RG/SGSSAA

[Gabbyjay]

SGSSAA looks better in the pictures (and much more so in motion), cause MSAA does not affect textures, it leaves em alone.
It also depends on the game/scene how much this is visible.

About the AMD Cards:It's SGSSAA.
But i can't tell you much about how and if it works with AMD cards with Dolphin, as i only own an nVidia card at the moment.

Dont know why its converted to jpg, i uploaded em as PNG as you said earlier. Sigh

[xemnas]

Thanks for the information. I'll try it sometime.

[Gabbyjay]

Another two examples where you can see a moiree effect (blue fields at circle/arrow the top) and the texture (anti-)aliasing (floor at the bottom circle):

http://imgur.com/DPnKQY9&AXdMvsx&TLulFXZ#1

http://imgur.com/DPnKQY9&AXdMvsx&TLulFXZ#2

Also, pay attention to the vertical piece of track right of the blue square, or the bright yellow bar left of it!

SGSSAA works like magic in this game, especially if you see it in motion.


Edit:
SGSSAA would look with even better with higher internal resolutions, so please, add a custom IR option! :-)

[Gabbyjay]

It's amazing how well even the 4xSGSSAA mode performs against the 9xOGSSAA mode, not only regarding edges, but also on textures.

I always thought an ordered grid would perform better on textures as the information per pixel is higher and the distance between pixels is larger.

What i did not think of is that many, many times, textures also have straight lines on it!
On these, the SG works far better then the OG, so the 4xSG mode can actually look better on textures then 9xOG, while also fighting moiree patterns more effective.

I like it!

[Shonumi]

Since you do no feel like continuing the discussion we started, feel free to ignore the following part. The part below this may have some points you wish to discuss since they are somewhat outside the scope of our lengthy debate and others would find them interesting. I already wrote all of this by the time I came back to your post though I'll leave it in a Spoiler to avoid visually cluttering this thread:

Spoiler: (Show Spoiler)

Gabbyjay Wrote:I already gave an example where more subpixels (4x, 9x and 16x OGSSAA) and/or higher physical resolution (4K) do not take care of the problem.

Not enough for you, but what does that matter? You've already claimed nothing currently available would ever be "perfect" for you, thus nothing can ever really "take care of the problem". This is subjective based on how sensitive you are to aliasing. To my eyes, 4x SGSSAA looks good enough and takes care of the problem. In other cases I imagine 9xSSAA will be enough in combination with a high DPI, Retina-like display. Take the examples you posted for Super Mario Galaxy 2. This is a comparison I took at 4x IR:

SMG 2 - 4x IR + 4xSSAA

If I sit normally in front of my monitor, I can't tell how different they are. I have to lean in close to inspect the actual differences. To me, I cannot largely distinguish the difference between 4xSGSSAA and the 4xSSAA Dolphin implements through OpenGL, not unless I zoom in (at least 400%) on the screenshots. They're even closer when you factor in downsampling to 1080p (which I have not taken a screenshot of, this is a raw screenshot from 4x IR). In that case, with downsampling I could barely see any aliasing even when I leaned in.

I have to try very hard to note any difference in the geometry anti-aliasing. I can say that 9xSSAA would most likely be enough to take care of whatever aliasing is left for me to detect. This may not be the case for you, but sitting here in front of my computer, I can't see (literally) how the problem won't be taken care of in the future, especially when either 4xSGSSAA or Dolphin's 4xSSAA do the job now. Your eyes may vary, but I can't see SGSSAA making a notable difference in IQ in Dolphin. It does have a better IQ yes, (looking at the images at extremely close reveals this to me) but it's just not enough for me say it's significant enough.

Gabbyjay Wrote:Irregularity.

Moires discussed later below. It's awkward trying to talk about them in two different places.

Gabbyjay Wrote:The term "high DPI" does not equal "Retina level category".

