Godot 4.0 Alpha 10 Brings Temporal AA

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Godot 4.0 Alpha 10 Brings Temporal AA

The tenth alpha release of the Godot 4.0 open-source game engine is now available for testing with some interesting additions...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Godot-4.0-Alpha-10

[Calinou]

TAA has been gaining popularity with game engines for offering same/comparable quality as multi-sample anti-aliasing but with lower overhead.

One of the largest benefits of TAA (that is only really matched by supersampling) is that it reduces specular aliasing, which has become increasingly common in modern games as a result of PBR materials. There are other ways to mitigate this specular aliasing (such as a screen-space roughness limiter), but TAA is one of the best ways to tackle this in a fast enough manner.

TAA also works on alpha-tested materials, but MSAA with alpha to coverage can do that too. However, MSAA in modern game engines is often much more expensive than in old engines due to the higher material complexity.

FXAA and SMAA aren't really comparable as they do not provide subpixel accuracy. They work well in some cases (including on alpha-tested materials), but they don't do much to reduce specular aliasing.

Edit: To clarify, Godot 4.0 will keep support for MSAA and FXAA. TAA is just an additional option (which you can combine with MSAA and/or FXAA at the same time if desired). There's been some interest around adding SMAA support, but I don't think it will be implemented in 4.0 (maybe later).

[piotrj3]

TAA has one giant benefit in reduces jagginess when objects very small when you are moving are repeatly switching in width like from 1 px to 2 px and after back to 1 px. This is also common issue people make, they take one screenshot from one antialiasing method to another and say X looks better, but TAA actually helps a ton with antialiasing in motion.

The issue is, TAA has tendency to introduce own artifacts like ghosting. In general art of temporal antialiasing is hard to make perfect.

[Quackdoc]

this is nice, TAA gets enabled on most of my games. but too many games treat it and SSAA as the be all of anti aliasing. when the truth is each AA technique has strengths and weaknesses. Offering the player choice is what should be done, there are times when SMAA looks better and times when TAA looks better, sometimes even within the same game. and thats disregarding that different people enjoy different things

I hope this doesn't lead new devs into the trap of implementing one or the other. though I do usually prefer TAA myself.

[qlum]

Longer term, this may also open the door for implementing FSR2 in engine. Although that would also wait for it to be open sourced and have vulkan support.

[aufkrawall]

this is nice, TAA gets enabled on most of my games. but too many games treat it and SSAA as the be all of anti aliasing. when the truth is each AA technique has strengths and weaknesses.

In practice, only stable image is that with TAA, and with TAAU you even gain loads of performance at the same time. But it's a complex matter and lots of potential hasn't even been used yet, so near future will shift even stronger in favor of TAA(U).
Hopefully also the gap between good and terrible TAA deployed by different studios will grow smaller.

[PAUL007]

They improve there scripting system c++ setup is a lot of steps lack of tutorials

[EvilHowl]

Longer term, this may also open the door for implementing FSR2 in engine. Although that would also wait for it to be open sourced and have vulkan support.

Actually, FSR 2.0 is meant to replace any TAA the game has as it's an anti-aliaser as well. That's the opposite of FSR 1.0, which worked with an already anti-aliased image.

[qlum]

Actually, FSR 2.0 is meant to replace any TAA the game has as it's an anti-aliaser as well. That's the opposite of FSR 1.0, which worked with an already anti-aliased image.

yes, but both require temporal data, so as far as I know by implementing taa you are already doing work which makes FSR2.0 and DLSS easier to implement.

[EvilHowl]

yes, but both require temporal data, so as far as I know by implementing taa you are already doing work which makes FSR2.0 and DLSS easier to implement.

That's true, but I mean that they should have implemented FSR 2.0 in the first place, as they may have to ditch their TAA as it would become useless if they implement FSR 2.0, as it works on any hardware and it's just plain better than any TAA out there.