resolution and it scales the image down to your PC screen.
Also, most forms of AA don't work in every scenario, and even ones that work well in stills will be shimmery in motion.
Here's an example of downsampling vs 8xMSAA
And that's not even showing off the huge difference in image stability between the two.
Here's another example, where there are fences behind fences.
The MSAA one is barely even recognizable as fences behind fences.
Downsampling absolutely provides huge benefits outside of typical AA's abilities, allowing much better texture clarity, less shimmering, and a huge reduction in aliasing.