You miss the fact that I've been clarifying, constantly, that when I'm speaking about high DPI displays, I'm talking about displays with a DPI of 220+. "High DPI" is broad term, but for the purpose of this discussion, I have clearly been iterating that when I say high DPI displays, I mean 220+ DPI displays, not something else. That number has come up more than once and for a good reason.

Gabbyjay Wrote:I dont know what experience you have with large screens, but you cannot imagine how disturbing the aliasing effect gets as you multiply the screen size.

As long as the resolution before scaling the image (say, from a game) is fairly low, that's going to be the case when upsampling. If you render the image at a higher resolution closer to the displays actual resolution, you're going to reduce aliasing.

Gabbyjay Wrote:No, it isnt.
Mario Galaxy 2 won't even run with 4xSSAA in full speed @ 4xIR in Dolphin 4.0. And that is 5120x4224.
9xSSAA @ 3xIR would be 5760x4608.

Again, keeping this discussion more organized, your results are discussed below.

Gabbyjay Wrote:Erm... no. Not true.

How is not true? Up until now, there has been little discussion about it; hardly any one talked about it. People were not motivated to ask for it.

Gabbyjay Wrote:As you can see in this thread, if you show em the benefits (higher IQ and far lower performance hit), more and more people agree. It's only about information.
It is the same thing as everywhere in the world: People do not realize how it can be, because what they have is all that they know.

Again, simply because they had no idea that something like SGSSAA existed doesn't mean they couldn't have said "the AA available isn't enough, I want something better". You don't have to know something better actually exists to know that you want it, or even muster up and start talking about it. Those kinds of discussion did not happen here. This is the first major discussion I can find that's been so lengthy or in-depth.

Gabbyjay Wrote:First, show em a few comparison screens. In this thread, several people, some of them "firts timers", agreed with me that 8xSGSSAA looks better then 9xSSAA, for example.
Now show em the performance impact. 26 FPS vs 38 FPS!
And then ask em about their opinion again: Do you want it or not?

And I disagree. I've seen the comparisons in SMG2, and I don't think SGSSAA is notably different enough for me to want it. As you noted, I'm a first-timer as well. It's not sufficiently distinguishable from SSAA for me it would good. If I cared about performance, I'd just jump down from 9xSSAA to 4xSSAA (assuming 9xSSAA becomes possible on Linux, see belwo), or lighten up the IR in Dolphin. The reduction in quality due to this jump, again, is not enough for my eyes to see or care about unless I examine things extremely close (which I won't be doing during actual gameplay).

Gabbyjay Wrote:For all screen sizes includes devices made for home cinema invironments, such as large TVs and projectors. These are always tied to the content delivering the resolution: Movies on disks. Look at how many years we had the DVD and how many years we have the BluRay. You can imagine the successor of the BluRay won't be exchanged for even another standard for several years again, especially as film studios also need the cameras, the equipment and stuff for it. Same is true for television broadcasting, which advances even slower. In my country, you can be glad if you even receive 720p!
The situation looks even worse in Stereo 3D. For projectors, you cannot even play @ 1080p in 3D @ 60fps. 720p @ 60Hz in 3D is the max, since the HDMI standard is also advancing slowly.
Next thing are devices such as receivers and amplifiers, who also need to support it. You cannot put a signal through your home cinema receiver if it does not support the standard. All those things need to be switched over.
As you can see it's far more complicated than you seem to think when you consider all screen sizes.

The thing is, 4K content is already widely available via internet sources, the Japanese are experimenting with 4K broadcasts, and Comcast (my TV + internet provider) has begun making 4K content available to its subscribers. If display tech advances are limited by the methods of content delivery, we're going to see 4K getting more prominent and quicker than in the years past. In your country, obviously this is going to take a while for the market to change, but in countries that are traditionally a hot bed for technology, it's coming quickly from where I'm standing.

Gabbyjay Wrote:And higher fps at a higher image quality can be useful for a lot of people, can't it?

