DF: Alan Wake: the sub-HD debate

[selnor]

WereKitten said:

selnor said:

MLAA as a premise is the same in GOW3. The devs a more than likely referring to how it's implemented. If it didnt use blending as it's tech, it wouldnt be refferred to as a modified 'morpholigical' AA. As in the dev saying its still morpholigcal means it's morphing. AKA blending.

Seriously... you shouldn't allow yourself to talk about this stuff without using Google or a dictionary first.

• Morphology means the study of shape and it has a very precise meaning in biology, linguistic and mathematics. Morphological is the corresponding adjective. MLAA takes its name from the fact that it works by finding the contour of shapes and can potentially reduce its aliasing "smartly" without touching the details inside that shape, differently from a blur filter. For example see here, and if you're in for the technical details see the linked Intel PDF paper.

• Morphing is an animation technique that creates a transition between two different shapes (thus its ethimology) and has nothing to do with MLAA.

• Blending pixel colour data at pixel scale is what all AA techniques are about.

And then, a few other lines of yours.

"Maybe because Alan Wake is the only Console game ever to have 4XMSAA it's confusing people with uber smooth edges. LOL."

Again? Here's the link to the thread of B3D that gathers data on resolution and AA for many console games. There are more than 30 games for the 360 to date on that list that employ 4xAA, mostly thanks to the eDram and excluding smaller downloadable titles. Most of them are 720p 4xAA, but of course AW might have had - I'll wait for the first-hand analysis of the game - to settle to a reduced resolution because the core of its aesthetic is in the lighting, foliage and post effects.

Support your claims, please. Or refrain from them.

"As we know from Remedy. Geometric resolution does not determine the resolution of textures. In fact there is 50+ parts of an image which all have varying resolutions in their native states."

Remedy isn't saying anything new when they talk about multiple buffers and deferred rendering. The whole point of the opaque geometry is the rendering of the textures on surfaces though. Why exactly should they render a naked, lower res geometry and then again render a higher res textured one that somehow doesn't quite cover the poly edges? The edges of textured geometry is what the pixel counters worked with.

PS:

The ironic thing is that you're the cause of your own distress here. If you had simply always loved and shown your enthusiasm for how AW looks as many did, the final visuals of the game would have most likely satisifed your subjective expectations. But since you went on a pseudo-tech tirade about only two engines discovering the use of eDram to get 720p 4xAA "for free", you're the one who is lkely to be bitten back by a spec change. Most other people will simply look at the total package and at what the engine excels at for the setting and style Remedy chose.

I might sound harsh, but I think that it's best for you first and foremost to learn to document yourself properly instead of losing to the technobabble and PR daemons.

Really. Professionals disagree with you. I know exactly how MLAA works because I wanted to know what it was more than 6 months ago. And was shown an article by A Reshetov from Intel Labs. The following is The purpose and the how in a nutshell:MLAA is designed to reduce aliasing artifacts in displayed images without causing any additional rays, it consists of 3 main steps.1. Find discontinuities between pixels in a given image.2.  Identify predetermined patterns. 3. Blend colours in the neighbourhood of those patterns. And be realistic. You know very well no console game till Alan Wake has done FS 4xMSAA. And no spec is biting back. All this forum has done is look for ways to disprove why AW wont beat U2 or GOW3. The review embargo lifts soon, so we will all see if I or you guys are correct.