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Forums - Microsoft Discussion - Morphological Anti-Aliasing refined on Xbox 360- 3x faster than PS3 Cell

dsister on 05 May 2011
Slimebeast said:

" and in the Xbox it only requires 3.79ms to perform anti-aliasing on a 720p image. For comparison, the God of War III implementation requires 20ms of a single SPU (4ms using 5 of them).

Upon moving from an XNA development kit to a genuine Xbox 360 development kit the speed has increased dramatically to 3x as fast.

Jimenez's MLAA is running at 1.3ms@720p on the Xbox 360 (XDK build). "

So is it 3.79ms or 1.3ms?

Either way, amazing news! There's still unused power in the old hog.


He originally did it on an XNA development kit, which is a free(?) kit for indie developers. So it's obviously not as good as the regular Xbox development kt. So the XNA kit was 3.79, and then the regular dev kit was 3 times as fast. So now it is 1.3



Sig thanks to Saber! :D 

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SvennoJ on 05 May 2011

Interesting read but what does this mean "Memory footprint is 2x the size of the backbuffer on Xbox 360" How big is 'the backbuffer'

They measured by taking screenshots and running their GPU implementation on the 360. I imagine that the results will be a little higher when the GPU is also used by the game. Code needs time to get swapped in and out as well.

How does it hold up in complex scenes. It reads like the time it takes is partly determined by the number of edges that need smoothing.

"Anti-aliasing quality can be dynamically adjusted on the fly, depending on the available resources at each frame" Games are going to be like HD on cable, beautiful when things go slow, messy when the action heats up. (well a lot already are like that)



iWarMachine on 05 May 2011

Great to see MLAA running on the 360. it's one of the best AA i've seen.



I'm Back! - Proud owner of the best doomed handheld of all time!

pitzy272 on 05 May 2011
d21lewis said:

*pretends to see difference in the pics*

That is so fucking awesome!!  I totally know what you're talking about!


Haha dude I was thinking the same thing. I actually laughed bc they seemed so identical. Once I saw Nsanity's msg I looked back at the pics and now I see what they mean. I guess I would have to know what anti-aliasing does in the first place to know what difference to even be looking for haha:/



Wagram on 05 May 2011

Looks very nice. Hope to see it soon.



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yo_john117 on 05 May 2011

Good I hate jaggies.



Zappykins on 06 May 2011

Good! I no like the jaggies and the 'shimmer' that non Anti Aliasing gives.  Nice innovation team Jemenez!

I know they are talking about the Xbox, but might the Wii 2 use this?  So I could upscale my old Wii games in 1080P HD and make it look better.  I don't think I will play Zelda TW all the way through again, but some other games could really use this visual clean up.



 

Really not sure I see any point of Consol over PC's since Kinect, Wii and other alternative ways to play have been abandoned. 

Top 50 'most fun' game list coming soon!

 

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Attoyou on 06 May 2011

Very nice!! lets hope we see devs using this.



Atto Suggests...:

Book - Malazan Book of the Fallen series 

Game - Metro Last Light

TV - Deadwood

Music - Forest Swords 

SvennoJ on 06 May 2011
Zappykins said:

Good! I no like the jaggies and the 'shimmer' that non Anti Aliasing gives.  Nice innovation team Jemenez!

I know they are talking about the Xbox, but might the Wii 2 use this?  So I could upscale my old Wii games in 1080P HD and make it look better.  I don't think I will play Zelda TW all the way through again, but some other games could really use this visual clean up.

It will solve the jaggies but not the shimmer. If you mean thin lines / small details appearing and disappearing between frames by shimmer. MLAA can actually make that worse (ie standout more) in some cases. It depends on the game whether it looks as good in motion as 4xMSAA.

MSAA has its own disadvantages, mainly with alpha testing (translucent textures) MLAA will perform better in games with for example a lot of smoke effects.

Maybe combine 2xMSAA with MLAA for best results.



Kynes on 06 May 2011
SvennoJ said:

Interesting read but what does this mean "Memory footprint is 2x the size of the backbuffer on Xbox 360" How big is 'the backbuffer'

They measured by taking screenshots and running their GPU implementation on the 360. I imagine that the results will be a little higher when the GPU is also used by the game. Code needs time to get swapped in and out as well.

How does it hold up in complex scenes. It reads like the time it takes is partly determined by the number of edges that need smoothing.

"Anti-aliasing quality can be dynamically adjusted on the fly, depending on the available resources at each frame" Games are going to be like HD on cable, beautiful when things go slow, messy when the action heats up. (well a lot already are like that)


The back buffer memory footprint is the resolution multiplied by the number of bits per pixel, by the number of buffers (two if double buffer, three if triple buffer) and by the number of AA samples. This means that this method has approximately the same memory footprint than 2x MSAA. This is if you don't use several different surfaces where you make intermediate rendering passes, and then compose the image, which is what most modern graphics engines do. In this case, you have to sum the different buffers (each can have different bits per pixel, resolution and number of AA samples) memory footprint.