Again, usefulness is not the only factor that's considered. Even if it were how does one decide what "a lot of people" is? How do the developers know that it will even be useful to a lot of people in the first place and not something that people don't care for?

Gabbyjay Wrote:We are talking about ONE (!) additional checkbox here, as i already explained!
"Apply SSAA to the whole screen instead of edges only? (higher quality but less performance compared to only MSAA)"
That's all it takes.

And feature creep usually starts with just 1 additional checkbox :/ Adding SGSSAA takes one more checkbox. So do a lot of other additional features people want in Dolphin. When and where do you draw the line between which supposedly useful features need to be added and which don't? They can't all make the cut. That's the reality of modern software development; developers have to decide which features can or can't be included.

Gabbyjay Wrote:See above, SGSSAA for example is a thing a lot of people can benefit from.

Determine what "a lot of people" is. Most people may already have an AA setup that already provides the wanted IQ/performance ratio and find SGSSAA uninteresting. How do you determine how many people stand to benefit and how many would not?

Gabbyjay Wrote:You are claiming that emulation accuracy as close to the original system has higher priority then rendering accuracy.

Yes, it is. The devs have said as much to me personally before. They want Dolphin to be as accurate an emulator as they can make it. Enhancements and the like are secondary concerns for the project, not a primary goal.

Gabbyjay Wrote:So who are you to judge what is more important here

I'm someone who's had conversations with the devs, and these are the people who decide what's important enough and what's not for Dolphin. They do care about enhancements (hence the fact that they're available at all) but accuracy is something the project strives for above other concerns.

Gabbyjay Wrote:And i would think that those people would love a feature that not only works at a lower performance hit, but at even better IQ at the same time.

Not unless you buy them newer CPUs or GPUs. A lot of the people who come here wanting Dolphin to perform better on their hardware either are CPU bottlenecked or their GPU is not strong enough to run games at 1x IR without slowing down (mostly IGPs, like some of Intel's HD IGPs). For those GPU bottlenecked, these aren't the people who have hardware to be running any kind of AA. They can't run the game at the GC/Wiis native res even when AA is disabled, so I don't think they're the type looking for advanced AA in the form of SGSSAA.

Gabbyjay Wrote:Is that so? Why? Cause your grandma cannot use the Dolphin emulator anymore? Go and play on the original console then, if emulation is too complicated.

It's not about the complexity of the options themselves; it's horrible software design to load your program with too many features, regardless of how they'll be used (or not) by users. It leads to cluttered interfaces and it's a complete pain in terms of code maintainence. It leads to bloat, possibly redundant code, lack of code control, and can drag the scope of the program towards off-track from its goals (which again is pain when it comes to maintaining it).

Gabbyjay Wrote:But I think you can deal with an additional checkbox.

And then deal with another. And another. And another. And then, feature creep. If one feature gets added solely on the basis that it might potentially be useful to anyone, what's to stop the next feature that's just as potential from being added? Where do you stop? This is a very real problem both in hobbyist and professional software development. If you don't believe me, go ask neobrain himself as to why he's generally against adding more checkboxes.

Gabbyjay Wrote:Not even about the difference in FPS?

No. I discussed it thoroughly with them, and we had the consensus between us that the AA options already available to us satisfied out IQ/performance needs.

Gabbyjay Wrote:It's the lack of information. As you can see even some devs have no clue about it. Hope this is about to change.

Not really. It's not necessarily the lack of information. It's not hard for ordinary users or the devs to wonder if something better exists and then start discussions based around that.

Gabbyjay Wrote:So naturally, there are more users asking something like "hey, i see there's an option x working on all my PC games, could you make this possible in Dolphin as well?" if they can see it in the drivers. This is not the case with SGSSAA!

Makes sense, doesnt it?

But it doesn't take users asking specifically for SGSSAA to bring up a discussion about advanced AA and if it can be implemented in Dolphin. They could have no idea what SGSSAA is at all, but still ask the devs for something better than MSAA and SSAA. The fact is that there was not a great deal of discussion about the subject of advanced AA. Most users didn't care enough to ask.

