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lazy_boy
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Crysis 3

Sat Feb 23, 2013 3:07 am

Hi

Currently I'm playing Crysis 3 using Nivida GTX 680 how i'm not sure which anti-analising option to choice (e:g FXAA, MSAA, SMAA....etc), obviously I want the best option.

What do you guys think?
 
ClickClick5
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Re: Crysis 3

Sat Feb 23, 2013 3:12 am

Well, FXAA is Nvidia's AA type, MSAA is AMD's. As for SMAA....never heard of it till just now. I would say use what looks the best to you, with the best performance that you accept.

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JohnC
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Re: Crysis 3

Sat Feb 23, 2013 3:25 am

Try using TXAA. It should give best performance/quality ratio on Nvidia's cards.
http://www.geforce.com/landing-page/txaa
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auxy
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Re: Crysis 3

Sat Feb 23, 2013 6:14 am

ClickClick5 wrote:
Well, FXAA is Nvidia's AA type, MSAA is AMD's. As for SMAA....never heard of it till just now. I would say use what looks the best to you, with the best performance that you accept.

This is quite nifty: http://www.iryoku.com/smaa/
No, no, no, no.
Since I see a lot of confusion on the topic, here's some information about AA.
AA stands for Anti-Aliasing. All of these are techniques to reduce Aliasing, which, in this case, is when you have pixels that end up the "wrong" color due to a lack of precision, thus causing jagged edges ("jaggies"), shimmering, moire patterns, and other artifacts. Aliasing is jarring, distracting, and just plain ugly. The best way to reduce aliasing is to simply increase the rendering resolution, but that's usually not an option these days, thanks to the pathetically low DPI of most monitors.

There are a lot of types of AA, and those types often have subtypes. Most anti-aliasing techniques these days are what we refer to as "FSAA", or "Full-Scene Anti-Aliasing", meaning they apply to the whole displayed area, or the whole "scene". There are also AA methods that only apply to parts of the scene. I'll talk about those later.

Common types of FSAA:
  • SSAA: Super-Sampling AA. Super-Sampling works by literally rendering the object (in this case, the whole scene) at a higher resolution, then downscaling it intelligently to preserve more precision. There are various types of this, mostly revolving around what kind of subsampling the graphics card does to create the final image from the super-sampled image. Super-Sampling yields the very best results, but as it is essentially equivalent to raising the rendering resolution, it exponentially increases the requirements from the GPU's ROPs and memory bandwidth, thus making it extremely taxing.
  • MSAA: Multi-Sampling AA. Multi-Sampling attempts to mimic the results of SSAA by intelligently (in theory) taking multiple samples of each area in the rendered scene to create the pixels that make up the final image. MSAA is not as demanding as SSAA, but doesn't quite look as nice either, and it still carries a heavy performance penalty. Additionally, whereas SSAA will help with virtually any sort of aliasing, MSAA cannot help with a few special conditions, such as textures using alpha (transparencies.) Still, MSAA is usually the best compromise of image quality versus performance. There are MANY types of MSAA, as it has been the dominant type of AA technology in consumer graphics for over a decade.
  • FXAA: Stands for "Fast approXimate AA", and was created by a guy named Timothy Lottes, who is very clever. Basically, instead of doing AA during the middle stages of rendering a scene, he lets the GPU completely composit the scene, and then applies a "fast, approximate" filter to the output that blurs it slightly hiding aliasing artifacts. FXAA has almost no performance impact on modern GPUs, and looks pretty okay in motion. It does have the side effect, however, of blurring everything, and applied too heavily, or improperly, can make it look like someone smeared vaseline over the monitor. It also can blur UI elements, like HUD and menus, if the developer didn't include specific support for it.
  • MLAA/SMAA: These two are "Morphological AA" and "Subpixel Morphological AA". The latter is an evolution of the former, which is itself essentially the same idea as FXAA. SMAA is, in my own personal opinion, far and away the best of the post-processing AA methods; it makes things nice and smooth without adding too much blur, and it usually leaves UI elements alone -- or even makes them look better. FXAA, MLAA, and SMAA are all evolutions of the same idea, however.
  • TXAA: I initially wasn't going to give this its own bullet point, because it's mostly just a type of MSAA, but it warrants mention. TXAA is "Temporal Anti-Aliasing". (Adding an "X" in place of the rest of a word is pretty common practice in English; see the medical abbreviations Hx, Dx, and Sx for history, diagnosis, and symptoms -- not to mention the old standby "xmas".) ATI has or had a form of temporal AA awhile back; I don't know if they're still doing it. Nvidia's TXAA is a little different from AMD's solution in that it combines the vector-based frame blending of regular temporal AA (in other words, smoothing out motion by blending frames) with a simplistic MSAA filter that blurs the crap out of everything. It's more demanding than FXAA and, IMO, looks way worse. It's horrible crap.
It's true that FXAA is "Nvidia's", at least in the sense that they have it built into their driver. However, the algorithm is available, and unless I'm mistaken, it's free for anyone to use. I don't know why you would, though, as SMAA is also free for anyone to use, and in my opinion vastly superior. SMAA does have a slightly heavier performance hit than MLAA -- itself a bit more demanding than FXAA -- but even SMAA is not especially tough. Keep in mind all three of these techniques have variable quality settings that will affect performance more than which filter you use.

