What is SweetFX and what does it do?

[drhycodan]

I see most people are using SweetFX in the screens thread to run their games. I don't see anything different about the games, though.

[NaturalViolence]

Have your eyes examined. The effects are usually pretty noticeable. It's basically an injector + configurable shader pack. It allows you to add all sorts of post-processing effects to d3d applications. I personally don't like to use it because I feel that this sort of filtering rarely makes anything look better.

[isamu]

(05-06-2013, 08:50 AM)NaturalViolence Wrote: Have your eyes examined. The effects are usually pretty noticeable. It's basically an injector + configurable shader pack. It allows you to add all sorts of post-processing effects to d3d applications. I personally don't like to use it because I feel that this sort of filtering rarely makes anything look better.

Can you go a bit more into detail regarding what types of post-processing effects it supports? I'd be interested in seeing what it can add to F-Zero GX. Is there a dedicated thread somewhere?

[NaturalViolence]

Just google sweetfx. Or better yet I'll save you some time. Here are the first two results that popped up when I googled it:

http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=376265
http://sweetfx.thelazy.net/

Here are a list of included shaders according to the first link:

Quote:SMAA Anti-aliasing : Anti-aliases the image using the SMAA technique - see http://www.iryoku.com/smaa/
Cartoon : Creates an outline-effect that makes the image look more cartoonish.
Advanced CRT : Mimics the look of an old arcade CRT display.
LumaSharpen : Sharpens the image, making details easier to see
Bloom : Makes strong lights bleed their light into their surroundings
HDR : Mimics an HDR tonemapped look
Technicolor : Makes the image look like it was processed using a three-strip Technicolor process - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technicolor
Cineon DPX : Makes the image look like it was converted from film to Cineon DPX. Can be used to create a "sunny" look.
Monochrome : Removes colors from the image so it appears as if shot on black and white film.
Lift Gamma Gain : Adjust brightness and color of shadows, midtones and highlights (avoids clipping)
Tonemap : Adjust gamma, exposure, saturation, bleach and defog. (may cause clipping)
Vibrance : Intelligently saturates (or desaturates if you use negative values) the pixels depending on their original saturation.
Curves : Contrast adjustments using S-curves.
Sepia : Sepia tones the image - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sepia_tone#Sepia_toning
Vignette : Darkens the edges of the image to make it look more like it was shot with a camera lens. - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vignetting )
Dither : Applies dithering to simulate more colors than your monitor can display. This lessens banding artifacts - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ditheri...age_processing )
Border : Makes the screenedge black as a workaround for the bright edge that forcing some AA modes sometimes causes.
Splitscreen : Enables the before-and-after splitscreen comparison mode.

isamu Wrote:Is there a dedicated thread somewhere?

Not really.

[isamu]

(05-07-2013, 11:09 AM)NaturalViolence Wrote: Just google sweetfx. Or better yet I'll save you some time. Here are the first two results that popped up when I googled it:

http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=376265
http://sweetfx.thelazy.net/

Here are a list of included shaders according to the first link:

Quote:SMAA Anti-aliasing : Anti-aliases the image using the SMAA technique - see http://www.iryoku.com/smaa/
Cartoon : Creates an outline-effect that makes the image look more cartoonish.
Advanced CRT : Mimics the look of an old arcade CRT display.
LumaSharpen : Sharpens the image, making details easier to see
Bloom : Makes strong lights bleed their light into their surroundings
HDR : Mimics an HDR tonemapped look
Technicolor : Makes the image look like it was processed using a three-strip Technicolor process - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technicolor
Cineon DPX : Makes the image look like it was converted from film to Cineon DPX. Can be used to create a "sunny" look.
Monochrome : Removes colors from the image so it appears as if shot on black and white film.
Lift Gamma Gain : Adjust brightness and color of shadows, midtones and highlights (avoids clipping)
Tonemap : Adjust gamma, exposure, saturation, bleach and defog. (may cause clipping)
Vibrance : Intelligently saturates (or desaturates if you use negative values) the pixels depending on their original saturation.
Curves : Contrast adjustments using S-curves.
Sepia : Sepia tones the image - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sepia_tone#Sepia_toning
Vignette : Darkens the edges of the image to make it look more like it was shot with a camera lens. - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vignetting )
Dither : Applies dithering to simulate more colors than your monitor can display. This lessens banding artifacts - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ditheri...age_processing )
Border : Makes the screenedge black as a workaround for the bright edge that forcing some AA modes sometimes causes.
Splitscreen : Enables the before-and-after splitscreen comparison mode.