Gabbyjay Wrote:More users can take advantage of it.

That they can doesn't mean they will though. Again, it's a consideration that must be taken during software development.

Gabbyjay Wrote:So you admit there are features added without having a certain "majority" in mind.
Why should this not be the case with SGSSAA?

If you'd actually been reading my posts, I've already stated this several times before :| Minority/majority opinions aren't the sole deciding factor, nor have I said they were. As I've also said many times before, they nonetheless weigh heavily in the decision process. Several graphics devs see no reason to include it in Dolphin. Perhaps it is percisely because they don't feel enough users would appreciate it being available in Dolphin, or they feel it's better off left in the drivers. Whichever reason it may be, they don't see the value it brings to the emulator. You've asked me plenty of times why shouldn't SGSSAA be included in Dolphin regardless of how many users would take advantage of it, but strangely never the devs themselves, who are in control of Dolphin's development.

Gabbyjay Wrote:Think of a curved line on a LC Display.

- snip -

But this is not even necessary.
It's already enough if you agree that you definitely just cannot be certain that 9xSSAA at a certain DPI level will take care of all visible aliasing.

Well, see I took you up on your advice, and I tried it for myself in Dolphin. In Xenoblade Chronicles, the rope bridges provide excellent examples of moire patterns. You can see it clearly, especially at oblique angles. It's also very noticeable when you move the camera a lot. The following pictures compare 3x IR + No AA, 4x IR + No AA, and 4x IR + 4xSSAA:

3x IR + No AA
4x IR + No AA
4x IR + 4xSSAA

The first two did not get rid of the moire patterns at all, and in fact I didn't see much improvement that a higher IR had, even when downsampled to 1080p. Contrast this with the last. To me, personally, this image quality is very satisfactory; the moire patterns are eliminated from every angle I tried to view the bridges, not to mention the patterns themselves didn't crawl during motion like they did before. If 4xSSAA already works for me, you can't say that I'm not certain 9xSSAA in combination with a higher DPI display than the one I have now will take care of all visible aliasing. Something less already does the job Is it enough to please you? I don't know, but it certainly works for me, and in fact I'm quite pleased that I discovered this (I have not looked at SSAA seriously until very recently).

Gabbyjay Wrote:This is already enough for the original statement "you guys gonna give a shit" to be not true.

Paul's original statement was actually "you guys are gonna stop giving a shit about any variety of AA more specific than '9x SSAA'" when we get high resolution and high DPI displays. I can say this will be true enough for me once I get the hardware, and you've already said this wouldn't be so for yourself.

Gabbyjay Wrote:Erm - it was you claiming that it is only few people wanting it. Not me claiming more people like me exist, I'm just saying you don't know if it's only a few people just by looking at this forum.

Did I ever say you claimed that? No. I'm merely pointing out that such an argument can't be made, which is altogether different from saying you've made the argument already. I've said repeatedly that few people have vocalized their desire for advanced AA methods in Dolphin, which is still true. Few people want SGSSAA or any other advanced AA methods in Dolphin enough to ask for them. Again, not knowing about whether such AA methods exist is not enough to stop people from asking for something better.

Gabbyjay Wrote:Cause i dont claim to know if certain users are a minority or majority?

Because you don't know common things about community (the Dolphin devs focus on accuracy as a priority, the reason why Lock Threads To Cores was removed, the fact that many people choose to stay on older revisions because that is their only current option).

Gabbyjay Wrote:Again, is a feature providing better IQ at lower FPS hit useful, or not?

Not to everyone in every scenario. Again 4xSSAA at 3x IR provides the IQ I need, and its performance is not a concern for the games I play. Could I get better performance? Sure, but it's not going to make any difference to me. My GTX 550 Ti is already silent, the temps stay stable, and the FPS is steady. That's all I care about.

