TAA also makes games super blurry & its starting to be forced.

[MSIfanboy]

i probably wouldnt mind in single player games, but multiplayer games, like first person shooters, gross, halo infinite is a tragedy, it looks foul when moving

[jorimt]

@jorimt, thank you for the clear definition and insight I can share to my non or lesser technical knowledge friends. Are you aware of any alternatives for the deferred rendered engine's/games?

Where post-process AA is concerned (not counting the short-lived Nvidia TXAA, which was MSAA with a temporal component; Watch Dogs, etc), just TAA, unfortunately, which, as already pointed out by the OP, can vary heavily in effectiveness and quality per engine/game; not all TAA is created equal.

Then there's image reconstructive techniques which are very similar to TAA, like DLSS (which has many versions that each interact differently with each game) and DLAA, but, in turn, also have similar temporal artifacts.

The only non-temporal AA readily available for deffered-rendered games is downsampling (achieved via DSR/DLDSR, a larger custom resolution downscaled to a lower one, "SSAA"-type options, or an internal resolution slide, often represented in a percent slider 50-200%, etc), the resolution increase of which required to reduce aliasing in deffered-rendered games (especially sub-pixel shimmering, which is even impractical for MSAA to reduce in forward-rendered games; a reason users tried "SGSSAA" back in the day) is typically too performance intensive to justify, at least in the newest games at max settings.

Finally, if you have an Nvidia GPU, you can use Nvidia Inspector to force driver-level FXAA in most games, assuming the game in question allows you to fully disable its TAA, but even then, you'll quickly find simple post-process FXAA and SMAA (via Reshade, etc) are highly ineffective at mitigating all but the simplest of aliasing on basic geometric edges, and do little to to nothing to reduce shimmering in motion (something only TAA-type AA can achieve in modern games, but at the expense of some level of blurring).

Again, modern games rely too much on 1) deferred-render engines (which basically enclose many of the geometric edges in "pockets" of effects, making them uncoverable by MSAA), and 2) temporal rendering techniques (screen-space, ray tracing, etc) for the more traditional post-process and hardware AA to be effective.

[Kyouki]

@jorimt, thank you for the clear definition and insight I can share to my non or lesser technical knowledge friends. Are you aware of any alternatives for the deferred rendered engine's/games?

Where post-process AA is concerned (not counting the short-lived Nvidia TXAA, which was MSAA with a temporal component; Watch Dogs, etc), just TAA, unfortunately, which, as already pointed out by the OP, can vary heavily in effectiveness and quality per engine/game; not all TAA is created equal.

Then there's image reconstructive techniques which are very similar to TAA, like DLSS (which has many versions that each interact differently with each game) and DLAA, but, in turn, also have similar temporal artifacts.

The only non-temporal AA readily available for deffered-rendered games is downsampling (achieved via DSR/DLDSR, a larger custom resolution downscaled to a lower one, "SSAA"-type options, or an internal resolution slide, often represented in a percent slider 50-200%, etc), the resolution increase of which required to reduce aliasing in deffered-rendered games (especially sub-pixel shimmering, which is even impractical for MSAA to reduce in forward-rendered games; a reason users tried "SGSSAA" back in the day) is typically too performance intensive to justify, at least in the newest games at max settings.

Finally, if you have an Nvidia GPU, you can use Nvidia Inspector to force driver-level FXAA in most games, assuming the game in question allows you to fully disable its TAA, but even then, you'll quickly find simple post-process FXAA and SMAA (via Reshade, etc) are highly ineffective at mitigating all but the simplest of aliasing on basic geometric edges, and do little to to nothing to reduce shimmering in motion (something only TAA-type AA can achieve in modern games, but at the expense of some level of blurring).

Again, modern games rely too much on 1) deferred-render engines (which basically enclose many of the geometric edges in "pockets" of effects, making them uncoverable by MSAA), and 2) temporal rendering techniques (screen-space, ray tracing, etc) for the more traditional post-process and hardware AA to be effective.

Thank you so much. This is very useful to share among friends who are lesser of tech knowledge.

[Hybred]

@jorimt, thank you for the clear definition and insight I can share to my non or lesser technical knowledge friends. Are you aware of any alternatives for the deferred rendered engine's/games?

Where post-process AA is concerned (not counting the short-lived Nvidia TXAA, which was MSAA with a temporal component; Watch Dogs, etc), just TAA, unfortunately, which, as already pointed out by the OP, can vary heavily in effectiveness and quality per engine/game; not all TAA is created equal.

