Forcing MLAA to a higher version?

[ToonTotalWar]

Hi
Is it possible to force my settings from MLAA to MLAA x2 etc..as I only have MLAA as an option??

I have a GTX275 896mb card, any help on this would be appreciated

Thanks

[SupAll]

Nope. MLAA is a post-processing effect that mimics Anti-Aliasing. Some say it is the equivalent of 8x MSAA. Besides, if you record video with it, the AA won't actually show in the video from what I understand.

[MikkOwl]

On the AMD it is possible sometimes to have MLAA + MSAA but maybe not in Shogun 2. I think nVidia cards are unable to do this. It is a huge resource hog anyway, and makes it look far uglier than just the MSAA.
It is not the equivalent of any proper AA I've ever seen. It looks awful. It doesn't know anything about the real geometry of the scenery and can't properly figure out what things should have sharp edges, curves, jagged or blurred. It just applies its smoothening filter to everything, and the result is an effect that looks mostly like just lowering the resolution on the LCD monitor. I have an AMD HD 6970 and it for sure uses at least as much resources as proper MSAA x4.

For anyone who is curious about MLAA I ask you to try to forget everything you heard about it. Just carefully study the image and compare the different types of AA modes (even without). There's supersampling and multisampling available sometimes too. Note what a huge difference there is in image quality despite some modes having much lower sampling rate. You'll probably notice that everything looks weirdly smudged, even the interface, cursor, texts etc, with MLAA. And if you get to try SuperSampling, you'll notice that even x2 looks really awesome.

[MikkOwl]

AMD HD 6970 and it for sure uses at least as much resources as proper MSAA x4.

A correction to my previous post: I did framerate testing and found that MLAA had about the same penalty as MSAA x2, at 1920x1200.

[Blom89]

A correction to my previous post: I did framerate testing and found that MLAA had about the same penalty as MSAA x2, at 1920x1200.

Did MLAA look better than MSAA 2x though?

[MikkOwl]

Did MLAA look better than MSAA 2x though?

No, I think it looks worse than even having no AA at all. The main reason is that it is a post processing filter that does not know, or discriminate, what it is looking at. It has no knowledge of the content of the scene. It looks at the image as if it was a 2D picture, then tries to guess where to add smoothing and sharpening. In some places of a scene, it looks pretty good, maybe comparable to MSAA x4. But everywhere else, including the overlay interface, cursor, texts, textures/surfaces of units, look smudged/blurred, bizarre and distorted. Kind of small artifacts that degrade the quality of the scene.

MSAA - Multi Sampling Anti Aliasing if I remember correctly, has awareness of the 3D geometry of the scene. It looks at the edges of 3D objects, then applies extra rendering of them to get higher accuracy, without touching anything else. It gives a clean result that does not interfere with the rest of the scene (text/interface overlay, surfaces etc). It doesn't do anything for transparent textures like trees and grass unfortunately.

The next step is called Adaptive-MSAA, at least on AMD cards. It doesn't work in Shogun 2 but it also gives the same treatment for transparent textures (think grass and trees). It looks fantastic.

The next step after that is called Super Sampling. It is extremely resource intensive but looks amazingly good. It is much like rendering the whole scene at a higher resolution than the display, then properly downsizing it (with the correct filter to make everything, including transparent textures and surfaces) appear with the highest accuracy. Doesn't work in Shogun 2 either as far as I know.

During my testing today, I could not find any setting that really got rid of the aliasing of the spears carried by the Yari Ashigaru (they look like bright disconnected pixels moving about). x2 MSAA was overall nice looking but not nice enough to warrant the 20-25% performance hit it gave. The best thing for the spears (and indeed transparent textures like trees) was to set "Depth of Field" to "Low". It applies a camera focus type blur that looks pleasing, and hides much of the aliasing. It eats about 18-23% performance too, sadly.

[ToonTotalWar]

Thanks guys very informative and +rep to all

[zrtelford]

do not use it with your nvidia card, your results will be blurry and horrible, Force AA with invidia Inspector, how to do so is plastere all over the Tech. side of these forums. I have done that and had great results with two 9800 gtx+ cards. MLAA made my units look like Nintendo 64 graphics.

[ToonTotalWar]

do not use it with your nvidia card, your results will be blurry and horrible, Force AA with invidia Inspector, how to do so is plastere all over the Tech. side of these forums. I have done that and had great results with two 9800 gtx+ cards. MLAA made my units look like Nintendo 64 graphics.

I disagree, the MLAA looks fine in my game! I was using Nvidia inspector prior to the patch update and that also worked a treat but dropped my FPS.

[M2TWRocks]

Hi
Is it possible to force my settings from MLAA to MLAA x2 etc..as I only have MLAA as an option??

I have a GTX275 896mb card, any help on this would be appreciated

Thanks

I don't know what it is, or what it does, but the game runs very smooth with it on. X8 AA would cause some slowdowns for me.

[Blom89]

Super Sampling AA is only on DX11 cards right?

[MikkOwl]

Super Sampling AA is only on DX11 cards right?