There's been a lot of interest lately in these "injectors", which are applications that use virus-like techniques to add code into a game's renderer, input code, and so on. I myself use ENBSeries injector, which can add special effects to a lot of DX9 games, adding an incredible amount of realism to the lighting. However, the relevant one to this discussion is SweetFX. SweetFX has various other effects besides anti-aliasing, but you can disable them with a bit of fiddling. SweetFX supports SMAA and FXAA as of version 2.0; it looks very nice in action. If you're interested in using a newer type of AA (to get anti-aliasing without the big performance hit of MSAA/SSAA) on an older game that doesn't support them, try it out.
HOWEVER, to actually answer OP's question, for Crysis 3, you should use whatever you are comfortable with. Whichever one you think looks the best and gives you the most acceptable framerate. I haven't played Crysis 3, so I don't know what all options it has, but MSAA will probably look the best and run the worst. SMAA should be a happy medium.

[edit]I wrote this assuming that Crysis 3 doesn't support SSAA, but people tell me it does, so SSAA will look the best and run the worst. I still recommend SMAA if it's an option though, unless you have egregiously powerful graphics hardware (e.g. Titan SLI, stuff that will come out long after this post) for the game you're playing. Since nothing qualifies as "egregious" for Crysis 3 right now (and probably won't anytime soon), I'd stick with SMAA. [/edit]
Last edited by auxy on Thu Mar 07, 2013 10:48 pm, edited 2 times in total.
 
flip-mode
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Re: Crysis 3

Sat Feb 23, 2013 9:18 am

auxy wrote:
No, no, no, no.

What are you doing? :-?
 
auxy
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Re: Crysis 3

Sat Feb 23, 2013 2:50 pm

flip-mode wrote:
What are you doing? :-?
I just have a zero tolerance policy for misinformation. I'd even rather things were vague than wrong.
 
flip-mode
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Re: Crysis 3

Sat Feb 23, 2013 3:20 pm

Auxy, first, I'm glad you're here. I've been here for a full decade now. I ask that you try to be polite in your responses to people. It should be absolutely no problem for you to express your opinion politely. At least start out a conversation that way and give it a chance to be friendly. 8) I've seen 10 posts from you now that have made me cringe. Even if you're "right", it's possible to be right and polite!

Secondly, your response to click-click didn't even make sense. What are you saying "no" to? What did click-click say that you disagree with?
 
ClickClick5
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Re: Crysis 3

Sat Feb 23, 2013 3:25 pm

Auxy, you practically said what I said, with more words. My explanation was the rule-of-thumb, while yours was a lecture.
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flip-mode
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Re: Crysis 3

Sat Feb 23, 2013 3:52 pm

ClickClick5 wrote:
Auxy, you practically said what I said, with more words. My explanation was the rule-of-thumb, while yours was a lecture.

That's the same vibe I got! :lol:
 
auxy
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Re: Crysis 3

Sat Feb 23, 2013 4:14 pm

flip-mode wrote:
Auxy, first, I'm glad you're here.
Great! I'm glad to be here!(●´∀`●)
flip-mode wrote:
I've been here for a full decade now. I ask that you try to be polite in your responses to people. It should be absolutely no problem for you to express your opinion politely. At least start out a conversation that way and give it a chance to be friendly. 8) I've seen 10 posts from you now that have made me cringe. Even if you're "right", it's possible to be right and polite!
I don't know what you're talking about! ヘ(。□°)ヘ I think I am polite! Did you think I was rude in some way? I get this a lot. I'm not trying to be offensive! (。 >艸<)
flip-mode wrote:
Secondly, your response to click-click didn't even make sense. What are you saying "no" to? What did click-click say that you disagree with?
ClickClick5 wrote:
Auxy, you practically said what I said, with more words. My explanation was the rule-of-thumb, while yours was a lecture.
Wrong! It's true that we came to the same conclusion: "I would say use what looks the best to you, with the best performance that you accept." However, you said this:
ClickClick5 wrote:
Well, FXAA is Nvidia's AA type, MSAA is AMD's.
Which is both factually wrong and misleading.(ノдヽ) I won't bother explaining how; I think I covered that well enough in my "lecture."

