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AAA – Analytical Anti-Aliasing

(blog.frost.kiwi)
602 points todsacerdoti | 2 comments | 20 Nov 24 08:03 UTC | HN request time: 0.421s | source
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FrostKiwi ◴[20 Nov 24 11:20 UTC] No.42192825[source]▶
Thanks for sharing! Author here, happy to answer any questions.
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enbugger ◴[20 Nov 24 16:18 UTC] No.42195398[source]▶
As a non-gamedev person but just gamer, I should expect that this will replace TAA anytime soon? Should it replace TAA?
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Arelius ◴[21 Nov 24 01:46 UTC] No.42200211[source]▶
Basically no... Analytic AA is a really hard problem for video games, and I know of no general purpose solutions.

For font and 2D vector rendering it's likely, in fact afaik, some solutions, such as Slug already do.

But for 3d rendering I don't know of any solutions.

For an intuition, consider two triangles that intersect the same pixel.

Consider if say one has 20% coverage and the other 30%, does that pixel have 50% coverage, 30% by one, 20% by one and 10% by another, or any other conceivable mix? It's very difficult to say without selecting specific points and sampling directly.

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1. woctordho ◴[21 Nov 24 10:33 UTC] No.42202876[source]▶
There're already games fully using SDF rendering, such as Dreams [0]. It even made a SIGGRAPH talk [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreams_(video_game)

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9KNtnCZDMI

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2. Arelius ◴[22 Nov 24 15:12 UTC] No.42214431[source]▶
Whe SDFs are being used in games, SDFs don't really change the Analytical AA story much. SDFs are generally evaluated with ray marching, which is a form of discret sampling that has the same issue regarding coverage.

I think dreams might be using splats? It's possible that something like splats combined with a form of OIT along with an art style that is tolerant to certain types of artifacts could use Analytical AA. I don't know the specifics on Dreams, but i'd be surprised if even they would be using AAA.