There is a deep irony in that TAA is necessary to deal with the massive increase in shimmer due to the massive increase in geometric and shader complexity, but then the TAA goes and erases much of the detail it was built to compensate for.
This is a big part of why 4k keeps getting pushed, IMO. In my experience, even just downscaling with a 1080p monitor and running FSR2 Performance, a lot of the blur is eliminated. It's like TAA needs way more pixels to work with to not fall apart.
@@colbyboucher6391 Funny, I kind of theorized this conclusion but backwards when the 4k fad started happening... because I noticed all of a sudden that no developers knew how to make functioning well-performing anti-aliasing and I just thought the push to 4K was to make it less noticeable, I didn't know that it was actually for a weird technical reason.
@@Coconut-219 The reason TAA became popular is because the pipeline of the big engines switched to preferencing a deferred shader rendering workflow. Essentially, the scene is rendered in multiple passes in a way that makes traditional MSAA anti-aliasing incompatible.
@@JohnSmith-sk7cg To add to your comment MSAA is useless on in-object detail. It only works on geometric edges, so most of the shimmer issues here would still exist on non-geometric items like the facial hair (which use layered 2D cards), grid and bump-mapped texture details.
@@sean_mc That in my opinion could be solved with a form of fxaa on the texture faces or something of that ilk if one is still doing single pass rendering. There are a myriad of business and technical reasons why they switched that make total sense to me. But I think texture/lighting aliasing is pretty solvable when you don't have deferred rendering.
Hey LNG, incase your audience is unaware I have a mod that disables TAA in Halo Infinite called "QoL - More Graphic Options" on Nexus if they want to disable it for themselves. Thanks for covering this topic!
I use your mod, the game would be unplayable without it! TAA makes me so sick, I thought I'd never be able to play Halo again, I'm so happy modders exist 💙 thank you so much
I've seen this mod and am very interested in trying it out. The problem is I've heard somewhere that EAC is even in the campaign. Is the mod (or reshade for SMAA) still safe to use in campaign or multiplayer?
Dude, I'm actually going to re-download Infinite just to try this. Idk why I didn't think to check Nexus...... Side note: I'm a hater of proprietary tech just as much as the next guy, but DLSS is by far the best anti-aliasing solution I've ever used [the wiki entry for DLSS specifically states it is an "Anti-Aliasing implementation"]. My hope is AMD's FSR can get to DLSS 2.0 levels of AA in short order - it'll be an immediate upgrade for literally everyone.
I'm one of the moderators on r/fucktaa. These are the kinds of videos we want. Not everyone blindly hates on the technology. It's not an "echo chamber", we provide fixes and gather resources that show the differences. We have been advocating for player choice from the beginning. But the place does attract the wrong kinds of people...
Good to know things have become more nuanced! I dipped into that subreddit earlier this year and it seemed a little unhinged at points. Any interesting developments in that subreddit? If it’s gotten more nuanced, I can only imagine actual game developers have been actively involved in there
@@LateNightHalo We have a few developers that actively help us create fixes, and a few more that have made videos to help convince developers to give player choice. The Hybred and Threat Interactive are two such developers that have gone to make videos about the topic. They are friends of the subreddit, and we chat with them often. I cannot say that the subreddit isn't filled with passionate people. But that doesn't mean that the subreddit as a whole agrees with the negativity. It's hardly an echo chamber though, such places wouldn't give people the resources to chose for themselves. You'll find many different opinions, not many are advocating for the shimmering and aliasing.
@@ericthomas2388I have watched some of Threat Interactive’s videos. I feel he is a little misguided. Lots of passion, but maybe doesn’t fully understand the technology? That’s just based on his videos however. Personally TAA has only ever been a problem for me in FF15. And games with DLSS 1.0. (anthem…)
@@_SP259 Can you articulate what he doesn't understand? I've watched his videos and I haven't noticed anything incorrect. You need to back up your claims. And personal anecdotes of you not finding any problem doesn't lend any merit to the conversation. Everyone perceives image quality differently, TAA's accessibility issues causes people headaches. It doesn't matter how you feel, it matters that everyone has options. That means including TAA (for people like you) and including other options (for people like me). Best of both worlds.
