Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

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 Sad

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

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! :-)

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!

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 Sad

I'll leave it in a Spoiler to avoid visually cluttering this thread:

Spoiler: (Show Spoiler)

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?".

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.

@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

@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. Wink

(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.

@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. Wink

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

Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

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