BF4 and AA settings - help

[jnick]

I've been out of the loop for quite some time now and it seems like in that time, AA has gotten a hell of a lot more confusing. I remember MSAA and CSAA. Now I'm reading about Post-AA, Deferred AA, FXAA and SMAA!!! Ahhh!!

I'm currently running the BF4 beta with "enhance the application @ 2x" in the control panel. Deferred set to off and post set to high on my GTX 570. Should I change anything here? It runs pretty well but I'm still noticing quite a bit of jaggies. What would you recommend? How do you enable these other mystical AA settings?



Thanks!

 

[dragonstongue]

it wont matter much till the final game is released anyways.

But generally there are 2 major types of AA, post and deferred, post(something like AMD uses with their Morphological AA) happens before the image is sent to the final buffers so can be further "tuned" by other methods of AA being stuff such as MSAA, SSAA, FXAA and so forth, the deferred type is done before the image is sent to screen(the way I understand it)

So generally speaking, MSAA is the lowest quality lowest resource type of AA, SSAA is the highest type we desktop users generally use and also takes a lot of performance to do, FXAA is supposed to be somewhat the look of SSAA but much less of a hit and being more akin to MSAA requirements(supposed to be and is depends on how it is used and what game) then of course there is the more custom types used by AMD, Nvidia and possibly more I am unaware of, Edge-detect along with enhanced in the 7k+ series for AMD, CSAA and such for Nvidia, these depending on game or app once again are meant for either better performance and quality with not near the hit or just better performance with the same look.

So yeh, there is many types and they all have and serve a different function as there is many game engines out there, many different apps and so forth, not one answer is the best one as they all have differing properties hence the so many choices for AA resolve.

Again, in BF4 case make it run nice BUT its not the final version of game so what is smooth right now may not be, you may not need to use it, and in your control panel on game launch some of the other forced settings could prove to have better results for you.

worth reading up on as a lot of it is easy enough to see the basics on what they do and what they are for like HBAO, SSAO, Blur, AA types, AF and so forth.

 

[socK]

I've been out of the loop for quite some time now and it seems like in that time, AA has gotten a hell of a lot more confusing. I remember MSAA and CSAA. Now I'm reading about Post-AA, Deferred AA, FXAA and SMAA!!! Ahhh!!

I'm currently running the BF4 beta with "enhance the application @ 2x" in the control panel. Deferred set to off and post set to high on my GTX 570. Should I change anything here? It runs pretty well but I'm still noticing quite a bit of jaggies. What would you recommend? How do you enable these other mystical AA settings?



Thanks!

Post AA in BF4 is (probably, as it was in BF3) just FXAA... which is a form of AA done in post processing. It gives nary a shit about geometry or anything, and will even work fine on still images.

Deferred AA in BF4 is MSAA. It tends to be expensive on deferred renderers (and will bloat memory usage, so if you're vram starved already, be weary) and needs extra work to function correctly. Enabling it in the driver might not work correctly.

 

[Joga]

[H]ardOCP wrote an article (albeit for Crysis 3) that explains a lot of different kinds of AA.

But for BF4:
Post AA - AKA FXAA (uses a post-processing shader filter). Almost no performance impact, gets rid of jaggies very well. However it kind of "smears" the whole screen (including textures) which I personally don't like.

Deferred AA - AKA good 'ol fashioned MSAA. More of a performance hit, and only smooths geometry edges (doesn't do anything to leaves/grass/anything that uses transparent textures instead of polygons)

If you have the horse power, my preferred setting is 4xMSAA and PostAA turned Off (to save the texture quality).

If you need higher framerate or don't have much VRAM, set PostAA to High and Deferred AA off, and just live with the muddiness (some people don't even notice it).

 

[{EB}NuTSymPToM{EB}]

What does it do to performance if you use a bit of both? Seems that setting Post to low or medium may protect general image quality while pairing with 2x MSAA would help smooth poly edges a bit.

Or do I have it all wrong and mixing the two causes all kinds of calculation collision that wrecks perf?

 

[socK]

What does it do to performance if you use a bit of both? Seems that setting Post to low or medium may protect general image quality while pairing with 2x MSAA would help smooth poly edges a bit.

Or do I have it all wrong and mixing the two causes all kinds of calculation collision that wrecks perf?

They're fine to mix.

 

[GoldenTiger]

What does it do to performance if you use a bit of both? Seems that setting Post to low or medium may protect general image quality while pairing with 2x MSAA would help smooth poly edges a bit.

Or do I have it all wrong and mixing the two causes all kinds of calculation collision that wrecks perf?

Nope, works great. I run medium post-process AA and 2x MSAA, looks gorgeous, with in-game settings.