The reason the explosions look like a that is because in TAA's quest to remove jaggies they will morph information together causing the image to look like an oil painting or like theirs vaseline on the image, and this problem is worsened the lower your resolution is. So the image isn't JUST blurry, its also oily...
@@proggz39nah, TAA is dogshit 99% of the time, and 1% of the time it's just tolerable, never good I've never played a game with TAA where I didn't think to myself that I'd rather just use FXAA or no anti aliasing at all
@@cyd_hunter99 If you have a *truly* powerful PC that can brute-force through 4k, even if it's upscaled, TAA doesn't look nearly as awful. (Doesn't really suggest anything good about TAA, still.) Issue is that modern games use deferred rendering usually and no AA looks pretty awful as a result. FXAA is just as blurry as TAA, except then it's *always* blurry instead of only when you're moving.
Holy mother, the explosion farm was a jawdropper. I knew the effects felt underwhelming, but god damn I didn't know TAA did this much. I do feel like we've overstepped a bit when it comes to graphical fidelity, considering how many games need TAA to function as intended (looking at you, BF5). I both want to whack the fingers of the artists when they try to add too many details for the game to run reliably, but also give every gamer "Just wanting better graphics, bro" the same whack and a stern talking to when it comes to readability. Cause I'd happily throw away the very pretty hair and go back to the solid, textured wigs we used to have even during the 360/ps3 era if it meant we could get particle effects like sparks back. Hell, I've been replaying MGS 3 on pc now in the original resolution, and I'm kind of awestruck at how much the blood, the sparks, and the impact dust clouds are visible in a well upscaled 720p resolution. It's actually a bit sad that I think particle effect, post processing, and readability in general peaked with Halo 3, with so many games after it doing more and achieving less
The issue is primarily to do with deferred rendering as opposed to traditional forward rendering. Deferred rendering makes dynamic lighting in particular much easier. However, it's clearly possible to make amazing looking forward-rendered games, an example being Half Life: Alyx, provided that you make heavy use of lightmapping rather than using entirely dynamic lights.
that's actually a big mystery as halo reach was one of the first ever games to use TAA and id say it has better particle effect fidelity than halo 3(though art wise i still prefer halo 3). Maybe they had a unique implementation of TAA, i would not know as i don't know much about the topic.
MSAA was amazing but practically no game offers it these days due to all of them using "deferred rendering". We've gone through an anti aliasing regression where older games have better AA. Even if you disable TAA, some games (particularly Unreal engine games) will STILL have ghosting artifacts because they use in built-in temporal solutions for certain lighting effects. "Threat Interactive" talks about this in detail.
The very recent guilty gear strive uses MSAA. The game looks stunning with it on. Then they released granblue fantasy versus and removed it... Incredible waste.
The missing sparks are probably from over-aggressive window filtering. Basically, when you're reprojecting previous-frame data onto the newer frame, one way of checking whether a pixel is relevant in its new neighborhood is to check whether it has a similar color to other pixels in its vicinity. If it does, great, blend it in; if it doesn't, assume that it's out of date and filter over it. This works pretty well in many situations, but small sharp fast-moving details are a pathological case: the filter can very easily assume that they're a rendering artifact and smudge them over.
It absolutely does, the game makes me feel like I need glasses everytime I play. A funny thing I found tho is the game looks sharper if you turn the sharpness setting all the way down
The game will be more detailed with sharpening disabled. Adding a bunch of halos around everything (which is how sharpening filters work, by exaggerating edge contrast) is inherently going to replace some detail, and cover up a lot of detail by making it comparatively lower contrast. Hated how early DLSS looked because of how oversharpened it was. Turn off the sharpening and games look so much more detailed and smooth up close. I suppose if I was playing on a TV 5 feet away it might look worse then, but I'm not.