From googling a bit I see people talking about using it in dx9, so can't be exclusive to DX11.
Here is a proper simple description of what it is. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_sampling

[Crazyeyesreaper]

if you have an ATI card use the Morphological AA filter in CCC not the MLAA available in game most of the excessive blur and just plain ugliness is from Creative assemblies use of the filter,

MLAA via CCC uses less resources then MSAA 4x and looks closer to 8xAA MLAA via in game settings it just terrible,

i tend to mix 4x AA to 8xAA with Morphological AA etc,

In general for nvidia cards force MSAA, for AMD / ATi use MLAA via the catalyst driver not the MLAA option in game.

[Blom89]

if you have an ATI card use the Morphological AA filter in CCC not the MLAA available in game most of the excessive blur and just plain ugliness is from Creative assemblies use of the filter,

MLAA via CCC uses less resources then MSAA 4x and looks closer to 8xAA MLAA via in game settings it just terrible,

i tend to mix 4x AA to 8xAA with Morphological AA etc,

In general for nvidia cards force MSAA, for AMD / ATi use MLAA via the catalyst driver not the MLAA option in game.

I don't see that option in the "Gaming" tab w/ 11.5 drivers. I have the AMD Vision Engine Control Center open and the only options for AA I see are:

Smoothvision HD Anti-Aliasing
[] Use application settings

Level 2x -------4x-------8x

Filter(drop down menu): Box, narrow tent, wide tent, edge detect

There are no other AA options available.

[MikkOwl]

if you have an ATI card use the Morphological AA filter in CCC not the MLAA available in game most of the excessive blur and just plain ugliness is from Creative assemblies use of the filter,

MLAA via CCC uses less resources then MSAA 4x and looks closer to 8xAA MLAA via in game settings it just terrible,

i tend to mix 4x AA to 8xAA with Morphological AA etc,

In general for nvidia cards force MSAA, for AMD / ATi use MLAA via the catalyst driver not the MLAA option in game.

On my Radeon card in various games, as well as in different articles comparing the results, I can't notice any difference in MLAA appearance. Whenever it is involved in any way, it smudges/distorts large parts of the scene while eating resources. The only time it can be useful is in certain types of scenes that have many clear well defined (jagged) lines that could need smoothing, and the game itself supports no AA at all.

I was around back in the day when it was 3DFX VooDoo cards versus PowerVR, Matrox and the beginnings of nVidia. 3DFX went all out for motion blur as their main killer feature. The thing people eventually realized was that blurring occurs naturally in the eye when objects are moving fast enough, and is only useful to help hide bad framerates (like in the movie theatres - film often use 24fps with lots of blur). They asked: "If this feature only does something if the framerate is low, but itself causes low framerate, it is only a fix for a problem that it itself causes. What purpose does it have, then?". The 3DFX brand lost the fight and was bought up by a competitor if I recall. The connection here is that MLAA is to me clearly a crappy gimmick, like 3DFX's blur feature.

[Crazyeyesreaper]

Its called morphological AA in the driver panel it has a tick box use it

morphological AA via ATI AMD drivers only supports 5000 and 6000 series cards so if your on a 4000 series it probably wont work.

MLAA is hit or miss ATI MLAA via driver panel works in some games not in others

http://www.hardocp.com/article/2010/...ce_iq_review/1

It should also be mentioned you will want to turn Morphological AA OFF when not playing Shogun 2 etc because morphological AA applies not only to games but windows desktop and web browsers etc, firefox for instance is well known to get blurry and IQ due to its hardware accelerated renderer not being fully compatible yet.

[Blom89]

Oh alright.

[MikkOwl]

By the way, the whole game interface seems to have MLAA applied to it, no matter what settings used in DX11 mode. People talk about this in other topics, describing how everything is smudged, including the loading screen. I wonder what is going on, and hope for a quick fix. It is tiring on the eyes to try to read all the little smudged text & symbols.

[Crazyeyesreaper]

its a post process filter, meaning its the last object in the render pipeline so it gets applied,

basically deffered game engines can use regular MSAA the problem is theres only so much space in the pipeline, so AA gets removed, for more important features or enhancements, MLAA is basically a fix for that offering a type of AA, when MSAA cant be used,

good examples of Morphological or MLAA is Metro 2033's AAA method or any game using AA on the PS3 the few games on PS3 that use AA use an MLAA method.

now in theory MLAA could be moved in the pipeline to be before UI elements but this requires planning and thought something well CA isnt well known for lol

to be blunt think of MLAA as CAs lets shut the DX9 has no AA whiners up for a bit fix,

DX9 had no AA due to pipeline restrictions imposed by Deffered Rendering engine, MLAA works they toss it in to make DX9 users happy or semi happy,

it should be noted MLAA works on everything which is good and bad, it should also be noted MSAA dosent apply to everything which is also good an bad,

MSAA has no impact on UI but it dosent fix the plants etc edges, since it dosent apply to transparency maps, MLAA does apply thus works on said plants and foliage, its a no win situation basically damned if you do damned if you dont.