Topic: Anti-Aliasing?

[WuTangTurtle]

I have a question for u guys that i will be using for a essay and presentation for my college class (Game Art & Design) and i want to use this survey type question as a reference.  (Im not sure if this is breaking any  forum rules so i hope i did this correctly)

That being said my question is simple, Do you agree that video game texture's anti-aliasing is a huge importance for graphical realism and that the right color shades to create the anti-aliasing is important for realism?  One more question Do you think Anti-Aliasing is the biggest thing to creating realistic textures?

P.S. I need more than a couple of you guys to reply otherwise the survey would be very inaccurate.

Oh God plz say this thread is ok i dont want to face the wraith of the mods (Bloodworth) and just in case let me bribe u with this  

[KDR_11k]

I think you didn't get the difference between anti-aliasing and bilinear filtering. Anti-aliasing has zero to do with textures, it renders the image multiple times from slightly shifted positions and averages between them to reduce the "stairs effect" at the edges of polygons. Bilinear filering interpolates between the texels of the texture to prevent the texel borders from becoming obvious. If you're using Blender, that might be your problem, since that software only does bilinear when OSA (OverSampling Antialias) is on. Also look up Trilinear Filtering and Anisotropic Filtering.

So, in effect my answer is: No, those are completely unrelated.

[WuTangTurtle]

ok, um let me rephrase then.

Do you think that anti-aliasing is important in gaming?  

And since anti-aliasing is a technique that uses tones and shades of colors of an object in a game to blur the jaggies or stairs look, Do you think that the right choice on a color is important to have the object look real and not jagged.

[Jale]

I think that Anti-aliasing is important because people dont have jaggedy edges in real life. If a game has no Anti-Aliasing it looks wierd and the animation seems jerky. In a smooth game it looks smooth and fluid.

[Bill Aurion]

I don't think it's important as long as it doesn't distract from the gameplay...  

[Jale]

It really depend on the game. If it is a game like Tetris or Space invaders (for the sake of argument) where the attraction is the gameplay then anti-aliasing isnt important but if there was bad anti-aliasing in WW then it would be bad because one of the major attractions to WW is the gorgeous fluid graphics.

[SearanoX]

Eh, anti-aliasing isn't a thing that is game-specific.  Video cards today come equipped with the means to do it themselves, albeit with a performance hit.

That said, no, I don't use anti-aliasing, and it's not necessarily needed.  However, some people tend to swear by it because they hate jaggies.  I can stand them in most cases, and I'd rather take performance over image quality (though I generally keep graphics settings at highest because my computer can handle just about anything out right now, as well as in the future).  When you're getting low framerates (sub-40 fps for newer games, sub-60 fps for older ones), then image quality is probably the thing that won't be on your mind.

When it comes down to realism, then of course it's important.  Your goal is to make the player think that the player is doing what they are doing in real life, not actually playing a game that attempts to mimic real life.

[mouse_clicker]

In my opinion, anti-aliasing certainly doesn't hurt, but I'd rather a developer not focus on such minute graphical touches over the actual game. If they have the time I think it's a great effect to have.

[Ian Sane]

I find that graphics aren't the most important part of a game but they are still important.  It's important that I am drawn into a game so the graphics have to look reasonably good to do so.  I don't mean they have to look realistic they just have to fit the style the game is trying to convey.  Therefore the blocky design of Cubivore is acceptable because it's an intentional look.  Metroid Prime however has to have those high quality graphics to fit the style.  Naturally the importance of graphics is dependant on the hardware itself.  I'll tolerate blocky characters in an N64 game because of the hardware limitations.

Anyway since I feel that graphics must reflect the style of the game anti-aliasing is required when the graphic style calls for them and the hardware is perfectly capable of doing it.  If for some reason the designer intentionally wanted jaggies then anti-aliasing isn't needed.  In a PS2 game that's supposed to look like real life the lack of anti-aliasing would be a flaw in the graphics and thus a flaw on the rest of the game (though likely a minor one).

"Eh, anti-aliasing isn't a thing that is game-specific. Video cards today come equipped with the means to do it themselves, albeit with a performance hit."

It is game-specfic in console gaming where there is no option of having a different video card.  I assumed that's what he was talking about and since this is a console related site that was what I was talking about.

[SearanoX]

Yeah, that's true, heh.

By the way, does the PS2 have anti-aliasing?  I don't remember seeing it in any games.

[mouse_clicker]

I don't know for sure, but I think the PS2 is able to do anti-aliasing, it just has some trouble with it and hence most developers will not worry about it. That's just my guess, though.  

[Bill Aurion]

Yeah, there is, but it comes at a cost in either performance or texture memory...

[manunited4eva22]

Depends on how the AA is used.  There are a lot of times it makes zilch difference, but then again it can make a difference.  But to answer your question, it can make games look better, but the skill with which the tool is used determines how well it works, not the other way around.

[WuTangTurtle]

Thank you guys for the replies, and by the way early ps2 games suffered horribly with jaggies because developers did not know how to do anti-aliasing on ps2 and most early ps2 games had many jaggies, i forget what developer found out how to do it but i remember that they freely told out the ps2 dev community.  I don't understand why they would tell the dev community how to do it for free, you think they would benefiet by keeping the secret to themselves.

[NinGurl69 *huggles]

Isn't it more of an "anti-flicker" filter for PS2 rather than AA these days?  Not unlike the filter for SSBM?  

[KDR_11k]

Quote
Originally posted by: ShaolinKilla
Do you think that anti-aliasing is important in gaming?  

And since anti-aliasing is a technique that uses tones and shades of colors of an object in a game to blur the jaggies or stairs look, Do you think that the right choice on a color is important to have the object look real and not jagged.

1. No. I don't think AA is important for gaming. It's usually the least of my concerns with fast moving things like games.

2. AA doesn't have a "choice on color". It's a computer calculated interpolation. If you mean 16-bit artifacts then I'd say games HAVE to be 32-bit. Look at PN03, really obvious it's running in 16 bit. Also, AA doesn't "blur" anything, it just tests how much of the pixel the geometry really occupies and calculates the color accordingly.

[Retroyoshi]

Anti Aliasing is important in games, but only running at low resolutions.  At TV resolution it will help tremendously and reduce the amount of noise, especially on high polygon meshes seen from a distance.  It is essential, will help images look much better, but I don't think most people will even notice one way or the other.

It has absolutly nothing to do with blurring, anti-aliasing makes the image look sharper by rendering the image at a higher resolution and re-estimating the color of each pixel based on it (simple answer).

[DrZoidberg]

Quote
Originally posted by: ShaolinKilla
i forget what developer found out how to do it but i remember that they freely told out the ps2 dev community.  I don't understand why they would tell the dev community how to do it for free, you think they would benefiet by keeping the secret to themselves.

it's called 'how to not be a total money grubbing tit' most / all developers are gamers or were gamers at once point i assume, they enjoy playing games, if they can help better games everywhere then wouldn't it seem logical to let everyone know how to do AA on ps2 games?  just because it's a cut-throat market doesn't mean it has to be an unfriendly one

[manunited4eva22]

The greedy crap is what killed OpenGL as being the number one API for graphics.  Had it been more freely available perhaps directx wouldn't even be around anymore.