The video explained everything perfectly imo. Obviously one could get into more technical detail, but for most people this explanation is more than enough. Here are some other AA methods with their strengths and weaknesses: _Super Sampling:_ (Happen during render pass and can not be added in post) SSAA (Super Sample Anti Aliasing) - Renders the game at a higher resolution (2x, 4x etc.) and scales it down to the desired display resolution. Very effective, but also very costly since the game runs at 2x or 4x the resolution. MSAA (Multi Sample Anti Aliasing) - Renders the game at a higher resolution, but only at the edges of the actual geometry of the scene. Very effective and not too taxing when used at 2x or 4x. Provides SSAA quality along geometry edges. Downside is that it iIgnores all Texture detail and alpha transparancies since it only looks for the geometry. So not suitable for modern games. _Post Processing:_ (Happens after the render pass and can simply be added at the end of the finished render) FXAA (Fast Approximate Anti Aliasing) - Uses contrast detection and simple blur algorithms to reduce jaggies along high contrast edges. It's super fast often doesn't even have a noticable performance impact. It's not particularely good at anti aliasing. On stronger implementations tends to cause the entire image to look blurry and low detail. On weaker implementations often not strong enough to effectively reduce aliasing. SMAA (Subpixel Morphological Anti Aliasing) - Similar to FXAA uses the contrast detection and blur algorithms to remove aliasing along high contrast areas. Also uses more sophisticated edge detection and edge reconstruction algorithms to better get rid of jaggies while still preserving detail. Not as fast as FXAA, but still minor compared to other AA implementation. Not quite as effective in all scenarios as other AA methods. _Temporal:_ (Also implemented at render pass which means it can also effect other effects as demonstated in the video) TAA (Temporal Anti Aliasing) - Pretty much as explained in the video. Also uses ray jitter to sample slightly different points each frame. Low performance impact similar to SMAA thanks to the temporal component. Generally very effective for almost all scenarios. Introduces artifacts such as blur, ghosting or motion trails because of its temporal component. _Hybrids:_ SMAA T2x (or Filmic SMAA T2x) - Uses SMAA with a temporal component on top. Because it doesn't only rely on temporal data only, but also on the SMAA algorithm it is more effective than SMAA while also having less ghosting than TAA. The Filmic version generally has even less temporal artifacts such as ghosting because it uses a temporal filter. Will provide good anti aliasing but at a higher performance cost than both SMAA and TAA. MSAA + FXAA - Is as the name suggest, a hybrid of MSAA and FXAA. Since MSAA is fairly ineffective in modern games and FXAA is hit and miss this implementation attempts to use both in conjunction to mitigate the issues that they have individually with more or less success depending on the scene. Implementation is pretty rare and has the same performance cost as MSAA and FXAA combined. ______________ My personal choice for most scenarios would be SMAA or Filmic SMAA. Especially at higher resolutions like 1440p and 4k, SMAA is usually more than effective enough. At lower resolutions the argument for a temporal anti aliasing method gets stronger but pure TAA has too many drawbacks for me personally. SMAA T2x is also temporal but it's generarally more stable than pure TAA from my experience and in my opinion worth the extra performance cost.
I always go for FXAA. Still a bit of pixels, but I like the crispness. With the push for TAA in damn near every game coming out.. Im just forced to pick a screen FULL of shimmering pixels, or vaseline on my eyes. I wish they didnt throw away the "middle ground"
I agree with this. A good edge FXAA implementation to me looks much better than the alternatives, especially when paired with some subtle sharpening. However, poorly implemented FXAA shaders have the same problem with making the overall image muddier, so it varies a lot game-to-game.
It's a shame that stuff like this is becoming super common especially on the the most powerful consoles to date. I get hitting those 60 frames but I wish there were more options to let us run games rendering natively without any upscaling or blurry workarounds. It kinda feels like the current gen games are leaning on all the fancy new shaders, lighting and the ability to cram in hi fidelity models and textures do a lot of the visual work but outside of cutscenes it's too difficult to maintain where as some of the old cheats devs used to get a "realistic" look like baking in lighting, adding contrast to textures and heck even bloom (in modest amounts) feel more clean and art directed even if they don't hit that "photorealistic" bar.
High end PCs can’t even run current gen games at high native resolutions with a high frame rate. There’s nothing wrong with upscaling when done well like Nvidia’s DLSS, AMD’s FSR, PlayStation’s PSSR. TAA just sucks and hopefully the industry can move onto a better form of anti aliasing
I think what makes Sprite great is its malleability. You want something to compliment alcohol? Want to mix syrup flavorings together? Want something non-offensive at a party? What about a punch? Sprite's just a good gender neutral compliment to whatever drink you want. I've heard people dislike sodas, but never Sprite. Same for likes. No one loves Sprite. No one.