Gabbyjay Wrote:My point is, it makes no sense to say "People who wanna use this feature can still use older revisions, so we can remove it". If there is no reason other than "only a minority uses it", then why remove it? That don't make sense, as their revision will be heavily outdated one day.

Yet that's the way the developers have operated for a long time now. If people need to stay on older revisions, that's their problem when it officially becomes outdated. The forum policy is to support the latest stable build (currently 4.0) all the way up to the latest development build. If users require an older revision, they have to deal with not getting support other than advice on upgrading Dolphin itself or the hardware. We aren't looking to still support things as old as R6515 because it has an option or feature (like speed) that was essential to some users. If you think that's not the way it should be, talk to the devs. Most of them are on Dolphin's IRC channels (#dolphin-emu on irc.freenode.net) or available via PM.

Gabbyjay Wrote:Perhaps until then, there will be some new techniques other then anti aliasing which require a LOT of new hardware power, and again you will be happy if you can save it in some other region? Do you know for sure?

Yes I know for sure better efficiency doesn't appeal to me. I already said 3x IR and 4xSSAA was well enough for me. If something gave me similar results but used less of my GPU, it wouldn't matter to me in the least. Why? My GPU wouldn't be quieter than it already is (barely audible as is), my games wouldn't run any faster (already fullspeed, that's as much as I want), and as for power savings, I'm not really the one paying the electric bill at my house (and my parents haven't complained yet about my gaming habits).

Gabbyjay Wrote:You have not even tried SGSSAA yet! you are only talking about something you do know almost nothing about. I will make some screenshots especially for you later.
Good chance that you don't wanna get back, if your system can handle it. Why should you? It makes textures look better, it makes foilage like trees and grass a LOT better, it fights interrupted lines like that are less then 1 pixel wide like cables and fine lines, it gives more detail and it essential fights all forms of aliasing we encounter here. If you don't have the hardware power to use it, you can still uncheck it and revert back to MSAA. Isn't it nice to have the option?

Simply because I have not tried it doesn't mean I don't know what it looks like when it's doing its job. I saw BONKERS' video (not sure he posted it here, but it's online somewhere) comparing no AA to SGSSAA on the game Dead Island. Yes, I could tell the difference it makes, especially the scene where he went into the bathroom (the fine lines between the tiles "flickered" with no AA, but were smooth with SGSSAA). Still, I don't play many PC games though. I play Dolphin, so I have to go by my personal experiences in Dolphin. From what I can tell 3x IR + 4xSSAA is perfect for me in all regards (IQ, performance, hardware noise and temps). 9xSSAA would only be that much better for me. There's no such thing as Nvidia Inspector for Linux, so I can't try either 9xSSAA or any form of SGSSAA through my drivers. But still, I have no interest in SGSSAA over SSAA. Is it nice for others. For some people it could be, but for me the answer is not really.

Gabbyjay Wrote:Wouldn't you agree, number one?

It certainly sounds better than saying "you guys won't give a shit about ... " But it's not just edge aliasing (geometry aliasing) that SSAA does a good job of taking care of. It also takes care of shadows, textures, and in my experience does a fine job of getting rid of moires. At 4xSSAA, it's the perfect performance ratio for me, so I can say that 9xSSAA will be more enough for me (overkill), and given what I've talked about with my gaming co-workers, it will at least be the same for others. For others like yourself, as I've said you've proven beforehand, there will others who prefer advanced AA regardless. Paul's statement should be amending to be more accurate, yes, but keep in mind there are people like myself where 4xSSAA and 9xSSAA are enough for all of our needs, just as SGSSAA is enough for all of your needs (for the time being now, we all could always want something even better in the future).

Gabbyjay Wrote:No. Cause there are a LOT things i can think of.

That was a rethorical question really (you weren't supposed to answer it) :|

Gabbyjay Wrote:What i wanna say is that there are SO many people involved in the scene that do it out of interest or that love their hobby (consoles and emulation), and a really really hope some of Dolphin's developers fall into that cathegory as well and are not as majority or number-orientated as you are trying to tell.