Then there's image reconstructive techniques which are very similar to TAA, like DLSS (which has many versions that each interact differently with each game) and DLAA, but, in turn, also have similar temporal artifacts.

The only non-temporal AA readily available for deffered-rendered games is downsampling (achieved via DSR/DLDSR, a larger custom resolution downscaled to a lower one, "SSAA"-type options, or an internal resolution slide, often represented in a percent slider 50-200%, etc), the resolution increase of which required to reduce aliasing in deffered-rendered games (especially sub-pixel shimmering, which is even impractical for MSAA to reduce in forward-rendered games; a reason users tried "SGSSAA" back in the day) is typically too performance intensive to justify, at least in the newest games at max settings.

Finally, if you have an Nvidia GPU, you can use Nvidia Inspector to force driver-level FXAA in most games, assuming the game in question allows you to fully disable its TAA, but even then, you'll quickly find simple post-process FXAA and SMAA (via Reshade, etc) are highly ineffective at mitigating all but the simplest of aliasing on basic geometric edges, and do little to to nothing to reduce shimmering in motion (something only TAA-type AA can achieve in modern games, but at the expense of some level of blurring).

Again, modern games rely too much on 1) deferred-render engines (which basically enclose many of the geometric edges in "pockets" of effects, making them uncoverable by MSAA), and 2) temporal rendering techniques (screen-space, ray tracing, etc) for the more traditional post-process and hardware AA to be effective.

To be clear; you make a lot of good points, however these are simply reasons why getting good anti-aliasing quality is more difficult, rather than impossible.

Theirs many papers, code on shadertoy, UEBlueprints, etc that teach us how to avoid aliasing in deferred rendered games and also how to make things like MSAA work. It requires tinkering but it's not that difficult, its just deemed not worth the time. Theirs soo many techniques and methods to work around these issues that I can't explain them all but there's plently of deferred rendered games with low amounts of aliasing or working MSAA, the issue is designing your game with either of those things in mind is a labor of love when you could just make the game faster by relying on TAA and supporting it as the only option, and gaming has never been more corporate than it is now and rushing games out the door which is essentially what AAA gaming is.

It's the real reason why these methods are obsolete now is because they're not plug and drop anymore, they actually take time to get right. This could be mitigated by public game engines utilizing these things themselves properly by default, but that's not the case.

I'll leave a link to some sources my projects use with great results, and I may leave some links to getting MSAA working as well later I just dont have them on hand atm.

Specular Anti-Aliasing

- See what Valve did in Half Life: Alyx to reduce specular aliasing: https://media.steampowered.com/apps/val ... DC2015.pdf & https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1021771/Advanced-VR

- Square Enix improved Valve's method, you can checkout their version as well: https://www.jp.square-enix.com/tech/lib ... ularAA.pdf

- ShaderToy code to reduce specular aliasing: https://www.shadertoy.com/view/WssyR7
(Square Enix version)

- Check out this Unreal Engine Blueprint (based on the ShaderToy code): https://blueprintue.com/blueprint/bzklypaz/

- If using Unreal Engine with Valve's method make sure to change this setting: https://imgur.com/a/jpAIvnQ (No need to do this for the ShaderToy one)

Thin Geometry/Wire AA

- Source: https://www.humus.name/index.php?page=3D&ID=89

- UE blueprint: https://blueprintue.com/blueprint/scrhcp_s/

Stochastic Anti-Aliasing

- Source: https://www.shadertoy.com/view/mtXcDN

Temporal Anti-Aliasing

- Use commands "r.TemporalAA.HistoryScreenpercentage=200" & "r.TSR.HistoryScreenPercentage=200" in Unreal

- Decima's paper on TAA: https://advances.realtimerendering.com/ ... ph2017.pdf
(TAA with minimal blur, handles fast paced content well)

Dynamic Sharpening

- Source: https://forums.unrealengine.com/t/tempo ... ning/98676 & https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6aGasGgrvoI
(Sharpens the imags based on option, reducing TAA's motion blur issues. Won't work on UE5 or later versions of UE4, this is something you have to make yourself. Good concept)

[jorimt]

To be clear; you make a lot of good points, however these are simply reasons why getting good anti-aliasing quality is more difficult, rather than impossible.

My comment you quoted was only concerning what users can do with the officially available methods now. Short of manual config hacks and third-party mods, the rest is down to developers.

