AAA – Analytical Anti-Aliasing

Thank you for the excellent writeup, terrific work!

> Whole communities rally around fixing this, like the reddit communities “r/MotionClarity” or the lovingly titled “r/FuckTAA”, all with the understanding, that Anti-Aliasing should not come at the cost of clarity. FXAA creator Timothy Lottes mentioned, that this is solvable to some degree with adjustments to filtering, though even the most modern titles suffer from this.

I certainly agree that the current trend of relying on upscalers has gone too far and results in blurry and artifact riddled AAA game experiences for many. But after seeing this [1] deep dive by Digital foundry I find the arguments he makes quite compelling. There is a level of motion stability and clarity only tech like DLSS can achieve, even outperforming SSAA. So I've shifted my stance from TAA == blurry, TAA + ML when used right == best AA possible currently for 3D games.

Thoughts?

[1] https://youtu.be/WG8w9Yg5B3g

Disclaimer: I haven't really played games with high-end graphics on a high-end system in over a decade, and have always had more of a soft spot for games that use beautiful art design to work around the limitations of "underpowered" systems (IMO the graphics in those games hold up much better throughout the decades anyway). And as I mentioned elsewhere I'm generally quite lost when it comes to AA names and abbreviations. It would be disingenuous of me to tell a community I'm not part of what the best solution is for them.

However, on a meta-level I find something like “r/FuckTAA” fundamentally entitled and ungrateful to the people who put years of their lives into making these games. Of course the loudest gamers tend to be smaller subgroup of the entitled toxic ones, so perception is distorted anyway. Plus, I do get it to some degree: if you invest a lot of money and time into powerful hardware to get beautiful graphics, you'd like to actually get beautiful graphics out of it.

Still, every time I read any article on the technical workings of modern graphics, it strikes me as a community full of extremely passionate people who care about squeezing beautiful graphics out of the available hardware. There are nicer ways to say "sorry but this particular technical solution/aesthetic trend doesn't vibe with me".

(Obviously this is not aimed at your nuanced take with a sincere question for discussion. And thank you for the link, will watch, because the tech still is an interesting topic to me even if I don't play these types of games)