However, I wrote a "lecture" because I see a lot of confusion on the topic and though someone might like a concise, pointed summary of common AA types so that they might take this information forward in the future and spread it to others! ヽ(‘ ∇‘ )ノ
 
flip-mode
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Re: Crysis 3

Sat Feb 23, 2013 4:20 pm

auxy wrote:
Did you think I was rude in some way?
I thought I was pretty clear on that point. I suppose I could write a more thorough lecture on the matter, but I'm going to pass on that. \<(.:.)>/ <- japanese emotion for "I'll pass on that".

I wrote a "lecture" because I see a lot of confusion on the topic

Yeah. If the point of your lecture was to clear up confusion, it didn't do so well. Now that you've explained your lecture it makes more sense.
 
auxy
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Re: Crysis 3

Sat Feb 23, 2013 4:35 pm

flip-mode wrote:
auxy wrote:
Did you think I was rude in some way?
I thought I was pretty clear on that point. I suppose I could write a more thorough lecture on the matter, but I'm going to pass on that. \<(.:.)>/ <- japanese emotion for "I'll pass on that".
HAHA! It's funny because you're referencing a prior conversation we had! I get it! (*≧▽≦)ノシ))
Seriously though I still have no idea how I was being rude.
flip-mode wrote:
Yeah. If the point of your lecture was to clear up confusion, it didn't do so well. Now that you've explained your lecture it makes more sense.
I edited the original post to make it clearer. Is that better? 【・ヘ・?】
 
flip-mode
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Re: Crysis 3

Sat Feb 23, 2013 4:59 pm

Cool, maybe it's a difference of dialect and I'm being too sensitive. (and your edited version has a much more friendly start to it, IMO) :)
 
JohnC
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Re: Crysis 3

Sat Feb 23, 2013 5:40 pm

That's a lot of text to quote on smartphone, so not gonna do it... But I disagree about TXAA being a "horrible crap" - yes, it adds in a slight blur to whole image but much less so than FXAA, especially if the game itself supports it. It's a good alternative to MSAA in case if your system is not powerful enough to use that type of AA.

Also, I would be careful of mentioning 3rd-party add-ons like "SweetFX" - some gaming companies do not take kindly to this sort of thing... For example, on Planetside 2 forums SOE specifically said that even using 3rd-party programs to modify graphics settings may result in an account ban, because:
"We are aware of SweetFX, the proper way to fix this issue is to improve our own shaders where possible.
There are some circumstances in which a modified version of SweetFX could result in an advantage for some players"
Soo... Yea, I would avoid using this in any game that supports multiplayer and has some kind of "cheat detection" mechanisms, unless game developer specifically mentions that it's ok to use this mod :wink:
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auxy
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Re: Crysis 3

Sat Feb 23, 2013 5:49 pm

JohnC wrote:
That's a lot of text to quote on smartphone, so not gonna do it... But I disagree about TXAA being a "horrible crap" - yes, it adds in a slight blur to whole image but much less so than FXAA, especially if the game itself supports it. It's a good alternative to MSAA in case if your system is not powerful enough to use that type of AA.
Opinions are like opinions! ┐( ̄ー ̄)┌
JohnC wrote:
Soo... Yea, I would avoid using this in any game that supports multiplayer and has some kind of "cheat detection" mechanisms, unless game developer specifically mentions that it's ok to use this mod :wink:
Well, SweetFX itself should be fine, but ... well ... hrm ... ┐(‘~`;)┌ There's no way to tell the legitimate version of ENBSeries or SweetFX from modified, wallhack versions, so I guess I can't fault those companies for taking action against people who use them. It's still a little frustrating, though, and a very good point! You get a gold star:
(ノ・ェ・)ノ
 
IAmGhostDog
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Re: Crysis 3

Thu Mar 07, 2013 10:09 am

lazy_boy wrote:
Hi

obviously I want the best option.

What do you guys think?

Options.

Hey guys, my name is Baldur and I work at Crytek UK on the R&D/Engine team on various parts of the rendering.

With the help of some of the guys at the office here I've written up a document covering the variables and tweaks that are available in Crysis 3. With these you can turn on or off features, and tweak settings more precisely to squeeze out better performance.

http://www.mycrysis.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=64&t=56955

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auxy
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Re: Crysis 3

Sun Mar 10, 2013 3:45 pm

IAmGhostDog wrote:
(image)
Wowww! I never opened this thread at home, only at work, where the image is blocked by our content filter. Really nice! I need to get Crysis 3 now that I have some hardware that maybe can run it!
 
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Re: Crysis 3

Mon Mar 11, 2013 5:35 pm

auxy wrote:
IAmGhostDog wrote:
(image)
Wowww! I never opened this thread at home, only at work, where the image is blocked by our content filter. Really nice! I need to get Crysis 3 now that I have some hardware that maybe can run it!


And here's some more eye candy - my vids from the begening of the game:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZA1TsUjiQs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=af2FJZXbuxE
https://www.flickr.com/photos/zawodowy_fotograf/

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