These limitations tend to occur when 1) some developers are lazy, 2) some developers are hamstrung by the current industry standards and/or engine they're working with, 3) some developers are hamstrung by leadership and their lack of knowledge on what to prioritize on a technical-level, and/or 4) some of these things are technically doable and known by all involved, but are ultimately cost/scope prohibitive within the given project, and thus are deprioritized for more profitable endeavors (I.E. lower hanging fruit).

Again, right now, we're in a phase in the industry where the current focus in engine development is rendering techniques that rely heavily on temporal methods, so until we advance past that (into what ever "next" is), the whole AA situation where motion clarify is concerned is going to be...problematic.

I'm all for more awareness and more robust and varied AA options, though I'm guessing said awareness would probably be more effective being pushed at the dev-level than the user-level, where possible.

I will say, however, I've been playing the Talos Principle 2 (UE5) recently, and where AA is concerned, I have the option to use FSR, XeSS, DLSS, DLAA, TSR, and TAAU, most of which support an adjustable quality and sharpening parameter.

So in many cases, the issue isn't so much the lack of AA and/or reconstructive image methods or settings available, but the fact that most of them must be of a temporal nature to be effective within the given engine, and that they can't be disabled because of that.

And even if more devs did start allowing AA to be entirely disabled as well as offering non-TAA methods, the same players that hate TAA would then likely be complaining about the uselessness of said non-TAA options and their frustrations with the lack of temporal coverage in temporal-heavy games, while at the same time not being able bring themselves to go back to (the now optional) TAA due to the artifacts and blur.

I.E. pleasing the more "technical" audience is a near-impossible balancing act where the devs are darned if they do, and darned if they don't right now.

That all said, I don't disagree with you, and I'm not trying to play devil's advocate; you simply keep quoting my messages, hence I continue to reply

[Hybred]

To be clear; you make a lot of good points, however these are simply reasons why getting good anti-aliasing quality is more difficult, rather than impossible.

My comment you quoted was only concerning what users can do with the officially available methods now. Short of manual config hacks and third-party mods, the rest is down to developers.

These limitations tend to occur when 1) some developers are lazy, 2) some developers are hamstrung by the current industry standards and/or engine they're working with, 3) some developers are hamstrung by leadership and their lack of knowledge on what to prioritize on a technical-level, and/or 4) some of these things are technically doable and known by all involved, but are ultimately cost/scope prohibitive within the given project, and thus are deprioritized for more profitable endeavors (I.E. lower hanging fruit).

Again, right now, we're in a phase in the industry where the current focus in engine development is rendering techniques that rely heavily on temporal methods, so until we advance past that (into what ever "next" is), the whole AA situation where motion clarify is concerned is going to be...problematic.

I'm all for more awareness and more robust and varied AA options, though I'm guessing said awareness would probably be more effective being pushed at the dev-level than the user-level, where possible.

I will say, however, I've been playing the Talos Principle 2 (UE5) recently, and where AA is concerned, I have the option to use FSR, XeSS, DLSS, DLAA, TSR, and TAAU, most of which support an adjustable quality and sharpening parameter.

So in many cases, the issue isn't so much the lack of AA and/or reconstructive image methods or settings available, but the fact that most of them must be of a temporal nature to be effective within the given engine, and that they can't be disabled because of that.

And even if more devs did start allowing AA to be entirely disabled as well as offering non-TAA methods, the same players that hate TAA would then likely be complaining about the uselessness of said non-TAA options and their frustrations with the lack of temporal coverage in temporal-heavy games, while at the same time not being able bring themselves to go back to (the now optional) TAA due to the artifacts and blur.

I.E. pleasing the more "technical" audience is a near-impossible balancing act where the devs are darned if they do, and darned if they don't right now.

That all said, I don't disagree with you, and I'm not trying to play devil's advocate; you simply keep quoting my messages, hence I continue to reply

Well of course, I'm replying because I'm enjoying the dialogue, I may misunderstand what you're insinuating with what you say soketimes but were both on the same page it seems, and that is that it's not impossible but the 4 reasons you gave are EXTREMELY true as for why the problems aren't tackled despite being possible, I mean I've worked on big games like AC and yet despite my expertise in this area I was not allowed to touch certain things and as a result was unable to improve it as much as I wanted.

