The lattest,though, is not a sampling artifact. It's down to earth physical interference... We will need ray-tracing for that, before we worry about removing it. Nice use of GPU resources.

True, but do we really need ray-tracing for that? It should already occur with transparent textures or rendering power lines for example. fxaa is pretty destructive in those situations.

I'm looking forward to ray-tracing, anti-aliasing won't be a problem for now. Current hardware is far from powerful enough to render a real time high-res noise free image. Realistic lighting still eludes the best cgi in movies. I recently watched Samsara and Life of Pi. CGI still can't compete with 70mm film.

It was partly ironic, as in "aren't we happy that our most fancy rendering tech should bring more visual artifacts to be realistic" :)

But it's not exactly the same as with overlapping transparent textures. The "moire effect" you get in real life when you overlap two chainlink fences is magnified by the optical diffraction in the overlapped pattern corners, the same phenomenon that brings you fringes of light and dark around the border of real shadows.

Stand in front of a window, close one eye, raise you hand between your eyes and the light at 10-15 inches from your face and "pinch the air" between your index and thumb, trying to get them as close as you can without them touching. You'll see the light between them decreasing critically when they're really close but still separated. You might even observe some dark fringes in that light slice, if you help yourself with your other hand to keep the fingers steady.

In the same way when you look at some moire patterns in real life you get "dark blots" in the corners that are actually "optically thicker" than the overlapped grids (obviously that light is not lost, it is diffracted on a wider angle,  just less evident to the eye). There might also be biological effects in there, due to how our eye responds to very fine separation between two light spots or dark spots, but I'm ignorant on the subject.

If you want to simulate/render that, I suppose that you either simulate light wavefronts in spherical harmonics, or compute optical ray curving due to interference in ray tracing.

Thanks for understanding what I was trying to ask. Especially as things move – you’d get a moiré patter from the structure of the pixels themselves.  I think Anti-Aliasing stays useful for the time being.  Although, I remember hearing a few years ago about a new way of doing it well beyond 8x sampling, that was exponentially better with the same burdon on the GPU. But it might have been a marketing gimmick, as I don’t recall much follow up.

Wow 300 fps! That is amazing!  I almost flipped out when I realized I could see my 120Hz flickering out of the corner of my eye.  I did some research and found that some people can perceive up to 200Hz, but 300, Wow!

Incidentally did anyone else see The Hobbit at 48p and what did they think?  I defiantly thought it looked better, but still flickered.  But I also saw on a DLP which is tortuous for me because of the flickering.  The next Cameron Avatar movie is rumored to be at 60p. I am looking forward to experiencing that.

Looks like the same girl from my avatar. If so her name is Mya. Just guessing though.

its a common misconception, 20/20 vision is not perfect hell its not even good, its adequate to get a drivers license or so, most teenagers eyesight (if they dont ware lens) is 20/12. That is nearly twice as good as 20/20. Somehow over the years cause I assume that 20/20 equals 1/1 equals 100% that people have misunderstood it to mean perfect. I can easily see the difference between pixels on a iphone's retina display from more than 12" away  

Not if you use an emulator. Spider-Man 2 doesn't make my eyes bleed anymore! *Tears of joy*

OT: This is one if the most informative threads, I've ever read on this site.

LCD doesn't flicker itself, just the image updates, but yes the corner of your eyes can still see that. The 300 fps test is based on tests by showing fighter pilots images at 1/300th sec and asking them to identify them. You certainly won't experience all of those frames but it still feels more natural in motion. The human eye doesn't perceive a constant fps and to avoid temporal aliasing effects or judder (see things jump instead of move) it's best for the source material to be as high as possible.

The eye is also very good at tracking moving objects, which is why it's best not to introduce unnecessary motion blur. For example a very simple experiment: When you stare out of the passenger window of a moving car you generally see the ground move as a blur as the car speeds up, but now and then you get a flicker of the actual street as it speeds by.

Brightness is also important. The darker the image the sooner it looks fluid. Cinemas have their screen brightness at about 15 Fl, Tv's are more in the range of 50-70 Fl. I can see the difference with the same material when viewed on my 52" LCD and 92" projector (at about 17 Fl).
24fps looks a lot better on the big screen in the dark, while it feels jerky on the TV.

It's a shame The hobbit on blu-ray is just 24fps, I would have liked to see the comparison at home. Guess that will have to wait until the 4K spec for hdmi comes through.

As for cheap fsaa looking AA, there are some tricks like rotated grid sampling or using a sinc filter. Useful to create a smooth image, but small details suffers as they were never rendered.

I checked their retina claim once and came to this:
"The iPad 4 retina display needs to be viewed at a distance of 43.4" to make it a true retina display."
At that distance you see it at 100cpd.

For comparison a 1080p 40" set needs to be viewed from 17ft4" away to see it at 100cpd. That's the upper limit and anti aliasing becomes irrelevant.

I think it has more to do with biological effects. They eye has it's own edge enhancement build in. There are lots of optical illusions floating about to demonstrate that. Physical optical diffraction doesn't happen until you get down to the wavelength of light, 300-700 nm, not really possible with fingers :) http://bowiestie.wordpress.com/2010/02/18/moire-pattern-gifs/ no diffraction there.

Even more off-topic (sorry cgi) but optical illusions are just too cool :) (right-click view for the full effect)