Radeon EQAA Anti-Aliasing Support Merged To Mesa 18.2

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Radeon EQAA Anti-Aliasing Support Merged To Mesa 18.2

In addition to the potentially performance-doubling AMD Kaveri fix landing yesterday in Mesa 18.2 Git, also hitting this next version of Mesa is Enhanced Quality Anti-Aliasing (EQAA) support for Radeon GCN graphics processors...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=RadeonSI-EQAA-Mesa-18.2

[aufkrawall]

MSAA got killed by deferred rendering in modern games, so the usecases of EQAA will be very few.

"Enhancing" in-game MSAA to sparse grid SSAA / transparency SSAA ( called "adaptive AA" on Windows with Radeons) would make much more of a difference, especially for older titles and Wine.
EQAA leaves vegetation (alphatests) and shaders (aliasing inside of triangles) totally aliased, it just raises the sample count for geometry. So one part of the image looks fine, while the other is still total garbage.

[Khrundel]

There is an alpha-to-coverage hack for vegetation antialiasing.

[aufkrawall]

Care to elaborate how?

[Khrundel]

They use different alpha threshold for neighbor pixels (subpixels in case of msaa). Combined with msaa looks not bad.

[aufkrawall]

I meant how to activate. Patching Mesa?

[schmidtbag]

I'm pretty interested in trying this out. I hope this can be used to force-enable AA in games where it is otherwise unavailable. Most of the time I don't really care about AA but there are a couple of games I have where the experience is significantly worse without it.

[davidbepo]

I meant how to activate. Patching Mesa?

no, just use latest mesa git and run the game with EQAA=8,4,2 env variable

[aufkrawall]

no, just use latest mesa git and run the game with EQAA=8,4,2 env variable

I was referring to A2C Khrundel mentioned.

[Khrundel]

I was referring to A2C Khrundel mentioned.

Don't know. Long time ago windows nvidia driver was able to force a2c within certain games, far cry (the first) for example. Usually, I bet, game developer should implement this feature.