Intel Conservative Morphological Anti-Aliasing

[Lurka]

Hello,
Intel Graphics 520 features "Conservative Morphological Anti-Aliasing" as a replacement/override option for MSAA.
How does that interact with Dolphin's MSAA or SSAA? What settings do you suggest for Dolphin?



Thank you and goodbye,
Lurka

[AnyOldName3]

Driver-forced AA of any kind tends to upset Dolphin, so there's a good chance that things will break if you try and use it.

CMAA is a morphological technique, so it works by finding patterns in the final image that have certain features and then transplanting detail from a look-up table into the image. It's completely different to MSAA and SSAA, which render the original image with more detail in the first place. Dolphin has FXAA, yet another type of post-process AA, available as a post-processing option if you want some AA with a small performance hit, but for whatever reason SMAA (which is similar to CMAA except for being better and often faster) isn't available in the same dropdown.

[KHg8m3r]

Forcing graphics options from the driver is almost always a bad idea for Dolphin because it doesn't render games like traditional PC game. Also Intel drivers are known to have issues and not perform well, so I'd say let Dolphin take care of everything.

edit: ninja'd

[AnyOldName3]

It might be a good idea to suggest to one of the devs who knows about the relevant part of Dolphin that SMAA be included as a post-processing filter, as it's the only post-process AA that produces good results without appearing to blur anything.

[Dwedit]

Dolphin uses a sort of SSAA anyway, it needs to downsample 1440 scanlines down to 1080.

[Helios]

Dolphin will use a billinear filter to downsample to the correct resolution of your display. This is why we recommend using the SSAA option instead of increasing the IR to significantly higher resolution than your display. The driver absolutely has a better filter. We could implement a better filter and get rid of SSAA options entirely, which would be my preference. Fewer options for users to trip over when IR should ideally be able to do what most users are trying to do.

[Nintendo Maniac 64]

While I agree that a better downsampling filter would be ideal, the whole point CMAA (along with the likes of FXAA and SMAA) is that they're very non-demanding on the GPU, and obviously SSAA is literally the most demanding type of AA possible.

So as AnyOldName3 mentioned, it would make sense to try to get the ball rolling on getting SMAA implemented into Dolphin seeing as it's commonly touted as a better-quality alternative to FXAA with minimal extra performance hit, and obviously Dolphin already has support for FXAA.