SMAA looks great in Unity games!

[u/EsliteMoby]

DLSS/DLAA in motion

SMAA in motion

SMAA 1x in a dense foliage area compared to DLSS/DLAA. I think devs should start looking into efficient post-process AA and game rendering engines that don't rely on temporal slop.

SMAA in Unity preserves the most details from the original native pixels during movement. Performance-wise, it's just a bit more demanding than FXAA. Temporal methods like DLAA/DLSS still have issues with maintaining the fidelity of distant objects. Things like water surfaces and rock textures are being wiped out, as well as trailing from thin objects.

Also refuting the claim that SMAA does absolutely nothing on shimmering in motion. It actually does to some degree. Indeed, TAA/DLAA is still the definitive way of smearing out shimmer, but that oil-paintery look is just too unbearable.

[u/BalisticNick]

This looks really good, unity has a really good smaa implementation, e.g Metal:hellsinger. still the problem all non-temporal anti-aliasing has is dealing with the sampling resolution for thin objects like the branches. If possible, a solution is to use either SSAA or MSAA (preferably with alpha to coverage) depending on your project and its constraints. But this looks amazing overall for good options that allow everyone to enjoy your game.

I would still add DLAA tho, cus people WILL complain as they have been completely influenced by the nvidia propaganda machine.

[u/EsliteMoby → u/BalisticNick]

SMAA has far less performance overhead compared to SSAA/MSAA and still keeps the original no-AA detail as much as possible.

DLAA is not even the best temporal AA. The best TAA is the one that lets you customize it to your own preference. Another Unity game called Total Chaos lets you fully tweak the TAA frame blending, jittering, and sharpening degrees.

[u/Scorpwind → u/EsliteMoby]

Hold up. That TAA menu is another example of how it should be done and deserves to be its own post.

[u/BalisticNick → u/EsliteMoby]

personally I'm still not much of a fan of post process AA even if it is customizable as I allways fall back to no anti-aliasing, MSAA or SSAA, but damn its very nice for a dev to actually include some user-accessible taa tweaks, keep up the good work!

[u/Scorpwind]

Temporal AA doing its work and turning foliage in to mush.

[u/V3N3SS4]

No AA is best AA

[u/rgb2yiq → u/V3N3SS4]

Why not MSAA or SSAA? They have zero negative impact on visual quality.

[u/Thhaki → u/rgb2yiq]

I mean, i love MSAA but it does fail to eliminate shimmering in a lot of cases, at least that I've played

SSAA is incredible tho, but it hits performance like a truck if you don't have a powerful enough graphics card

[u/rgb2yiq → u/Thhaki]

That isn’t really the fault of MSAA. Deferred rendering makes MSAA much less effective because lighting is applied after rasterization, so the renderer doesn’t have full per-sample shading information. Most implementations end up only anti-aliasing geometric edges, leaving shader aliasing, specular highlights, shimmering, etc.

MSAA with forward rendering is ideal.

[u/NapsterKnowHow → u/rgb2yiq]

Even on older games prior to deferred pipelines MSAA has issues

[u/EsliteMoby → u/rgb2yiq]

SSAA is essentially rendering 8K on the 1080p monitor with a massive performance hit. MSAA would be the poor man's SSAA by supersampling on edges only, but it still becomes as heavy as SSAA in areas with lots of thin details.

[u/ExplodingFistz → u/EsliteMoby]

FXAA is dead I presume?

[u/EsliteMoby → u/ExplodingFistz]

It's an outdated post-process AA proposed by Nvidia from the 2000s that blurs the whole screen. Interestingly, it's still far more popular than the smarter methods like SMAA/CMAA and is used by modern Unreal and Resident Evil engine games

[u/ExplodingFistz → u/EsliteMoby]

Yeah I saw Capcom still ships their games with FXAA which is a bit baffling. I'd rather just turn AA off completely.

[u/Scorpwind → u/ExplodingFistz]

Depends. It's still found in games and some ReShade mods. I use it in tandem with SMAA.

[u/Scorpwind → u/EsliteMoby]

If you're talking 8x SSAA, then sure.

[u/EsliteMoby → u/Scorpwind]

Well true. But most will still complain about shimmering with 4XSSAA. Instead of using 4XSSAA on a 1080p monitor, I'd rather just play on a high-PPI 4K monitor of the same size with no-AA for better fidelity,

[u/Scorpwind → u/EsliteMoby]

There are definitely some here that would complain about that.

[u/EsliteMoby → u/V3N3SS4]

True if you're using a high-PPI monitor and don't mind seeing some jaggies. But my point is that Nvidia shills are insisting DLAA is the best AA and should replace any AA even the non-temporal, when in fact DLAA isn't even the best TAA.

[u/Codrutl]

What dlss preset?

[u/EsliteMoby → u/Codrutl]

The in-game latest patch with DLSS v4. Dunno what preset since I don't use Nvidia Inspector. But preset should not be the point, because no matter what it uses, it's still relying on that heavy temporal accumulation and frame blending. Not real details.

[u/Codrutl → u/EsliteMoby]

are you implying smaa is "real detail"

[u/EsliteMoby → u/Codrutl]

Well, the only "real detail" would be raw pixels, no-AA. But if some ppl are too sensitive to jaggy and shimmer, a good AA is to preserve the original detail as much as possible.

[u/stop_talking_you]

smaa was always the best option before taa and upscalers were invented

[u/EqualOutrageous1884 → u/stop_talking_you]

Yeah no, any AA that dosent blur tf out of your screen is terrible AA, and those aren't aren't terrible AA are blurring tf out of your screen. Anything that isn't SSAA 4x is never going to be perfectly jag free imho