Go Extreme With Antialiasing

YOU’LL NEED THIS

GEDOSATO The Rolls-Royce of downsampling tools. Available from http://blog.

metaclassofnil.com.

NVIDIA INSPECTOR If you side with Team Green in your

PCIe slot, this unofficial app is bristling with tweaks: www.guru3d. com/files-details/nvidia-inspector

download.html. FORGET FAIR MICROTRANSACTION MODELS and the magic formula for a successful esports game— these are but flash-in-the-pan challenges the games industry faces currently. For a much longer time, 3D designers were stumped by a far more prosaic problem: how to draw curved and diagonal lines without them appearing like a blocky staircase of pixels.

Aliased polygonal edges—or jaggies, as you say in today’s parlance, with your low-slung jeans and dangerous new ideas—were a simple fact of 3D graphics for over a decade. It was only in the mid-2000s that antialiasing (AA) became sophisticated enough to smooth out those lines until they appeared realistic, and it still takes a lot of computational power to do so.

In this smoother-edged age, though, new problems have emerged. What if the antialiasing options baked into your game aren’t sufficient? And what about playing old games, which offer only perfunctory antialiasing—is that the end of the line for your crusade against the jaggies?

Well, no. There are lots of other options. Here’s how to go beyond the graphics menu’s limitations, and antialias those edges so much that even Tom Jones would deem them smooth. four times, is the best approach. If all works as planned, your game will suddenly recognize these new resolutions, and offer them in the display options menu. We recommend those sizes in particular because rendering images at enormous resolutions, then squishing them back down to size, takes a lot of your GPU’s resources, and you’ll want a few settings to switch between later on when you’re tweaking for optimal performance. The laws of diminishing returns definitely apply here, too, so you may find that 2x downsampling produces a sufficiently smooth image. 3 TURN OFF AA IN-GAME Now, with GeDoSaTo still running in the background, select one of the higher resolutions that have just magically appeared in your game’s graphics options menu or launcher. Next, remove any AA effects in the game [ Image B], and observe whether downsampling alone has smoothed out the jaggies. There’s no point sending two fire trucks out to the same fire, after all. Unless it’s a big fire. (We’re not totally clear on how the fire brigade works.) If you’re getting great antialiasing but a low frame rate, try a smaller resolution. If you’re getting the opposite, enlarge the resolution that GeDoSaTo creates. 4 LAYER AA WITH NVIDIA INSPECTOR Here’s another approach to your extreme AA solution: layer different techniques. Like downsampling, it’s a resource-heavy pursuit, but what