Nvidia Researching SRAA (Subpixel Reconstruction AntiAliasing)

[Squall Leonhart]

Quote:It seems that Nvidia is researching a new antialiasing technology to compete with AMD's MLAA (Morphological Anti-Aliasing). Nvidia has published the following abstract from its research: "Subpixel Reconstruction Antialiasing (SRAA) combines single-pixel (1x) shading with subpixel visibility to create antialiased images without increasing the shading cost. SRAA targets deferred-shading renderers, which cannot use multisample antialiasing. SRAA operates as a post-process on a rendered image with superresolution depth and normal buffers, so it can be incorporated into an existing renderer without modifying the shaders.

In this way SRAA resembles Morphological Antialiasing (MLAA), but the new algorithm can better respect geometric boundaries and has fixed runtime independent of scene and image complexity. SRAA benefits shading-bound applications. For example, our implementation evaluates SRAA in 1.8 ms (1280x720) to yield antialiasing quality comparable to 4-16x shading. Thus SRAA would produce a net speedup over supersampling for applications that spend 1 ms or more on shading; for comparison, most modern games spend 5-10 ms shading. We also describe simplifications that increase performance by reducing quality."

The benefits of MLAA without the Blurring Deficits.

The source of most graphical issues with MLAA come from a lack of subpixel reads, which results in warped pixels (if anyone remembers, its also why the PSX has warping pixels the missing z buffer also plays a part in the case of the PSX though).