Hardware Anti Aliasing on 3ds

[ryan90]

Like the psp the 3ds will probably not employ any forms of anti-aliasing in most of its games, only ones i know of are resident evil revelations which uses 2x(2x1) AA in 2d mode and starfox 64 3d which uses supersampling.

Out of intrest I started searching the Internet to find all the different methods available of anti aliasing and found this new technique Morphological Anti-aliasing, thought this type of AA was amazing as it apparently has a extremely low performance hit and is a simple post processing effect on the shapes of the objects in the scene from what i can tell it works on the full scene aswell and is way better than edge detect.

Gripshift on psp also seems to have a very high quality of AA somehow, makes me wonder why people say the psp can't do it especially since the game has a very high framerate

I also found this Gran Turismo PSP Anti Aliasing

Click here to see images

Spoiler

The first screen is a captured frame from the game

This second screen is what the game actually looks like in motion on your psp screen.

if you don't see any difference look at the edges of the car and the wall or the edges of the headlight on the car its a staircase effect

I was wondering about this effect, since the 3ds has 3d wouldn't that double the effectiveness of this technique?

Finally i wonder about edge detect AA, its not the best but way better than nothing?

I have been taking interest in this because i read that any aliasing in an image really stands out in 3d, and it makes sense that it would since thats where the depth is visible!

Why are there so few handheld games that have AA when at the low res of handheld screens they are the ones that need it most?

Do you think the 3ds is powerful enough to do AA in 3d and would you mind playing in 3d if the games did have bad aliasing?

 

[Midna]

The Pica200 is capable of anti aliasing, and Capcom has designed their MT Framework port so that it enables anti aliasing upon the disabling of 3D. We could see it in quite a few games, but it's too early to tell. Also, the word is that the blending of the two images in 3D do a better job of smoothing the jaggies than the anti aliasing does. It doesn't need AA in 3D. It's needed most out of 3D, where the graphics chip also has extra juice available.

Edit: And your image links are dead in the spoiler tag.

 

[Jamstruth]

The way the 3DS does 3D creates an effect similar to the one that Gran Turismo on the PSP uses. Its a natural AA effect so the processor can get to work on the extra rendering needed.
In 2D mode there is real 2x AA.

 

[ryan90]

The Pica200 is capable of anti aliasing, and Capcom has designed their MT Framework port so that it enables anti aliasing upon the disabling of 3D. We could see it in quite a few games, but it's too early to tell. Also, the word is that the blending of the two images in 3D do a better job of smoothing the jaggies than the anti aliasing does. It doesn't need AA in 3D. It's needed most out of 3D, where the graphics chip also has extra juice available.

Edit: And your image links are dead in the spoiler tag.

oh i thought 3d would make it worse but i never thought about it being like a blending effect, if thats true then i have nothing to worry about, i still doubt it wouldn't benefit from AA in 3d, also the images seem to work for me.

 

[lostdwarf]

how would this type of 3d benifit from AA? You would in effect be BLENDING jaggies from foreground into the background. It would make everything look smudged and strain your eyes. It is not needed.
As soon as you turn the 3d slider to off, the 3ds hardware (not mtframework) applies 2xAA instantly. It is built to do this. In 3d - the jaggies will blend themselves out and has the same visual clarity as when in 2d and 2xAA is on. Apparently it is super smooth and crisp and even the transition is "like the best magic trick, period".

Source aussiegamer podcast on 3ds after over an hour hands on. Cant link as i am on my 'smart' phone lol

 

[lostdwarf]

ps. The reason you can see the images is because they are in your cache. We cannot as we dont.

 

[Midna]

how would this type of 3d benifit from AA? You would in effect be BLENDING jaggies from foreground into the background. It would make everything look smudged and strain your eyes. It is not needed.
As soon as you turn the 3d slider to off, the 3ds hardware (not mtframework) applies 2xAA instantly. It is built to do this. In 3d - the jaggies will blend themselves out and has the same visual clarity as when in 2d and 2xAA is on. Apparently it is super smooth and crisp and even the transition is "like the best magic trick, period".

Source aussiegamer podcast on 3ds after over an hour hands on. Cant link as i am on my 'smart' phone lol

Oh, really? The only place I've ever heard about the AA feature was Capcom, so i assumed they implimented it. We'll see, I guess.

 

[lostdwarf]

it was in one of Iwata's talks, he went into a lot of detail, cant remember where I saw it but I will search when I get back tonight and post the link.

 

[ryan90]

how would this type of 3d benifit from AA? You would in effect be BLENDING jaggies from foreground into the background. It would make everything look smudged and strain your eyes. It is not needed.

I honestly don't believe that, photographs have natural anti aliasing and they don't look smudged in 3d.
No offence but don't state opinions as facts

 

[dsfanatic5]

I would like to anti-alias my real life experience with the 3DS. If it sucks, I'll report back and let you all know. If the games rule, and look great, which they most likely will, then this thread will be pointless.

We must really be desperate for news about the 3DS if topics like this exist. It's like speculating how a new car is going to drive, when it doesn't come out till next year. Here, let's pretend we're smart enough to know what the 3DS is going to be like! Let's not......

 

[FireGrey]

What is AA :?

 

[myuusmeow]

What is AA :?

Large image:

Spoiler

It makes the graphics of a game look less jagged.

 

[ryan90]

I would like to anti-alias my real life experience with the 3DS. If it sucks, I'll report back and let you all know. If the games rule, and look great, which they most likely will, then this thread will be pointless.

