Can the Wii...

[staticneuron]

"In a recent interview with Daily Radar, James Hague of Volition claimed that they had licked the whole aliasing problem, as they were able to get Full Scene Anti-aliasing running on Summoner, the company's upcoming PS2 RPG, with a negligible hit on the game's performance. This was seen as a titanic revelation because based on previous reports, people were claiming that while anti-aliasing could be done on PS2 that it could only be done with a serious hit to the game's performance. However, according to Mr. Hague, there's not a drop in framerate when the aliasing is being used. Today, we talked to Hague about this revelation and asked him some questions as to exactly what was done to get anti-aliasing working on PS2 and why hasn't any of the Japanese developers used it in any of their games. With regard to the questions, Hague first explained that early on in the game's development, they didn't even think about the whole aliasing issue. It wasn't until they got the game running in high-resolution that they even began to think about it. Around that time, Sony came up with a document that explained how various forms of anti-aliasing could be implemented on the PS2 developers' forum. Now that it seems apparent that the entire anti-aliasing issue has been put to rest, it brings up a very big question: If it's so easy, then why hasn't it been used by the Japanese developers, such as Namco? Well, according to Hague, it has to do with the way things were noted in the PlayStation 2 documentation. The only method of anti-aliasing listed in the documentation is Edge anti-aliasing, which is defined above. However, the problem with this form of anti-aliasing, is that since it smoothes the edges of the polygons as they're drawn and the polygons have to be drawn from back to front, it is a tremendous load on the processor. Hague believes that because of the extra load on the processor, most developers decided to bypass the use of Edge anti-aliasing in their games. However, there were actually other methods of anti-aliasing explained in the documents; they just weren't labeled as anti-aliasing. The only reason that Volition was able to figure this out was because it was mentioned in the document posted by Sony in the PS2 developers' forums. According to the document, developers could use the display hardware to perform the anti-aliasing. It just wasn't explained fully in the hardware documentation as it simply said that there's a display hardware and it let's you do some stuff. " http://ps2.ign.com/articles/081/081661p1.html It turns out there was a hardware solution for anti-aliasing. Maybe not listed in the specs but neither was the PS3's hardware scaler which everyone assumed didn't exist.