isamu Wrote:Is there a dedicated thread somewhere?

Not really.

Thank you so much for the detailed reply man! Great post and very informative! I'm on the Guru forums now learning more about this app. Lots of reading to do lol. Just installed it and will give it a go on Dolphin after I'm done reading some more.

[MayImilae]

http://www.iryoku.com/smaa/

That link goes nowhere. SSAA is Super Sample Anti-Aliasing, and MSAA is Multi-Sampling Anti-Aliasing. What the hell is SMAA?

EDIT: Subpixel Morphological Antialiasing. Way to go google cache. Though I don't know why the full version of the cache is still rerouted. http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:nf7nuLH-NtYJ:www.iryoku.com/smaa/&hl=en&gl=us&strip=1

[NaturalViolence]

Well it's not my link, I just quoted the article.

Basically it's a modified version of the FXAA shader first developed by timothy lottes (which is opensource thankfully) made by a different author. It supposedly improves upon the original designs image quality. Although the performance hit of the two has never been directly compared to my knowledge. They're both fairly simple post-processing shaders so they should both have a very low performance hit. It is noticeably sharper than FXAA and most enthusiasts prefer it over FXAA.

Rant: (Show Spoiler)

Unfortunately due to their open source nature, easy integration into virtually any engine on any platform, and extremely minimal performance hit FXAA/SMAA have basically completely replaced other AA methods in most modern video games despite their noticeably poorer image quality. They also caused Nvidia to stop working on SRAA which in my opinion was a much better route to take. But apparently developers were too lazy to implement MSAA let alone SRAA. EA DICE and crytek were the only companies even willing to implement SRAA into their engines so nvidia just canned it.

[MayImilae]

Gods dammit I hate iryoku.com. Of course I find an article on SRAA there and of course it's broken. Oh well, to google cache! http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:jar8lAWwDvAJ:iryoku.com/aacourse/downloads/07-SRAA-Subpixel-Reconstruction-Anti-Aliasing.pptx+&cd=8&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

Subpixel Reconstruction Anti-aliasing eh? Considering the context, I'm assuming it's another way of cheating, like FXAA. But how would that be better? Could it actually compare to MSAA or SSAA in quality?

[NaturalViolence]

Well it looks like both the nvidia research paper and timothy lottes blog post on SRAA are down for some reason. So unfortunately I can't show you the good white paper. But here's an inferior version made for ID311 (this will take a really long time to download on your 56k connection): http://graphics.cs.williams.edu/papers/SRAAI3D11/sraa-talk.pdf

And a much shorter research paper: http://graphics.cs.williams.edu/papers/SRAAI3D11/Chajdas11SRAA.pdf

Some comparison images that I could find:
http://static.giantbomb.com/uploads/scale_super/1/10355/1722211-bf3_ps3_image_sraa.jpg
http://www.battlefield3.nl/images/sraa3.jpg

The nvidia whitepaper had some really good comparison images. Unfortunately every trace of it seems to have been obliterated from the web.

And a quick summary from the abstract section:

Quote:Subpixel Reconstruction Antialiasing (SRAA) combines singlepixel (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 super-resolution 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 (1280×720) 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.

It's not as good as SSAA in image quality. Nothing is. But it easily beats MSAA in image quality while maintaining a similar performance hit.

[AnyOldName3]

SSAA FTW. Shame a GTX Titan isn't under £100.