Dolphin has a lot of developers like that, who do it to learn about the console's hardware and enjoy a bit of programming, for fun or for a challenge. That's why I joined the Gekko emu project (another GC emulator, we're not too far along in our progress however). What I've been trying to tell you is that the Dolphin developers do take into consideration how many people they think will be affected by the changes they make to the emulator. Given their role as devs, it's a responsibility they have to the community surrounding the emulator. They have to decide which features are going to be included and which ones excluded; this process affects you and me. One of the factors (again there are more) is how many people they feel a change will benefit or harm. It's unavoidable when you have a project this large used by so many different people.

Gabbyjay Wrote:That is absolutely not logical.

This is not illogical in any way. The degasus himself said he'd rather do something else to improve AA than add more AA options (although he mistakenly though SGSSAA as a form of MSAA), which means just what I said: the devs don't care about if RG/SGSSAA adds flexibility to performance and IQ. Delroth has implied that the only way this is going to happen is if someone gets up and starts writing to necessary code; this means none of them care enough about RG/SGSSAA to start implementing it now. About the check box, I have already said my part on that (see above).

---

Now, about things you might like to discuss:

Gabbyjay Wrote:Please note:
1) This is just a random scene, it is NOT the scene where FPS drop the most!
I know several scenes where minimum FPS drop even further, to 20 FPS and below.
I can take screenshots of that too, no problem. Tell me if you want that.
And i have not really played much of this game yet, in fact i have not even beaten the first castle.
There are MANY levels in this game, where FPS can drop even further.

2) That it's a continous succession of frames, as you can tell by the movement of the birds in the background!

http://i.imgur.com/XloSMnq.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/3yg7u0f.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/DVu64l4.jpg

Sure you could say i manipulated em, but then again you could also manipulate a video...
But I will even make a video if you tell me what (free) program to record em you want.

First, thanks for taking the time to do this. I'm not doubting your results; screenshots are an accepted form of evidence here (our CPU benchmark relies on them), so your results are very much welcome. Like I said, we don't have many GTX Titan users. Any info is going to help us. I guess 4x IR + 9xSSAA is too much to ask for at this time. You're literally generating an image that's 12 times as great as 1x IR. Even so, the speeds are more impressive than some might realize. Half-speed at that resolution on one of the most demanding games in Dolphin is nothing to laugh at. I know you said it drops more than that, but at least we have some evidence of what the Titan is capable of on record.

Gabbyjay Wrote:Sure i can, as soon as if you believe me I don't lie to you about the frame rates. Cause it's a lot of work to do this, take the screenies, upload em and post em, so i dont wanna do this for 10000 different settings.

For me, it is enough if you believe me: SMG2 won't run at full speed at 4xIR and 9xSSAA, not even nearly playable, fps drops to 20fps and lower (perhaps much lower in later stages as Im only at the beginning yet).

I clearly said that my intentions in asking what your GPU could handle were not somehow attempts to make it look like you're lying. All I want is to get my hands on some real-world data, which you've kindly done so far. If you please could, I would be interested in 3x IR + 9xSSAA. If Linux ever gets 9xSSAA through drivers, I'd probably use that at the most, but for now 4xSSAA is where I'm comfortable at. Still, I'd like to know how Dolphin treats the best GPU available now at this resolution. Also, do you have any other games to test? I saw you posted some F-Zero GX screens. That, and any other games you have would be appreciated.

Out of curiosity, I got Dolphin to render a scene at 9x IR in SMG2 (no AA) and downsample it to 1080p. This is the equivalent of generating an image 9 times the size of 1x IR, which simulates the demands Dolphin would have on a GPU running 3x IR with 9xSSAA (the IQ is less though with 9x IR, I think because of the effects of downsampling). My GPU was barely standing (hey, it's only a mid-level GPU, and it's not getting any newer...) It dropped quite a bit in some cases (10~15 FPS usually), but some levels were actually 25~29 FPS. I'm sure you GTX Titan can handle this; I just want to find out.

