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[Digital Foundry] Tech Focus: TAA - Blessing Or Curse? Temporal Anti-Aliasing Deep Dive
- Thread starter Senua
- Start date
YeulEmeralda
Member
A lot of new(ish) games have a sharpening slider I noticed.
Husky
THE Prey 2 fanatic
I abhor sharpening filters, I think it's one of the ugliest effects. Same tier as chromatic aberration. Since TAA basically requires the image to be sharpened, I also hate TAA!
Every reshade is just an oversaturated, way oversharpened mess
But to add some positivity to this post, I love when I can scroll past TAA, and find a game has SMAA. I didn't enjoy Deathloop, but I sure loved seeing Nvidia DLAA in that game!
Whitecrow
Banned
You dont see why people say its blurry?
Did you ever check any comparison on a TV screen?
It definitely blurs the image. You can love it as much as you want, but dont talk like its the perfect solution with no downsides.
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Shin-Ra
Junior Member
Temporal supersampling and antialiasing
Aliasing problem Before I address temporal supersampling, just a quick reminder on what aliasing is. Aliasing is a problem that is very well defined in signal theory. According to the general sampl…
bartwronski.com
Good sections on temporal supersampling of everything that’s not just a jaggy edge, and the problems that introduces.
Deferred MSAA
A long while ago I was looking into morphological antialiasing (MLAA) to see if I could somehow make it practical for a GPU that isn’t the latest monster from Nvidia or ATI. With MLAA most people talk about how nicely it cleans up edges (which it certainly does), but for me the really cool part...
therealmjp.github.io
Good ol’ MSAA. Not so compatible with modern deferred renderers but still very effective.
Senua
Gold Member
It blurred the fuck out of PS4 games as they were so low res. It made a lot more sense when the Pro arrived. Some of those 1080p 30fps TAA games were a vaseline smeared mess. FSR2 is better than TAA, otherwise why would it even exist? The reason it looks so garbage in AW2 is because it has a low internal res and framerate, it would look even worse with TAA.
DirtyBast8rd
Member
TAA is a detail remover and not only of fine details. In a game like Need for speed hot pursuit remastered it literally removes detail out of side mirrors (trees and such). I avoid it when possible.
Its variable from game to game . I used to play in 1080p with the 1060 .
In shadow of tomb raider its feaking blurry , remove all of the detail . Terrible all around , I rather play with fxaa than with this shit TAA .
Rdr2 too , the different between 1080p taa and 1440p taa was night and days , Especially the tree and branches , at 1080p its lost all of its detail , characters very blurry when moving .
In mhw its weird , I think its off when you stand still , and only enable when you start moving , very notable at 1080p .
Cyberpunk , GOW its fine , playable .
The problem with TAA was though all of the new modern game require it to render the LODs (alpha channel too I think ?) ,so without TAA its unplayable .
Older game 1080p +fxaa look playable (like crysis 3 in the video) , but rdr2/cyberpunk for exam if you remove TAA its freaking ugly .
In shadow of tomb raider its feaking blurry , remove all of the detail . Terrible all around , I rather play with fxaa than with this shit TAA .
Rdr2 too , the different between 1080p taa and 1440p taa was night and days , Especially the tree and branches , at 1080p its lost all of its detail , characters very blurry when moving .
In mhw its weird , I think its off when you stand still , and only enable when you start moving , very notable at 1080p .
Cyberpunk , GOW its fine , playable .
The problem with TAA was though all of the new modern game require it to render the LODs (alpha channel too I think ?) ,so without TAA its unplayable .
Older game 1080p +fxaa look playable (like crysis 3 in the video) , but rdr2/cyberpunk for exam if you remove TAA its freaking ugly .
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winjer
Gold Member
When TAA first showed up, I hated it with a passion.
In part because the first implementations were crap, and in part because I was still playing at 1080p.
Most games looked like they were running at 900p, because the image quality was so blurry.
And to make it worse, there was a ton of ghosting artifacts.
So it wasn't so much an improvement, but rather exchanging one issue for another.
We got less shimmering but got temporal artifacts and a blurry image.
Eventually, TAA solutions improved a bit. For example, TAA Gen5, from Epic, managed to reduce ghosting and blurriness.
There were also tweaks I could make in UE4 games. But not all games used it.
A couple of years ago, I switched to 1440p, and the issue with blurriness is less acute. But temporal artifacts are still a problem in some games.
The problem is that today, TAA solutions still vary a bit. There are some games that look very good, with minimal added blurriness and temporal artifacts. Others have quite a bit of the old issues with ghosting and blurriness.
In part because the first implementations were crap, and in part because I was still playing at 1080p.
Most games looked like they were running at 900p, because the image quality was so blurry.
And to make it worse, there was a ton of ghosting artifacts.
So it wasn't so much an improvement, but rather exchanging one issue for another.
We got less shimmering but got temporal artifacts and a blurry image.
