AAA – Analytical Anti-Aliasing

Tangent: my biggest problem with AA is something adjacent to it, which is that almost none of my games bother explain what the differences are between the different abbreviations available in the settings, half of which are completely unknown to me. Like, sure, I can look them up but a little bit of user-friendliness would be appreciated.

This article will probably help for future reference though!

Games/graphics are one of those domains with a lot of jargon for sure. If you don't want to be a wizard you can just mess with it and see what happens. I like how dolphin approaches this with extensive tooltips in the settings, but there's always going to be some implicit knowledge.

On a meta level - I feel like I've seen anti-acronym sentiment a lot recently. I feel like it's never been easier to look these things up. There's definitely levels of acronyms which are anti-learning or a kind of protectionism, but to my mind there are appropriate levels of it to use because you have to label concepts at a useful level to accomplish things, and graphics settings of a game definitely are on the reasonable side.

The PS4 Pro introduced the gaming world to the simplification of settings from dozens of acronyms that were common to PC Gamers, down to “Performance” and “Quality”.

I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s now a market demand for that to spread back to PC land.

> just mess with it and see what happens

And even if you know every detail, that's still the best course of action, I think. Which kind of antialiasing you prefer, and how it trades with performance and resolution is highly subjective, and it can be "none".

There are 3 components to rescaling/rendering pixels: aliasing, sharpness and locality. Aliasing is, well, aliasing, sharpness is the opposite of blurriness, and locality is about these "ringing" artefacts you often see in highly compressed images and videos. You can't be perfect on all three. Disabling antialiasing gives you the sharpest image with no ringing artefacts, but you get these ugly staircase effects. Typical antialiasing trades this for blurriness, in fact, FXAA is literally a (selective) blur, that's why some people don't like it. More advanced algorithms can give you both antialiasing and sharpness, but you will get these ringing artefacts. The best of course is to increase resolution until none of these effects become noticeable, but you need the hardware.

The best algorithms attempt to find a good looking balance between all these factors and performance, but "good looking" is subjective, that's why your best bet is to try for yourself. Or just keep the defaults, as it is likely to be set to what the majority of the people prefer.

PC games have had Low, Medium, High presets for graphics settings for decades. I don't think reducing that from 3 choices to 2 is going to be a big win for user friendliness. And I certainly think it's user-hostile if it means taking the customization away and only letting users choose between two presets.

PlayStation does have shining examples of user-friendly settings UI though, namely in their PC ports. Look at this UI in Ratchet and Clank:

https://x.com/digitalfoundry/status/1684221473819447298

Extensive tooltips for each option and any time you change a setting it is applied immediately to the paused game while you're still in the settings menu allowing you to immediately compare the effects.

> I don't think reducing that from 3 choices to 2 is going to be a big win for user friendliness

It’s nowhere near as simple as 3 settings now there are different antialiasing techniques, path tracing lighting or reflections, upscaling (multiple algorithms) etc.

Nothing is all just fully positive and each has tradeoffs

Nixxes are very enthusiastic about every PC port having proper settings and exclusive options. I hope the C-levels at Sony continue to not notice.

Those are typically incorporated into the presets. I am not just talking about Low, Medium, High for individual settings. There's almost always a preset option that will set all the other settings according to what's deemed appropriate by the developer for the selected quality level.

Well, I suppose I'm not the assumed target audience. Back when I was younger I had the time to tweak everything on my computer: my Linux distro, my games (dualbooting windows just for that), and looking things up for that reason. I also could play long gaming sessions.

Nowadays I'm a dad with practically no spare time between raising a toddler and work. Suddenly the question of "does the game overstay its welcome?" has become a thing; I almost exclusively play games that can be played in short bursts of time, and that deliver a great experience as a whole that can be completed in a relatively short playtime. I got a Steam Deck a few years ago for the specific purpose of separating my work computer from my gaming platform, and being able to pick up and play a game and pausing it without problems.

Even with the built-in performance overlay of the Steam Deck (which is very nice) it takes time to assess the quality-vs-performance results of every possible combination of settings. Often more than I would spend on playing a game.

I suspect that people like me either already are or soon will be the bigger segment of the (paying) customers though, so that is something to consider for developers.

And some games do give short explanations of what each type of technique does and how they compare, along with statements like "this usually has a small impact on performance" or "this has a large impact on performance" to guide me, which is already a great help.

Oh there are lots more axes than just the 3 aliasing, sharpness, and locality ones. Those are the main tradeoffs for a pixel sampling or convolution filter choice, when downscaling an image, say between nearest neighbor vs bilinear vs Mitchell (bicubic). But the antialiasing methods in this article have many tradeoffs that aren’t on the aliasing-sharpness-locality spectrum. Other issues with real time AA methods include bias, correctness, noise, quality, temporal effects, compositing/blending issues, etc. And the topic gets much wider when we start talking about DLSS, we don’t even have established terminology for the many different kinds of tradeoffs neural networks give us. Anyway just noting that the main highlights of discussion in the article, which are MSAA and AAA (and references to TAA and others), don’t fit in the aliasing-sharpness-locality space. MSAA’s tradeoffs include it only running on geometry & texture edges, and its ‘wrong order’ samples or ‘double edges’ noted in the article. TAA has a temporal aspect and is most known for ghosting. AAA as described here doesn’t necessarily blend correctly and in general it can’t handle multiple arbitrary sub-pixel events, it really only works well if there’s one edge crossing a pixel.

Not a parent but I still agree that short games are great, 2-3 hours are great (or even a bit less, there is a reason for the standard 90 minute movie). 4-5 hours can be nice too ("chapter" divisions are helpful). Games are inexpensive and plentiful these days so a nice short game is great for everyone not just people with little time for playing games. (I guess I should say the flip side is that time spent with characters is one of the interesting things that games can use to good effect and bonus objectives that encourage you to explore details of the world can be nice too depending on the type of game and are easily skipped).

The best game settings have a scene to illustrate the effect of choices along with estimated(?) performance. Unfortunately I haven't seen that too often (mostly Falcom games that PH3 worked on). I agree that stating the impact on performance is quite helpful when settings need to be lowered. Usually they are ordered "best performance" to "nicest looking" so I set the last one and only fiddle with them if necessary (a smooth 12fps works great for me so luckily that isn't often).

> Those are typically incorporated into the presets

The upscaling, frame generation, path tracing etc are not.

For the reason I mentioned, none of its objective you're selecting between trade offs of crispness, artifacts, better lighting and reflection and framerate.

It's no longer just resolution of rendering and resolution of textures and a few post effects.