Gabbyjay Wrote:You will see the difference, the second image is not as blocky as the first. But again i tell you, the aliasing effect only really appears in motion!

Again, thanks for sharing more data. To me the difference is most prominent on the upper left hand side, where you can see the track changes course. I guess that's just my eyes; the aliasing is still visible there when set to 8xMSAA, so that's why I see so much change there when I view the other picture. You used no AF correct? If this is the case, then this really is a good example of texture AA. Most of the time I'm able to ignore it, but it seems to me that most moires and such come from textures when it comes to gaming in Dolphin.

Gabbyjay Wrote:With 9xSSAA, the aliasing is actually so bad that I doubt it is even working with FZGX. At least not with the settings i used.

Really? I have this game, but I have not dumped it to play in Dolphin, and of course I cannot force 9xSSAA to test for myself. I'd like to see an example of how bad it is in this game if you get the time.

Gabbyjay Wrote:Dont know why its converted to jpg, i uploaded em as PNG as you said earlier.

Ah, just to let you know, imgur turns PNGs into JPGs if they're larger than a certain filesize. I would suggest using a site like Minus, since it has a nice interface and does not have that restriction.

Gabbyjay Wrote:SGSSAA would look with even better with higher internal resolutions, so please, add a custom IR option! :-)

I think they've told us the reason was that no one could come up with a decent GUI setup. Personally, I don't think it's that hard, but I wasn't present when they were discussing any of it. For now, I just hack the source code (really, changing one character of one line in one file) and recompile Dolphin from source. I hard-code 1x IR to something else (5x IR, 9x IR, anything) since I don't use 1x IR at all :p

Gabbyjay Wrote:What i did not think of is that many, many times, textures also have straight lines on it!
On these, the SG works far better then the OG, so the 4xSG mode can actually look better on textures then 9xOG, while also fighting moiree patterns more effective.

Yes, as I said above, I found out that many of the moire patterns I find come from textures in the games that I play. It makes sense when you think about where you should look (stairs are often "ramps" with textures fixed on them, metal grating in Metroid Prime, and various other places are likely candidates). You can find a lot more if you know where to look. If I find anymore, I'll post them here if you're interested in testing them in SGSSAA. I'm certainly glad that you (and some others? xemnas?) have found something that works for you. I still can't find myself disappointed with 4xSSAA so I will stick to that, but I actually really appreciated you showing us all of this (don't get the wrong impression from our previous discussion). Think of it this way, I didn't have any interest in SSAA until this thread made me ask "where's my ideal performance/IQ ratio?".

[AnyOldName3]

A few things:

I once asked why D3D11 only had MSAA. I was told that they basically used a function which basically goes D3D.setAntiAliasing(x), where x is the number of samples. This mean that the AA code took up a grand total of one line, and so is used for simplicity. It only supports MSAA, though.

imgur doesn't actually do anything to images less than 5MB, which is quite a lot. The do sometimes append .jpg onto random images, though, but they still are in their original format. Either that, or the JPEG format is identical to the GIF format. (Many animated gifs say .jpg on the end.) Also, minus has really poor speeds, so large images and gifs take forever.

People wouldn't have to complain about the AA not being enough, but just too slow. We have had a few more cases of this than we have 'MSAA isn't enough', although it's by far not a large group, and the majority of them were using GPUs that couldn't even handle 1x IR, as Shonumi said.

[Shonumi]

@AON3 - Minus has bad read speeds? It uploads 3MB files in 5 secs for me. The site in general is very responsive. I'd blame your ISP :p

[Gabbyjay]

@Shonomi:
Regarding our discussion, i will leave it at that, as it merely turned into one of these famous "who has the last word"-forum-discussions and is not moving anywhere, it could go on for ages. So instead of theorizing and speculating about a distant future, numbers of users or intentions of developers, I will rather use my time to actually show the advantage of a different sample pattern in practise.