MSAA was the only good Anti Aliasing solution and then differed rendering ruined it. I'd rather play with AA entirely disabled than look at a blurry mess.
Another thing to note is that forced TAA isn't just a slight inconvenience. For some people the motion blur/smear affect of TAA causes nausea, headaches or eye strain, much like regular motion blur it can induce motion sickness. For others even the stationary image can cause problems as people feel like their eyes are out of focus so their eyes keep trying to "focus" on the image repeatedly which obviously causes problems. This is at its core an accessibility issue as much as it is a preference. As a result providing options for alternative anti-aliasing methods that don't accumulate past frames or at minimum offering an off option is essential. I totally understand people who prefer TAA's stable image, but some people, myself included, get physically ill after using TAA for 20 minutes or more. A 20 minute game session isn't ideal. Everyone should be mindful of this before they judge anyone for their preference, supporting more options is allowing more people to enjoy Halo 🎮
Oh yes this, so much this. I remember seeing a leafy tree fall over in BF5 and couldn't tell if my monitor was broken or I was having an eye migraine from all the ghosting that happened. I also remember playing a game called Derail Valley, which whilst gorgeous when running trains through vistas, made think I was going mad seeing all the paper diagrams and maps take half a second to morph into their final shapes with all the text and small images on them. Thank god there was an option to turn it off
sadly i am one of those people. makes it hard to play more than half an hour. i dont understand why so many games force it on you instead of just making it an optional thing.... like most aa is...
In fact, it'd make sense for "disable anti-aliasing" to be in accessibility setings, wouldn't it? It'd better communicate that it isn't an ideal choice.
Precisely, when I look at almsot any TAA implementations, I feel as if my glasses are one dioptre off the mark, which worsens when I move camera. Most egregious example of this is Talos Principle 2, my eyes literally start hurting after only a few seconds of looking at the image, and the game itself is very beautiful (alas, not playable with TAA off due to extreme shimmering)
Turning off AA entirely makes the game look bad, but there are many AA options that arent Temporal, kinda wish we could at least try them. Also, when Temporal AA is implemented into a game, that means that generally Nvidias DLSS can be modded into it too, and its version of TAA works much better and preserves a lot more quality.
You mention that TAA covers up the corners cut by developers, which it does (and that's a large part of why those corners are cut in the first place), but the bigger question is whether it's fundamentally necessary to cut those corners in the first place. I've seen some strong arguments from graphics programmers that studios and publishers are leaning on TAA as a crutch so they don't have to bother with implementing optimizations that don't require TAA to get away with, and that optimizing games without TAA is totally feasible, allowing for a better presentation. The issue is just getting publishers and studio heads commit to that near-term investment of time and resources on the matter so their games can benefit more in the long term. Those decision makers tend to focus more on maximizing ROI in the near term, so they're not likely to be keen on the idea if they can get away with letting TAA handle the consequences of doing things the quick and easy way.
I'm quite certain those developers have never worked on graphics programming for a modern triple A project. If it was a case of laziness, why has not one single developer ever done those optimisations? Why has Epic, adding all these cutting edge features to UE5 not just also hit the 'fix graphics' button? *Every* triple A game has to be fairly well optimised to run well at all. Clearly The Last of Us was decently optimised on consoles, but with imperfect optimisation on PC at launch it ran like complete shit. Every one-person indie game that uses modern UE also inevitably run like shit compared to AAA releases too, with titles taking place in a single room not necessarily running at 60fps across the board, because the devs aren't able to properly optimise their games the way a studio can. Badly optimised games are how you end up with the Arkham Knight PC port at release. But Cyberpunk (now)? Doom Eternal? Fortnite? The Hunt: Showdown? These are all deeply optimised titles trying to squeeze as much graphical power out of their systems as possible without making it prohibitively difficult to develop a large game. That kind of sentiment just feels like antivax sentiment. Sure you might believe that a single doctor might lie about a treatment, but essentially all doctors across the entire globe? If a lack of optimisation was the issue, you'd necessarily expect there to be some titles in the space that did have those optimisations and thus shipped without TAA while maintaining equivalent graphical parity in other areas. But they do not exist. TAA + temporal effects are absolutely an optimisation too, I think gamers forget that optimising code means making code do less 99% of the time. Not rendering the entire gameworld at once at fully detail even if you can't see it is an optimisation, but if you want to frame 'degrading the image' as a fake optimisation, then any form of level of detail or texture streaming is also that. Doing ambient occlusion as a post-process effect at a limited resolution instead of just raytracing it every frame would also be a fake optimisation. In fact just doing lighting in a shader instead of by tracing rays is again, just 'fake optimisation'. Or alternatively, you can embrace that 'downgrades' to improve performance are in fact optimisations. Just ones that come with shortcomings too.