Eventually, TAA solutions improved a bit. For example, TAA Gen5, from Epic, managed to reduce ghosting and blurriness.
There were also tweaks I could make in UE4 games. But not all games used it.
A couple of years ago, I switched to 1440p, and the issue with blurriness is less acute. But temporal artifacts are still a problem in some games.
The problem is that today, TAA solutions still vary a bit. There are some games that look very good, with minimal added blurriness and temporal artifacts. Others have quite a bit of the old issues with ghosting and blurriness.
Doctor Hades
Member
I personally love TAA as it removes the horrid shimmering artefacts and specular aliasing that was so prevalent during the Xbox 360 / PS3 era.
I play games at 1440p at 120 fps (or higher with DLSS3 frame generation which is even better than ever now I own a 360 Hz QD-QLED monitor) so I find that works superbly with TAA and having the choice of that and DLSS (particularly DLAA) for my RTX 4080 means that games now look better than they ever did. I can live with some minor ghosting, which is bearing noticeable at 120 fps and higher anyway.
I loaded up Yakuza 6 last night on my PC and immediately noticed how poor the image quality looks with lots of shimmering and aliasing due to only have FXAA and SMAA as anti-aliasing options. This issue is massively reduced in the newer games such as Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth and Judgment / Lost Judgment that feature DLSS (including DLAA which I use when available) and TAA.
I play games at 1440p at 120 fps (or higher with DLSS3 frame generation which is even better than ever now I own a 360 Hz QD-QLED monitor) so I find that works superbly with TAA and having the choice of that and DLSS (particularly DLAA) for my RTX 4080 means that games now look better than they ever did. I can live with some minor ghosting, which is bearing noticeable at 120 fps and higher anyway.
I loaded up Yakuza 6 last night on my PC and immediately noticed how poor the image quality looks with lots of shimmering and aliasing due to only have FXAA and SMAA as anti-aliasing options. This issue is massively reduced in the newer games such as Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth and Judgment / Lost Judgment that feature DLSS (including DLAA which I use when available) and TAA.
Bulletbrain
Member
Between shimmering, crawling, jaggies or some bluriness (which can easily be remediated with a bit of sharpening) the choice is obvious for me. Just look at the difference between say Yakuza 6 and Yakuza LAD.
rofif
Banned
Better blurred than pixelated shimmering mess. And I don’t think it’s as blurred as you imply
Senua
Gold Member
I disagree, the tradeoff is too severe at that low res. Look at Forza Motorsport on Xbox Series S for example, It looks like blurry garbage at 1080p with TAA. They should've stuck with MSAA for that version and left TAA for the XBSX version only. It's genuinely hard to clearly make out the road ahead in that version in performance mode.
Portugeezer
Member
If TAA allows overall graphics and performance to improve, then I'm all for it even with the downsides.
Agent_4Seven
Tears of Nintendo
I've said it before and I'll say it again - SSAA should be an option in as many games as possible as an alternative to DSR/DLDSR/DLSS as well, not to just TAA. Furthermore, SSAA simply doesn't have ghosting problems too cuz it's supersampling the game and running it at much higher resolution as Alex explained without using previous frames and causing ghosting. And as if that's not enough, SSAA is a much cleaner and true native rendering than DSR/DLDSR/DLSS are, and you don't need to artificially change the resolution and hope that the game supports this feature (not a lot of modern games are, TLOU PC port is one of them), you'll just have various SSAA options and that's it, no need to resize the games / desktop to a higher resolution for 5-8K to appear as an option. You won't even have smearing and softness problems while running the game at 30/40 FPS and be forced to run at 120/140 FPS (good luck at 8K) for it to disappear.
I just don't fuckin' get why SSAA is so criminally underused for years and years. I mean, why don't you want to run a game with much better visual clarity in the future when there'll be hardware for it istead if dealing with outdated crap like TAA or DSR/DLDSR/DLSS as the only options?
I just don't fuckin' get why SSAA is so criminally underused for years and years. I mean, why don't you want to run a game with much better visual clarity in the future when there'll be hardware for it istead if dealing with outdated crap like TAA or DSR/DLDSR/DLSS as the only options?
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Senua
Gold Member
Most games aren't as forward facing as they used to be. You can always downsample though. Downsampling + DLAA looks nuts.
Shin-Ra
Junior Member
Stochastic transparency? Basically dithered transparency with the TAA pass cleaning up the noise.
Stochastic Transparency | Research
Stochastic transparency provides a unified approach to order-independent transparency, anti-aliasing, and deep shadow maps. It augments screen-door transparency using a random sub-pixel stipple pattern, where each fragment of transparent geometry covers a random subset of pixel samples of size...
As more and more rendering features are added, it’s getting harder to maintain multiple methods for different people’s image quality tastes.
Cyberpunk’s doing path tracing at the very high end so they’re even more committed to the most efficient combination-techniques available. TAA/DLSS taking care of as much as possible.