I do think a push from user side of things is good because if companies, leadership, etc see this is something heavily desired it will be done, their needs to be demand to justify the work, users reception to something pushes us forward. We wouldn't have X thing or Y without enough users liking it. But I think I've said all I needed to say for now on the topic. Thank you for the chat

[jorimt]

Well of course, I'm replying because I'm enjoying the dialogue, I may misunderstand what you're insinuating with what you say soketimes but were both on the same page it seems

No worries, seems so.

the 4 reasons you gave are EXTREMELY true as for why the problems aren't tackled despite being possible, I mean I've worked on big games like AC and yet despite my expertise in this area I was not allowed to touch certain things and as a result was unable to improve it as much as I wanted.

I'm a web dev by trade, so #4 (and well, the remaining three, really) I know from experience; it can be extremely frustrating when you can't unleash your 100% potential due to time, budget, and/or scope restraints.

I do think a push from user side of things is good because if companies, leadership, etc see this is something heavily desired it will be done, their needs to be demand to justify the work, users reception to something pushes us forward. We wouldn't have X thing or Y without enough users liking it.

Fair. I think it's safe to say there probably needs to be an equal push on the user and dev-side for this to move forward.

Time will tell, and again, once we get over this whole 1st-gen "everything must be real-time rendering or else" hump, perhaps things will move naturally into the more temporally-stable direction where motion clarity is directly concerned.

I just think they're having to basically neglect one for the other until more advancements can be made in ray-tracing, image reconstruction, framerate amplification, and the like.

[Chief Blur Buster]

I've been in the subreddit for some time and for my long-standing quest of what and why my eyes tear up from some video game's.

Thanks to blurbusters and the TAA subreddit, I have figured out that I have a pretty bad case of blur-sensitivity in my eyes. Reducing where blur potentially may come from helps my eyes a lot (among other settings like Chromatic Abbreviation)

@jorimt, thank you for the clear definition and insight I can share to my non or lesser technical knowledge friends. Are you aware of any alternatives for the deferred rendered engine's/games?

I've added a shadow links to this threads from the Display Comfort and Software Developers discussion forum, because game settings -- indeed is an unexpected ergonomic consideration.

There's people who are more stroboscopics-sensitive than blur-sensitive, and thus get less eyestrain from enabling "GPU Motion Blur Effect". But there are also other people who get the converse (more eyestrain from low frame rates and motion blur), and need high frame rates with minimum temporal artifacts.

Game developers are doing an ergonomic disservice to audience by providing forced TAA. The non-TAA approach might look bad for static images, but look much better for moving images, and create less eyestrain for some of us.

I deem the sphere of problematic GPU settings within the sphere of Display Comfort. Blur Busters has been a long-time beacon for motionblur-eyestrain people, and so now a Display Comfort forum has been started to aggregate these topics. I want this squarely in the radar of vendors (displays/GPUs and games).

I have reason to believe more than 10 NVIDIA employees now monitor the Display Comfort forum, after I brought this to their attention. I'm hoping AMD/Intel/Apple/etc starts paying more attention too. We have to acknowledge the big ergonomic rabbit hole of the wide variety of displays/sizes/GPUs/games are inflicting upon us.

It was much simpler back in the CRT arcade/console gaming days, when you only had one display technology, and much simpler graphics. It's much more varied today, and a lot of ergonomic issues are currently unacknowledged or massively overlooked by game developers / etc.

[Kyouki]

There's people who are more stroboscopics-sensitive than blur-sensitive, and thus get less eyestrain from enabling "GPU Motion Blur Effect". But there are also other people who get the converse (more eyestrain from low frame rates and motion blur), and need high frame rates with minimum temporal artifacts.

I've indeed heard of friends who I suggested tech like BFI modes to give that a try, that they mostly gotten headaches from those. I wasn't aware and I do remember reading some of your posts in regarding of different eyes for different people to figure out a whole fleet of different issues per person! I've over the course of time helped people figure out more and also hopefully learned them the ways if not resources they can use to learn more about it.
Having the 360hz display and minimum or preferably none temporal artifacts made me able to enjoy games a lot longer and better.
Though getting that in framerate is very challenging and I often resorted to buying very high-end hardware which isn't something I always wanna do since it can get too expensive.

Game developers are doing an ergonomic disservice to audience by providing forced TAA. The non-TAA approach might look bad for static images, but look much better for moving images, and create less eyestrain for some of us.

I have reason to believe more than 10 NVIDIA employees now monitor the Display Comfort forum, after I brought this to their attention. I'm hoping AMD/Intel/Apple/etc starts paying more attention too. We have to acknowledge the big ergonomic rabbit hole of the wide variety of displays/sizes/GPUs/games are inflicting upon us.