@@GrandHighGamer You clearly didn't read my comment. I never said that AAA devs weren't optimizing their games, I never said anything about "fake optimizations" (wtf would that even be?), nor did I say that anyone was doing anything out of laziness. Please try to read and understand what someone writes before responding to them.
@@GrandHighGamer Devs optimize their games not to run well (in some abstract fashion, although some clearly do that, que in Crystal Dynamics and Nixxes console ports), they do it to reach certain KPI which is usually formulatd as 'we need the frames to be cooked within X ms'. So if devs can use some cheat like fake frames, TAA or other techniques to reach this KPI goal and simultaneously save time they'd do it. Also, since most people don't really care about image quality or have no idea what a game might look like with non-temporal AA (as in the last 10 years TAA is what devs use to reach these KPI goals), it doesn't bother them.
@@GrandHighGamer It has been done before, what are you saying? theirs a ton of deferred rendered games with minimal aliasing and temporal independent effects. I recommend watching my video where I highlight multiple solutions, many of which are rarley ever ployed. These are the reasons games are built around TA 1) some developers are lazy (it's not like AAA gaming is friendly, extra effort isn't expected or required, we don't get paid for working harder but for getting the job done) 2) some developers are hamstrung by the current industry standards and/or engine they're working with 3) some developers are hamstrung by leadership and their lack of knowledge on what to prioritize on a technical-level, and/or 4) some of these things are technically doable and known by all involved, but are ultimately cost/scope prohibitive within the given project, and thus are deprioritized for more profitable endeavors (I.E. lower hanging fruit).
Thank you, I appreciate you pointing out this. When this video mentioned that Halo Infinite without TAA looks rough, I thought that it's a fault of the developers, or their higher ups, who make games with TAA in mind, and therefore making it forced, rather than making proper fundamentally solid graphics, that would look well with various settings, and not be so dependent on one that has such an overkill efficiency that may not please everyone
It's hard to outright dismiss either option here, because TAA is a blurry mess and no AA is a pixelated nightmare. I think the best thing to do is simply also include more demanding yet more accurate AA methods like MSAA or SSAA. In a few years, an average gaming PC will be able to handle the more expensive methods, and that will be the definitive way to play the game. The best thing to do is always just provide a plethora of options.
MSAA either does not work well, or cannot be implemented with how most games are doing rendering nowadays. Technical limitation. SSAA is just rendering the game at a higher resolution. I am personally a fan of SMAA, in most games that supports it, it looks good.
MSAA doesn't work well at all in modern deferred rendered games. It's a big reason why the industry shifted away from it with the 8th console generation. Back in the 7th gen, you had hardware MSAA in the Xbox 360 and it legitimately looks great in games that used it, but you can't really use MSAA in a modern game with good results, see Red Dead Redemption 2 on PC for an example.
Most games these days have an SSAA slider. The problem is that SSAA or MSAA will not fix moving aliasing in motion. You need temporal frame blending regardless of SSAA and MSAA is what I'm trying to say. BUT it doesn't and never needed to be so blurry in the first place, the amount of TAA blur can be adjusted by the devs.
@@astrea555Supersampling can also counteract blurriness caused by TAA. Last and current gen Ubisoft titles are easy to do it with it's 0-200% resolution scalers. DLAA is also useful and seems to be a standard to implement it now.
