retardedly large UE3 screens

Quote from Gorion

they did not use AA i think i am gona print one as a poster.

Who needs AA when you have post-processing now.

Quote from Gorion

i was being sarcastic and for some reason i think UT3 can handle AA, else it will be the same thing as with GRAW.. i hate tat game for not handling AA.

GRAW used deferred shading which is why it couldn't use AA. UE3 uses something similar but not the same and I've definitely read things in the past where Sweeny has stated that GoW couldn't run with AA because they use a deferred way of handling their effects.

Interview here -- read the "one more question answered via email" answer.

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Sweeney- Gears of War runs natively at 1280x720p without multisampling. MSAA performance doesn't scale well to next-generation deferred rendering techniques, which UE3 uses extensively for shadowing, particle systems, and fog.

At the very least they will write the scene depth to a render target -- this allows the volumetric particle effects and can be used as inputs into things like underwater rendering. Put simply, if you know how far a ray from the eye has to travel to hit a specific point in the scene, you can do much more cool effects. The problem is that if you have something like scene depth written to a render target, then you don't want to blend or alter those values in any way as they become incorrect. It can produce some weird looking results.

Crysis is also using this sort of thing, so if it breaks AA support, you'd better get used to it because a lot of games are going to follow suit. There are ways to 'fix' the AA but I don't fully understand how they're doing it or whether it can be used in all cases (near the end of the Crysis presentation explains how Crytek corrected it).

So, unless Epic have come up with a way to fix it post GoW, it will still be running without AA. One alternative is to render at double the size of the frame buffer and then size down to achieve a smoother image (afaik this is similar to super sampling, except you would have to do it manually). You can imagine the performance penalty for doing that

Personally, I thought GRAW looked really bad without AA, though it was probably because it wouldn't let me run the game at my TFT's native resolution which makes things look doubly bad. I've played and watched GoW in action quite a bit and I didn't think it suffered from the lack of AA much at all (and yes I was playing on a high res monitor, so it wasn't the TV blurring the bejesus out of everything that was hiding the jaggies )). IMO effects like subtle blooming makes the image softer so you don't notice the jaggies so much.

*edit -

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Who needs AA when you have post-processing now.

I partly agree with that, but sometimes shaders can't really hide all the jaggies. AA does the job regardless of the look, genre etc. You tick a box and off it goes. It 'just works', which is why so many people complain when it is not available. Like I said, I personally thought GoW looked fantastic without AA but it might not be the case for all games (e.g. Crytek probably invested a lot of time and effort in retaining AA -- it can't have been for no reason). I'm fairly sure the hardware boffins will come up with something to replace traditional AA soon, or they'll make it more compatible with the cutting edge techniques that aren't playing nice.

Just seems like another method of draining away my framerate to me.

This guy looks like Bruce Willis

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