That's awesome, hopefully it strives for a better future for us suffering from these problems as well as others who just dislike the image / motion clarity of these technologies. Often these are implementations done improper or not thought of having a OFF feature at all. DLSS is one of those that helps for framerate, which is really cool but if it isn't done proper there can be a lot more TAA artifacts and thus elevate my issues playing the game.

It was much simpler back in the CRT arcade/console gaming days, when you only had one display technology, and much simpler graphics. It's much more varied today, and a lot of ergonomic issues are currently unacknowledged or massively overlooked by game developers / etc.

I've been ultra-keen in getting a really good CRT one day again to relive those better times as I remember not ever having this problems when gaming on them. On school we had CRTs and they were glorious to play little counter-strike matches on, then later on I got my own computer at home and started to wonder why my differences were so stark in game-performance as well as feeling like playing games felt like a blur or a haze or skipped information. All of this led me to this very forum and your research and discover and learn about all of these technologies made me aware of what I suffer from and what I can do to minimize it so I can still enjoy the entertainment medium.
Thank you.

[Hybred]

I've been in the subreddit for some time and for my long-standing quest of what and why my eyes tear up from some video game's.

Thanks to blurbusters and the TAA subreddit, I have figured out that I have a pretty bad case of blur-sensitivity in my eyes. Reducing where blur potentially may come from helps my eyes a lot (among other settings like Chromatic Abbreviation)

@jorimt, thank you for the clear definition and insight I can share to my non or lesser technical knowledge friends. Are you aware of any alternatives for the deferred rendered engine's/games?

I've added a shadow links to this threads from the Display Comfort and Software Developers discussion forum, because game settings -- indeed is an unexpected ergonomic consideration.

There's people who are more stroboscopics-sensitive than blur-sensitive, and thus get less eyestrain from enabling "GPU Motion Blur Effect". But there are also other people who get the converse (more eyestrain from low frame rates and motion blur), and need high frame rates with minimum temporal artifacts.

Game developers are doing an ergonomic disservice to audience by providing forced TAA. The non-TAA approach might look bad for static images, but look much better for moving images, and create less eyestrain for some of us.

I deem the sphere of problematic GPU settings within the sphere of Display Comfort. Blur Busters has been a long-time beacon for motionblur-eyestrain people, and so now a Display Comfort forum has been started to aggregate these topics. I want this squarely in the radar of vendors (displays/GPUs and games).

I have reason to believe more than 10 NVIDIA employees now monitor the Display Comfort forum, after I brought this to their attention. I'm hoping AMD/Intel/Apple/etc starts paying more attention too. We have to acknowledge the big ergonomic rabbit hole of the wide variety of displays/sizes/GPUs/games are inflicting upon us.

It was much simpler back in the CRT arcade/console gaming days, when you only had one display technology, and much simpler graphics. It's much more varied today, and a lot of ergonomic issues are currently unacknowledged or massively overlooked by game developers / etc.

Thank you so much for official confirmation on this subject. It is very relieving to hear you support this not only as a quality of life/user preference thing, but also as the underlooked "accessibility" aspect that is neglected.

I've heard some people getting headaches from TAA because the blur makes them feel like their eyes are unfocused and they keep trying to adjust, while others (like me) just get sick from the blur caused by movement (so its important to keep both of these things in mind)

Theirs so many issues this technology can cause, as it has inherent weaknesses that we have to try and mitigate which I don't believe we've even been attempting sadly and have instead got very complacent.

I left some sources above for improving both TAA and non-TAA solutions, unsure if you've seen them but hopefully other developers see it, I add them to all my projects with excellent results, the only trouble is when using closed source engines with their own quirks and flaws that fight against you from making these improvements (Nanite in UE5 is a big strain for me to workaround)

As for NVIDIA - I know DLSS/DLAA has a preset feature (intended for devs but user can override it), I would suggest they add a new preset to DLSS that really prioritized clarity and motion over anti-aliasing quality/stability so users who are sensitive to blur or these motion artifacts might have something. Preset C does this the best so far but not enough for this crowd of people, adding another preset so it becomes great for people sensitive to temporal solutions & possibly esports players would be awesome. As I think a TAA that doesn't accumulate past frames for too long like Decima's TAA is weak enough to not trigger some people.

Edit: I've decided to consolidate my knowledge & tips into a reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/MotionClarity/s/3DmpIO7S2X which includes extra info from what I shared above. If this is helpful to you maybe you can do something with it. Thanks for speaking with me