The comparison shot of 8xMSAA vs 8xSGSSAA was with anisotropic filtering turned ON, of course (16x was used).
Without AF, the difference would be easier to see, but i dont want purely academic comparisons here, i want to compare real worlds scenarios and as AF has such a low performance hit, I have it almost always turned on and at the max.

It should be noted that OGSSAA does have it advantages. I already explained that as best as i could on page 2 in my first posting in this thread.
It depends on the game, the scene, the system used (consoles, emulators, PC), your PC-hardware used, your settings and your personal priorities if the advantages of OGSSAA (slightly better filtering of textures at the shimmering limit) are worth it's downsides (less EER at the same or even at a higher sample count, ineffective against moirees, inflexibility as only 4x and 9x are used in practise).

I am no way speaking out against OGSSAA, i am just pointing out a few advantages of SGSSAA that can be worth having it as an alternative.
(Especially as in Dolphin's DX11's plugin, you don't have any other option for FSAA for now.)


Another thing to consider is that we have an emulator here, lots of things are different.
Please consider that OGSSAA activated directly in Dolphin (only possible in DX9 and OGL for now) rises the internal resolution the game is rendered in. That is the way OGSSAA works, it get's it subpixels from rendering at a higher resolution and then downscaling.

This consideration could play a role in the rare case where you find that you are actually UP(!)scaling.
That means, you play at an internal resolution that is lower (!) than your display's resolution and then the image get upscaled.
I encountered this problem when playing at 3840x2160 display resolution.
Setting the internal resolution to 4x results in an internal resolution of 2560x2112 pixels.
Those 2560x2112 pixels will be upscaled to 3840x2160 then. It will result in a blurry image!
If you apply 9xSSAA on it, the following happens:
The internal resolution of 2560x2112 is rendered 9x, resulting in 7680x6336 pixels. Those pixels then get downscaled to 3840x2160, resulting in an image that looks as it should be, as no upscaling happens.
Setting Dolphin's internal resolution to "auto window size" solves this problem:r The image does not have to be upscaled and so, it is not blurry anymore.
So when Dolphin and you wanna use SGSSAA instead of OGSSAA, make sure the internal resolution is same as or higher then the display's native resolution. Keep that in mind when using a 4K capable Display.

I could be wrong here, as this is rather complicated maths;
but i see this as a reason to include custom internal resolutions in Dolphin as i said in the other thread.

Because as shown there are cases where you want to use an internal resolution higher then the display's native resolution to avoid upscaling, but you still want to keep it a multiple of the 1xoriginal resolution.
For 4K Displays, 4xIR is not enough, so adding a custom option would solve this problem once and for all.
I'm sure the UI-problems can be taken care of.

[AnyOldName3]

(10-07-2013, 12:43 AM)Shonumi Wrote: @AON3 - Minus has bad read speeds? It uploads 3MB files in 5 secs for me. The site in general is very responsive. I'd blame your ISP :p

There's a good reason why 3/4 of the comments on any given minus post to reddit are "Why didn't you use imgur? Minus takes too long to load." It isn't just my ISP, it's practically everyone's.

[Shonumi]

@Gabbyjay - Yeah I heard from NaturalViolence that SSAA was broken in DX9 and looks blurry in OpenGL if you have your IR set to anything other than Auto (Window Size). I did not see it being blurry unless I went below 2x IR (this is really noticeable, it even lowers the IQ dramatically) but 3x and above seemed to be okay. I don't know what's going on with that.

By the way, OpenGL supports SSAA too (this was added not too long ago). Just to make sure this would be OGSSAA or am I talking about something else?

Would like to see more pictures as well, but take your time. It's the weekend and there's no rush.

@AON3 - Well, it's blazing fast on Comcast. Maybe you guys should steal admin89's Internet connection :p