We must really be desperate for news about the 3DS if topics like this exist. It's like speculating how a new car is going to drive, when it doesn't come out till next year. Here, let's pretend we're smart enough to know what the 3DS is going to be like! Let's not......

I'm only speculating on how the 3d will look which is a pretty important decision when spending so much money on a device plus im an AA whore and there are plenty of screenshots of games and game-play videos that we have a great idea of what to expect, I would also like to find out what the real life experience is with the 3ds but its gonna be quite a while before that happens.

 

[dsfanatic5]

I would like to anti-alias my real life experience with the 3DS. If it sucks, I'll report back and let you all know. If the games rule, and look great, which they most likely will, then this thread will be pointless.

We must really be desperate for news about the 3DS if topics like this exist. It's like speculating how a new car is going to drive, when it doesn't come out till next year. Here, let's pretend we're smart enough to know what the 3DS is going to be like! Let's not......

I'm only speculating on how the 3d will look which is a pretty important decision when spending so much money on a device plus im an AA whore and there are plenty of screenshots of games and game-play videos that we have a great idea of what to expect, I would also like to find out what the real life experience is with the 3ds but its gonna be quite a while before that happens.

I'm right there with you, when it comes to anticipating the experience of "actually playing" the 3DS. I'm more interested in the 3D aspect, since it can't be conveyed to anyone unless they have the 3DS in front of them. I hope for good AA as well, but it won't be a factor in my purchasing decisions. It's hard to tell at this point, since some videos of Kid Icarus look very jaggy. I've seen videos in different resolutions, and in the ones that are more on par with the real 3DS resolution, they look much better. Then I see videos of the Resident Evil game, and they look amazing. Here's hoping for the best

Happy Halloween BTW!

 

[pachura]

There was a thread on an antialiasing technique that could possibly be used in 3DS, however I think it is too technical for the GBAtemp public.

Anyway, let's state some obvious facts:

1. 3DS' screen has pretty low resolution. OK, it's a step up from DS, but nowadays more and more mobile phones offer full VGA resolution (640x480), even on smaller screens. What is also interesting is that Sharp produces a 800x480 version of the 3D screen to be used in 3DS, however Nintendo decided to cut the costs and use the one with half the vertical resolution (800x240). Therefore, some antialiasing would definitely be more than welcome.

2. In the stereoscopic (3D) mode, human brain merging two flat 400x240 images together will probably introduce an effect similar to antialiasing. However, how effective would it be, would it work like 2x2 or 2x1 AA - it's hard to tell.

3. The idea that "antialiasing in 3D will not work because you cannot blend edges against the background because of the 3D depth" is ridiculous

4. I've just skimmed through an article about this morphological AA mentioned by the creator of this thread and apparently it needs to be implemented in shaders. 3DS does not have programmable pixel shaders. Anyway, the technique seems quite complicated and complex.

5. The Grand Tourismo PSP antialiasing, on the other hand, is extremely easy to implement and has almost no impact - you just nudge every second frame by one pixel horizontally, and that's it

It seems that the game has to run at constant 60 FPS in order for this techique to trick human's brain. But the idea is great, I must admit

6. According to DMP's leaflets, Pica200 supports FSAA. Unfortunately, this is the most brute force type of AA - you render the whole scene with double size, and then resample it down to the screen size. This unfortunately requires 4 times as many pixels to be filled per frame. For some simple games with not too much postprocessing, rendering to textures, shaders etc. it can still work - apparently, it works for Starfox 3DS - but for more advanced ones (MGS), it won't.

7. It is still unclear how will the 3DS games behave in the 2D (flat) mode. Will full 800x240 resolution be used, or will they simply turn off one of 3D images (or render exactly the same image for two eyes), thus resulting in 400x240 effective pixels ? MT Framework can apparently apply AA in 2D mode, but does it antialias full 800x240 screen or just 400x240 ?

 

[ryan90]

very interesting reply, i would love to know the thread you saw where they were talking about the techniques.

I'm sure the AA effect that Resident Evil uses will probably be rendered at 800x240 then squashed down to 400x240, the same with Starfox i imagine(i thought thats what 2x1 AA was but i'm not sure) if it did that it would only be 2x the pixels like in 3d mode so it makes sense. but Starfox could be 4x because of the simple graphics.

We could easily find out the 3d effect on anti aliasing if someone were to upload a cross-eye 3d pic from a video game, if they panned into the screen we could easily tell by comparison. If anyone could do that it would be awesome.

I imagine the 2D mode will simply turn off the second column of pixels since the screen is designed to show 400x240 to each eye the design of the parallax barrier makes it incapable of showing the full 800x240 to a single eye. They could also load the same frame to both sides of the screen so the screen would have the same image twice, but the 3d effect would obviously not work so this would be pointless.

 

[Ikki]

What is AA :?

Large image:

Spoiler

It makes the graphics of a game look less jagged.

It's funny how the antialiasing made a person appear

 

[ryan90]

just thought i would give this topic a quick update to say that the anti alaising effect of 3d is actually real and i can proove it!
(click on the picture to see it full size)

Look at the jaggies at the bottom of the picture and in other places, then look at it in 3d and there gone also notice how you can now tell how close the bomb is!.

I can't seem to find any other images to prove it though but this picture alone should be proof enough

wish someone would use a 3d camera to film there 3ds, if they do it from the right angle it would work!

 

[Xuphor]

@ryan - those two pictures's jaggies look identicle to me. If there truly is anti-aliasing on that, it's very very very poor.

 

[Rydian]

@ryan - those two pictures's jaggies look identicle to me. If there truly is anti-aliasing on that, it's very very very poor.

He meant when you use the cross-eye 3D trick thing.