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[Senua]

Neogaf's favourite host is back to explain to us how TAA sucks and also how it doesn't! So let's strap in and extend our viewing distance so we can post about how we don't notice TAA ghosting and also not notice Alex's big sexy scar! This was actually a great video though. Especially liked how he explained how TAA at 30fps is especially garbage. DLAA 4lyfe

 

[joeygreco1985]

In my experience using TAA on anything lower than 4K makes the overall image look too soft. And even at 4K it could be better.

 

[adamsapple]

In my experience using TAA on anything lower than 4K makes the overall image look too soft. And even at 4K it could be better.

TAA with a slight sharpening pass applied to it can look very good.

 

[Bojji]

In my experience using TAA on anything lower than 4K makes the overall image look too soft. And even at 4K it could be better.

On pc you can fix many stuff with sharpening filters etc.

On consoles people are forced to play with (sometimes terrible) IQ.

 

[DaciaJC]

I remember playing Far Cry 4 back when it released and wondering why all the trees would blur heavily when I moved my character even just the most minute amount.

I hate basic TAA. It sucks that so many games don't offer any other AA solutions besides it nowadays.

 

[rofif]

The anti TAA crusade is crazy and I don't understand it.
TAA absolutely saved image quality on ps4. For the first time ever, we got rid of textures shimmering, pixel crawling, specular shimmer and sub-pixel shimmering.
It reduces dithering and the picture can look great and there are whole reddit subs complaining that it's somehow blurry. I don't get it.

FSR2 nowadays is what's crap. Pixelated and even worse in motion. If these fsr2 console games used TAA, it would allow for higher resolution (since fsr2 is expensive compared to TAA) and image would be uch more stable.
#LOVE TAA

 

[Senua]

The anti TAA crusade is crazy and I don't understand it.
TAA absolutely saved image quality on ps4. For the first time ever, we got rid of textures shimmering, pixel crawling, specular shimmer and sub-pixel shimmering.
It reduces dithering and the picture can look great and there are whole reddit subs complaining that it's somehow blurry. I don't get it.

FSR2 nowadays is what's crap. Pixelated and even worse in motion. If these fsr2 console games used TAA, it would allow for higher resolution (since fsr2 is expensive compared to TAA) and image would be uch more stable.
#LOVE TAA

 

[rofif]

On pc you can fix many stuff with sharpening filters etc.

On consoles people are forced to play with (sometimes terrible) IQ.

People who use sharpening filters and reshade in most games deserve to burn in hell.
no taste

 

[rofif]

You are just misinformed and ignorant. That's ok but nothing I've said is false

 

[KuraiShidosha]

DLSS is a gift from god compared to TAA. Without it, I'd rather have nothing.

 

[rofif]

DLSS is a gift from god compared to TAA. Without it, I'd rather have nothing.

Yes dlss is good but TAA is next best thing.
Launch any resident evil game and disable TAA. It's full of shimmering, noise and hair looks like crap.
people forgot how bad image quality was before TAA

 

[Bojji]

People who use sharpening filters and reshade in most games deserve to burn in hell.
no taste

When I have to use it I use it with around 3-5% max, it generates worse image with higher settings.

In game sharpening sliders usually are quite good.

 

[KuraiShidosha]

Yes dlss is good but TAA is next best thing.
Launch any resident evil game and disable TAA. It's full of shimmering, noise and hair looks like crap.
people forgot how bad image quality was before TAA

I specifically play RE2/7/8 without TAA. At 4k, it's not needed for me. I would use DLSS if I could without a mod though.

 

[NeverYouMind]

I like TSR, but TAA creates undesirable side effects. DLSS is similar to TAA in that regard.

 

[WitchHunter]

First thing I do is turn off all kinds of aliasing and the frame magic. The worst is when in ultra mode they leave the chromatic aberration on.

 

[Killer8]

In the choice between a) awful shimmering and aliasing versus b) none of those things but you don't see as much detail, I will choose the second option every single day of the week.

Shimmering is the number one thing that gives away that you're looking at computer generated images. TAA has been one of the best steps ever taken to make games look real.

You don't need to see every detail. Face it. You will not be crying over a static image because a texture is slightly less sharp when two feet from the TV. But you WILL notice sub-par image quality in motion, even from a great distance.

 

[Mr Moose]

Is this what Far Cry 5 uses? That shit has a lot of ghosting.

 

[rofif]

I specifically play RE2/7/8 without TAA. At 4k, it's not needed for me. I would use DLSS if I could without a mod though.

Dude that's gross. Leons hair look like dithered mess without TAA. yes even at 4k which is how I played and finished those games

 

[Denton]

Another great video by Alex, good job. Very evenhanded and well explained various AA techniques. I like TAA, but mostly in combination with downsampling, because in native 1080p it does blur image a bit too much. These days though, I pretty much always use DLDSR (1620p) in combination with DLSS (quality or balanced). Gives me awesome image quality (sharp and temporaly stable) at stable 60fps in every game. And I save on electricity.

