Hi,
of the features I remember reading back in its times, Edge antialiasing was one that I never ever seen the theorical improvements in still frames. Before the FSAA was the usual stuff you could clearly see the quality improvements, did anyone can post or say where you could see any pixel differences in game supporting edge antialiasing?
Thank
If you've got a 3dfx card, you'll most often see it on the splash animation. 😀 and that's usually the only place you'll ever see it.
The only common type of edge antialiasing I know is MSAA, but FSAA predates that technology.
FSAA became a standard feature around the DX7 era I suppose (GeForce, Radeon etc), where MSAA became commonplace with DX9 (Radeon 9700, GeForce FX).
I know there have also been some weird hacks by alphablending lines over the edges of polygons and such.
Didn't Rendition Verite supported edge antialiasing?
Never thought this thread would be that long, but now, for something different.....
Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman.
There was no "AA" before FSAA (from 3DFx), because before that you didn't exacly could implement it (Anti Aliasing in 2D or in low perf. 3D cards ?). I'm also not sure if 3Dfx didn't had a patent for FSAA.
BTW : Old FSAA = Super Sampling (or SSAA) of today.
Since 2005 (in NV case), there is also that Transparency AA for textures (because MSAA doesn't work on those).
wrote:There was no "AA" before FSAA (from 3DFx)
Then how would you explain Verite Quake (VQuake) anti-aliasing?
http://vintage3d.org/images/V1000/vquake2.png Click on the image to see VQuake 2 with maxed AA. […]
Click on the image to see VQuake 2 with maxed AA.
Never thought this thread would be that long, but now, for something different.....
Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman.
Yes, Rendition Verite can do edge antialiasing on VQuake and VQuake2.
I'm also fairly certain some Glide games could use it too. I seem to remember the Tomb Raider 3Dfx patch using it.
Similar topic on beyond3d : LINK
Yes, Verite was first (just barely, since chips were delayed well into 1996 when Voodoo 1 was released).
Basically it existed much before anyone ever talk about full screen antialiasing (in pc games). Even the Riva 128 had it on the drivers tool. I don't understand if it was actually better/faster considering the low power "gpu" (and cpu) existing in those years. And if I remember did even some home console support it?
And by the way was is somehow similar the the FAA of Parhelia?
Yes the Riva128 already supported it, however in most scenarios it required to have 8 MB VRAM i.e. a Riva128ZX.
I haven't captures of that available though.
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I remember when I was playing first Tomb Raider on 3Dfx Voodoo 3 in DOS i saw Antialiasing in game, and ran very smooth with my Celeron 300 without L2 which I haved that time years ago.
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Yea, FSAA in the sense of "full screen anti-aliasing" was often implemented as SSAA, "supersampling anti-aliasing".
Which could basically be implemented as a driver-feature or engine-feature on any videocard that supported render-to-texture.
You'd just create a texture that is 2x or 4x the size of the screen, then render to that. After that, you put that texture on a quad, render it to screen, and adjust the texture coordinates so that the bilinear filter samples exactly halfway each 2 pixels horizontally and/or vertically.
A simple bruteforce solution. Main problem was that it required 2x or 4x the fillrate to pull it off.
Here is a 3dfx glide game with Edge Anti Aliasing support. I have made some screenshots a while ago.
Nascar Racing 3 (not the maximum details were set because of the slow CPU)
on Voodoo3 1024x768
In this game:
When Edge-AA is off, some annoying edges still get anti aliasing (look at the fence).
When Edge-AA is on, some less annoying edges won't be anti aliased.
Screenshots best viewed in fullscreen mode.
Edge-AA is off.
Edge-AA is on.
Edge-AA is on.
Impressive if we consider that was a feature quiet older than the SSAA. It remembers me the FAA of the Parhelia that if I remember correctly was great but sometimes was off in some places.
Fun to see that the pit crew are clearly 'sprites' and not polygon-models, so the AA doesn't work on their edges.
wrote:Impressive if we consider that was a feature quiet older than the SSAA. It remembers me the FAA of the Parhelia that if I remember correctly was great but sometimes was off in some places.
Parhelia's FAA was an early form of MSAA I believe.
wrote:wrote:Impressive if we consider that was a feature quiet older than the SSAA. It remembers me the FAA of the Parhelia that if I remember correctly was great but sometimes was off in some places.
Parhelia's FAA was an early form of MSAA I believe.
But the edge antialising working only in some places and not other, could not be considered a sort of MSAA too?
wrote:But the edge antialising working only in some places and not other, could not be considered a sort of MSAA too?
I don't know how it works in the 3dfx implementation.
MSAA works by rendering the zbuffer at a higher resolution, and using this to detect polygon edges. For 4xMSAA you have 4 z-values for each onscreen pixel. As long as all 4 z-values belong to the same polygon, only a single pixel is shaded. Only when you have multiple polygons inside the 4 z-values, then they will all be shaded, and then downsampled for AA.
PlayStation 2 also had hardware support for edge AA. Couldn't tell you how it worked and it tended to create artifacts so I never used it personally.
Most of PS2's AA tends to be of the blend-screen-buffer-a-half-texel-few-times sort which isn't really AA though.
