this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2024
50 points (98.1% liked)

Games

16213 readers
694 users here now

Video game news oriented community. No NanoUFO is not a bot :)

Posts.

  1. News oriented content (general reviews, previews or retrospectives allowed).
  2. Broad discussion posts (preferably not only about a specific game).
  3. No humor/memes etc..
  4. No affiliate links
  5. No advertising.
  6. No clickbait, editorialized, sensational titles. State the game in question in the title. No all caps.
  7. No self promotion.
  8. No duplicate posts, newer post will be deleted unless there is more discussion in one of the posts.
  9. No politics.

Comments.

  1. No personal attacks.
  2. Obey instance rules.
  3. No low effort comments(one or two words, emoji etc..)
  4. Please use spoiler tags for spoilers.

My goal is just to have a community where people can go and see what new game news is out for the day and comment on it.

Other communities:

Beehaw.org gaming

Lemmy.ml gaming

lemmy.ca pcgaming

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/11840660

TAA is a crucial tool for developers - but is the impact to image quality too great?

For good or bad, temporal anti-aliasing - or TAA - has become a defining element of image quality in today's games, but is it a blessing, a curse, or both? Whichever way you slice it, it's here to stay, so what is it, why do so many games use it and what's with all the blur? At one point, TAA did not exist at all, so what methods of anti-aliasing were used and why aren't they used any more?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago (6 children)

Antialiasing is a byproduct of moving away from CRT display technology. The natural image softening in CRT tech is not replicated in LCD and LED displays.

TAA is one of the better options, but at the end of the day it will be difficult to create a true AA solution that doesnt have artifacts, without utilizing supersampling.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 months ago (1 children)

We used AA on our CRTs back in the day. Of course we were all running like 1024x768 as the resolution so it was a lot more needed. The higher your resolution the less you need it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

Yes, thats true. AA was helpful at certain resolutions that were what I call "medium resolutions", the range between 480 and 768 pixels. But CRTs still had a softer image simply as a byproduct of the way the technology worked, and worked better at lower resolutions like 240p (AFAIK, any signal less than 480 vertical pixel resolution was automatically progressive scan). This was abused and exploited by game developers of the time, famously utilizing dithering for transparency effects for platforms that didn't fully support it such as the SEGA Saturn (it only supported transparent 2D sprites, but not textured polygons like the PSX did). The softer image led to the dithered effects smoothing out, giving the appearance of a bigger available color palette and special effects. Flickering sprites every other field was also a common technique due to CRTs high image persistence. This is why games like Streets of Rage look awful on modern displays, but display correctly on CRTs.

But regardless, AA will probably be phased out eventually, its just a tool to mitigate growing pains of new display technology.

load more comments (4 replies)