 

[SF Kosmo]

TAA is performant and useful in some situations but I really came to hate it when I got into VR.

 

[Rocco Schiavone]

Is this a Bugaga video??

 

[Magic Carpet]

That was a very informative video.

 

[Kenpachii]

TAA kills shimmering, absolute best AA solution after DLSS.

 

[adamsapple]

TAA kills shimmering, absolute best AA solution after DLSS.

Yep, say what you want about it now that we have more alternatives, but temporal AA was such a huge improvement over the FXAA type solutions we had before. Shimmering out the bass when the camera moves.

 

[RoboFu]

For me the higher the resolution the less I need a heavy AA solution. At 4k whatever is the fastest will work. TAA works great there.

 

[flying_sq]

IMO curse, it muddies textures. It was jawdropping how much detail was lost in RDR2 due to TAA. I turned it off one time because everything seemed blurry at 4k. Stunning how disabling it improved visual quality so much.

 

[Imtjnotu]

TAA is a god send compared to the old FXAA days.

 

[Aretak]

DLSS is a gift from god compared to TAA. Without it, I'd rather have nothing.

DLSS is a form of TAA. It's usually the best quality TAA available right now, but there are still bad DLSS implementations which suffer from the usual TAA problems (such as ghosting). I find it funny when people wish TAA had never been invented in the first place, because we most certainly wouldn't have DLSS (or other reconstruction techniques like ITGI, FSR and XeSS) in that reality. It all stems from the same basic concept of using data from previous frames to improve the currently displayed one.

 

[YeulEmeralda]

I hate jaggies so blessing.

 

[SlimySnake]

Excellent video by Alex. This is the kind of stuff I expect from DF and Alex is basically their best at it. I came away with a detailed knowledge of why TAA is so widely used, and why it is hated. Same goes for MSAA and SSAA.

 

[SlimySnake]

For me the higher the resolution the less I need a heavy AA solution. At 4k whatever is the fastest will work. TAA works great there.

Yep. Thats basically what Alex says here. If you are gaming at 4k or on a big screen, TAA works just fine. The TAA hate bandwagon is led by 1080p PC gamers who refuse to upgrade their cards and sit right infront of the tiny monitors instead of gaming on a big 4k tv screen like the rest of console users. Alex said 60% of pc gamers on steam game at 1080p. shocking and retarded in 2024.

But rofif literally just said what Alex stated in the video. If it wasnt for TAA, we wouldnt have great advancements in graphics fidelity because half of the GPU wouldve been spent implementing AA instead of the 3-5% cost TAA has.

Alex missed a trick by not comparing FSR2 to TAAU or Epic's TSR because in my experience with Callisto and RDR2, Temporal Upscaling is WAY better than FSR2 which introduced all kinds of shimmering even at FSR quality. FSR balanced or below is basically trash.

If you have callisto on PC, you will see how their TAA upscaling even at 55% which is lower than FSR balanced, looks cleaner than FSR2. And thats a UE4 game, UE5's TSR is even better.

I game on a 4k 65 inch oled maybe 6-7 feet away and TAA never looked blurry to me. The only time ive noticed ghosting is recently in DLSS supported games like AW2 and Avatar.

 

[Zelduh]

I don't understand why people like or want Anti-Aliasing at all... why would I want my game to look like it's smeared in vaseline?

 

[Lagspike_exe]

I don't understand why people like or want Anti-Aliasing at all... why would I want my game to look like it's smeared in vaseline?

That's not what AA is about. AA cuts down on jaggies. Back in the old days, MSAA only fixed the jaggies issue without any other impact on IQ. The software-based solutions such as FXAA, TAA etc. introduce softness. It's just that MSAA is too expensive, so no one is using it anymore.

 

[Denton]

I don't understand why people like or want Anti-Aliasing at all... why would I want my game to look like it's smeared in vaseline?

Maybe, just maybe, watch the video?

Of course, if you like flickering shimmering disgusting jaggy mess of an image, you do you. People have all kinds of weird perverted kinks.

 

[Zelduh]

That's not what AA is about. AA cuts down on jaggies. Back in the old days, MSAA only fixed the jaggies issue without any other impact on IQ. The software-based solutions such as FXAA, TAA etc. introduce softness. It's just that MSAA is too expensive, so no one is using it anymore.

Maybe I like my "jaggies"? Makes everything look sharp and crisp.

 

[Mr Moose]

That is straight up shit, though good with shimmering.

 

[Bojji]

Maybe I like my "jaggies"? Makes everything look sharp and crisp.

Everyone has preference, I can't stand it personally.

