TAA also makes games super blurry & its starting to be forced.
Posted: 16 Dec 2023, 15:20
TAA & Persistence Blur
So this forum is dedicated to motion clarity, however it typically only talks about persistence blur (which is very important, and I am very dedicated to solving that issue as well, either via 1000hz panels with async warp or innovations to BFI such as ULMB 2)
However -- there are other issues contributing to poor motion clarity that also need addressed such as TAA (temporal anti-aliasing) which is an anti-aliasing solutions that uses past frame information to better detect what is aliasing and isn't. The problem is keeping this past frame information can lead to ghosting and blurring in motion.
It's sort of funny how it mirrors the issue of persistence blur, where the ghosting is like crosstalk or response times (overshoot), and the blur aspect is from keeping past frame information like a sample and hold display keeping the image on screen instead of strobing it.
Both result in significant image quality issues, but obviously they do so to attain other aspects of quality such as in BFI's case - flicker free, brighter image, and TAA's goal to reduce aliasing even further than other anti-aliasing methods. It really comes down to an individuals own preference, which will vary from display to display (some will have worse BFI implementations than others) and game to game (some games may have too much aliasing with TAA off, some games won't. Most games will also have very blurry TAA but a select few may actually put the time into it to make it look good in motion)
The reason this is also an issue is because more and more games these days are not providing an off/non-temporal option for anti-aliasing, if they provide any option at all its always "Low" and "High" (MW3, Battlefield 2042, Halo Infinite, 95% of UE5 games, etc) which means TAA is being forced onto people and is why modern gaming is so blurry and soft. It would be nice to achieve the following
Solutions
1) Advocate for non-temporal options to be provided like SMAA, or even just off, having an alternative solution would be better but the ultimate goal is to not have it forced onto people
2) Provide developer resources and knowledge on the best ways to correctly implement TAA to reduce blurring whether it's in stationary or in motion (if you know, if not I have a lot of documentation & knowledge on that)
3) Advocate for developers to expose TAA options in game so people can find their own balance of blur & anti-aliasing, if TAA is important for their render pipeline and they don't wish to put work into getting the game to look pretty with it off. This would include exposing things like "Current Frame Weight", the "Sample Count", the "TAA History Reprojection", and "Filter Size" to the user
Theirs a subreddit dedicated to the topic called r/****TAA (which has a vulgar name that triggers a defensive response, which I do not like) but theirs also another one that encompasses both issues (persistence blur and TAA) with a more PG name called r/MotionClarity if you need more information or would like to help bring awareness I recommend joining but it would be cool if we could discuss that here more, is the reason were not because we'd like to focus on one issue at a time and leave the other to other people? Is it because of ignorance of the issue? Either way thanks for reading
Here's a informative video with more examples & detailed information/solutions if you want to learn more https://youtu.be/YEtX_Z7zZSY
So this forum is dedicated to motion clarity, however it typically only talks about persistence blur (which is very important, and I am very dedicated to solving that issue as well, either via 1000hz panels with async warp or innovations to BFI such as ULMB 2)
However -- there are other issues contributing to poor motion clarity that also need addressed such as TAA (temporal anti-aliasing) which is an anti-aliasing solutions that uses past frame information to better detect what is aliasing and isn't. The problem is keeping this past frame information can lead to ghosting and blurring in motion.
It's sort of funny how it mirrors the issue of persistence blur, where the ghosting is like crosstalk or response times (overshoot), and the blur aspect is from keeping past frame information like a sample and hold display keeping the image on screen instead of strobing it.
Both result in significant image quality issues, but obviously they do so to attain other aspects of quality such as in BFI's case - flicker free, brighter image, and TAA's goal to reduce aliasing even further than other anti-aliasing methods. It really comes down to an individuals own preference, which will vary from display to display (some will have worse BFI implementations than others) and game to game (some games may have too much aliasing with TAA off, some games won't. Most games will also have very blurry TAA but a select few may actually put the time into it to make it look good in motion)
The reason this is also an issue is because more and more games these days are not providing an off/non-temporal option for anti-aliasing, if they provide any option at all its always "Low" and "High" (MW3, Battlefield 2042, Halo Infinite, 95% of UE5 games, etc) which means TAA is being forced onto people and is why modern gaming is so blurry and soft. It would be nice to achieve the following
Solutions
1) Advocate for non-temporal options to be provided like SMAA, or even just off, having an alternative solution would be better but the ultimate goal is to not have it forced onto people
2) Provide developer resources and knowledge on the best ways to correctly implement TAA to reduce blurring whether it's in stationary or in motion (if you know, if not I have a lot of documentation & knowledge on that)
3) Advocate for developers to expose TAA options in game so people can find their own balance of blur & anti-aliasing, if TAA is important for their render pipeline and they don't wish to put work into getting the game to look pretty with it off. This would include exposing things like "Current Frame Weight", the "Sample Count", the "TAA History Reprojection", and "Filter Size" to the user
Theirs a subreddit dedicated to the topic called r/****TAA (which has a vulgar name that triggers a defensive response, which I do not like) but theirs also another one that encompasses both issues (persistence blur and TAA) with a more PG name called r/MotionClarity if you need more information or would like to help bring awareness I recommend joining but it would be cool if we could discuss that here more, is the reason were not because we'd like to focus on one issue at a time and leave the other to other people? Is it because of ignorance of the issue? Either way thanks for reading
Here's a informative video with more examples & detailed information/solutions if you want to learn more https://youtu.be/YEtX_Z7zZSY