Aliasing and Anti-aliasing Comparison Tool

ss_2013-12-24_20-32-42This is a tool for illustrating the various types of aliasing which can occur in computer graphics, and how many common methods of anti-aliasing interact with them. I wrote it to accompany an article which will be published some time in the future, and which contains a rather detailed treatment of the topics of aliasing and anti-aliasing.

A main point is to also show aliasing (that is, flickering and image instability) in motion, which is insufficiently captured by the common screenshot or (compressed) video comparisons.

There are 6 types of aliasing shown (transparency aliasing, geometry aliasing (2D and 3D), sub-pixel aliasing, texture aliasing and shader aliasing), and many methods of anti-aliasing are available.

ss_2013-12-24_20-44-07The 1-8 keys are mapped to presets which show some common anti-aliasing methods:

  1.  none
  2. 4x MSAA
    multisampling, generally sparse grid
  3. 2×2 OGSSAA
    ordered grid supersampling with 4 samples
  4. 4x SSAA
    turns the 4 multisamples into supersamples, thus 4x SGSSAA on most HW
  5. FXAA
    just post-processing, see sub-pixel effects
  6. SMAA
    as above (note better motion stability)
  7. 1.5×1.5 OGSSAA + SMAA
    similar to what can be achieved via injection in most games, often decently playable
  8. best
    maximum number of SGSSAA samples plus 2×2 OGSSAA. Close to the “ground truth”, that is the perfect representation of the scene on the pixel grid

Let me know if anything breaks. I do know that the PXAA and TPXAA PPAA methods don’t work on AMD, if anyone wants to help fix it (and has the time) contact me and provide some means of synchronous communication (e.g. Steam ID).

Source code release soon.

Download here!

(If you encounter an error about missing some .dll when running the program, get the Microsoft C++ redistributable here)

(Edit 2014-1-14: updated to fix an issue which could occur with some AMD drivers)

8 thoughts on “Aliasing and Anti-aliasing Comparison Tool

  1. Hey Durante!

    I know you’re pretty busy working on GeDoSaTo but if you find some time it would be nice if you could check your anti-aliasing comparison tool.

    The program crashes if any number of multi samples are added. Log:

    Runtime assertion failed in c:\dev\aa\aliasing_comp\GLRenderTexture.h on line 51
    # Check: false
    # Message: Framebuffer incomplete

    My hardware specs:

    Intel 2500k, OC 4.2 GHz
    GeForce GTX 660, Driver 340.52
    Win 7 x64

    Hope that helps. Thanks in advance! :)

  2. Posting here regarding Rising. YOu should really do something about it, there is at least one thing konami will never fix themselves for sure, the black bars.

  3. Pingback: Antialiasing-Tool von Durante released!

  4. This is quite nice for me, as I only really knew about MSAA previously and have been trying to get up to speed on the more recent methods.

    I would request a full-screen option if you can, and also an FPS counter so that I can see which methods result in the greatest framerate drops.

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