Taa is absolutely ok in higher resolution, I hated it when I had 1080p monitor but on 4k tv it looks excellent most of the time.

There was this time at the start of previous generation when games had massive amounts of details with complex shaders and they looked like jaggy mess with techniques such as Fxaa, smaa, mlaa etc. Taa changed this for the better.

 

[Lagspike_exe]

Maybe I like my "jaggies"? Makes everything look sharp and crisp.

You would be a part of a very small minority. Jaggies kill immersion for me.

 

[Puscifer]

In my experience using TAA on anything lower than 4K makes the overall image look too soft. And even at 4K it could be better.

It reminds me of early FXAA, except it never got better

 

[Zelduh]

You would be a part of a very small minority. Jaggies kill immersion for me.

What's immersion-breaking about it? SNES games like FF6 have visible pixels and they look perfectly fine lol

 

[Denton]

What's immersion-breaking about it? SNES games like FF6 have visible pixels and they look perfectly fine lol

SNES games don't portray realistic worlds with near photorealistic graphics. Do you really need an explanation on a difference between pixel art and modern highend graphical styles?

 

[blastprocessor]

Best thing to happen to PS4 IQ was TAA it's a generation defining feature. Pretty much eliminated sub-pixel aliasing, the bug bear of PS3 graphics! Plus it looks so filmic. RDR2 is a bad example of TAA, l always felt it was a bit too soft.

 

[makaveli60]

How could anyone not like TAA? Jaggies and shimmering are the worst, TAA was perhaps the best graphical feature of the previous gen, I love it

 

[Shin-Ra]

Another one of those rabbit hole topics that gets more and more complicated the deeper you look

Just as not all games are equal (geometry density, fluttering blades of grass vs big slab of wall, realistic, cartoon, transparencies) not all TAA solutions are the same or tweaked per-game or scene by scene to minimise the negative side effects.

The higher the game’s temporal (framerate) and spatial resolution, the less gaps there are that need to be compensated for with TAA and motion blur.

Motion blur can still be added to ultra high framerate game for a more ‘cinematic’ appearance, even though we don’t normally (or ever) see movies shot at such high frame rates with or without shutter blur.

Fun detour because I’m bored of thinking about this now. Gemini Man at 4K120 without shutter blur. So crisp, so clean. Tremendous.

 

[squarealex]

TAA is agressive under 1080p on TV

Can easily notice them on 900p games and this is how PS4 have better IQ than Xbox One.

I Remember I was pretty surprise how Tekken 7 was soft on base PS4, because TAA + 900p.

 

[Mr Moose]

How could anyone not like TAA? Jaggies and shimmering are the worst, TAA was perhaps the best graphical feature of the previous gen, I love it

Because its quite blurry. Did that Batman game use this? It was 1080p but looked lower

 

[delfrickintree]

Another one of those rabbit hole topics that gets more and more complicated the deeper you look

Just as not all games are equal (geometry density, fluttering blades of grass vs big slab of wall, realistic, cartoon, transparencies) not all TAA solutions are the same or tweaked per-game or scene by scene to minimise the negative side effects.

The higher the game’s temporal (framerate) and spatial resolution, the less gaps there are that need to be compensated for with TAA and motion blur.

Motion blur can still be added to ultra high framerate game for a more ‘cinematic’ appearance, even though we don’t normally (or ever) see movies shot at such high frame rates with or without shutter blur.

Fun detour because I’m bored of thinking about this now. Gemini Man at 4K120 without shutter blur. So crisp, so clean. Tremendous.

Im new to this pc master race realm and Im learning so much lately. Very fascinating stuff!

Thanks for the vid, OP!

 

[Shin-Ra]

Best thing to happen to PS4 IQ was TAA it's a generation defining feature. Pretty much eliminated sub-pixel aliasing, the bug bear of PS3 graphics! Plus it looks so filmic. RDR2 is a bad example of TAA, l always felt it was a bit too soft.

Sad we didn’t see the evolution of Ready at Dawn’s Temporal-MSAA after The Order 1886.

Maybe their followup games did? Apparently NVIDIA TXAA is very similar.

The broad idea as I remember it is TAA is applied at the sub-pixel (hardware MSAA) level so there’s less perceptible jitter on still images/scenes.

 

[Zathalus]

TAA was a great leap in AA quality albeit with some downsides. Best in class is now DLAA, it is basically TAA with better stability, higher detail retention, and less ghosting.

 

[Hoddi]

Taa is absolutely ok in higher resolution, I hated it when I had 1080p monitor but on 4k tv it looks excellent most of the time.

It's why I think 'resolution/render scale' sliders that go from 0-200% should always be required in games. It's not the display resolution that's the issue but the rendering resolution being stuck at 1080p.

The TAA blur that usually happens at 1080p disappears quickly as you start downsampling. Even setting it to 125-150% improves the image significantly in most cases.