The problem with the TAA is that the assets and textures of the game are created in such a way that they accommodate the use of the TAA, things like: shadows, post-processing, hair, grass, etc. This means that when you remove the TAA the game looks terrible👎 . And adding that, this antialiasing method looks bad/blurred when you are moving🏃 in the game. The problem I have is that often developers don't give the user other options like: MSAA, SSAA, FXAA and others.🤔
In another game called Ground Branch, TAA makes picture-in-picture rendering of magnified optics look really smuggy and mutes glowing elements too (sparks from bullet impacts, red dot sights especially under NVGs at full reticule brightness). Cyberpunk 2077 also has forced TAA that when disabled, also causes other issues such as global shadows showing light seaping through seams in the world as if the map was stitched together like a quilt, and distant objects sometimes getting "fizzed out" by artifacting making scenic vistas kinda hard to enjoy. Devs really need to give us different AA methods or perhaps not make a game that would be heavilly reliant on AA for its visuals.
this is exactly why i try to turn off AA or TAA in any game i play, even if the game itself looks a little worse. its that loss of information, and for me, someone who tries to get every piece of information off my screen as much as i can, its a huge difference. Titanfall 2 in particular really benefited me from having the TAA turned off, i was able to spot pilots much more easily and from farther away as well. and with some TAA in some games, it can cause a little bit of motion blur if you move your aim a little too fast. and for someone who plays on a really high sense like myself, its almost immediatly noticable.
At 4K resolutions I don't even get why TAA is used. 4K is the equivalent is of Super Sampling AA for 1080p. And super sampling is the better looking AA method. Quite heavy though
Because everything in modern games is undersampled or built to work with taa exclusively. Some game engines are really bad about this. The RE engine has terrible specular flickering that absolutely does not get fixed at a native 4k.
Supersampling requires the game to render at a resolution higher than the display. Playing a game at 4k won't get rid of aliasing on a 4k display. TAA is usually the best anti aliasing method when it comes to getting rid of aliasing but a poor implementation can be extremely detrimental to the image like it is in halo infinite.
Having tried 4k without TAA myself, it just... doesn't work out as well as you'd hope. Deferred rendering plus highly detailed images = loads of aliasing and other issues regardless of resolution. Plus, at 4k, TAA has way more to work with and isn't nearly as awful.
It's like everyone forgot MSAA was invented over 2 decades ago for this reason. Deferred rendering fucked that all up. We traded having clear rendering for having hundreds of lights on screen, when on average you'll only have a couple.
It wasn’t just having hundreds of lights on screen. There were multiple reasons that deferred rendering became the norm as more advanced materials and lighting models became taxing on performance. MSAA, while nice, is just not realistic unless console gamers are willing to drop their 4K, 60+ fps games.
@@LateNightHalo Deferred rendering also aligns with Hollywood CGI which means they could both open up a new market with compatible workflows and utilize the pool of research already paid for by that industry.
@@LateNightHalo I'm more convinced deferred became popular because its convenient, not because its the right tool for the job. Most deferred effects can be achieved in forward. Newer variations such as Tiled/Clustered Forward Rendering (Doom, MW2019, Unity HDRP), can handle hundreds of lights with similar costs as deferred. Meanwhile, there is *a lot* that deferred throws a wrench in. Transparency isn't possible, you either have to render afterward in forward, *or do that pixelated dithered hair mess you often see*. It makes stylized rendering or special one-off effects very difficult, as it very much wants you to use a unified lighting model on the entire screen. Its performance cost scales poorly with resolution, as there are usually 2-4 fullscreen sized GBuffer images in the background also being rendered. This also means its expensive to render things like mirrors, portals, or extra cameras, as they add a lot of pixels to be shaded and stored in VRAM. Its particularly taxing on GPU memory bandwidth. Its also another contributor to having to render at lower than native resolution and upscaling.
I remember I complained about this "blurriness" when games started to implement this but I always got gaslighted into thinking that I was becoming blind and that I needed glasses. I then played older games and MCC and everything was crystal clear on my screen. Personally I think playing with TAA feels like I'm playing in a dream, nothing looks like I'm watching a real image.
Ok, hear me out, im not a game dev or anything, but, what if there was a way to have "configurable" TAA sample counts, and that those values could be game specific. For example, the game dev, or even better, the player through a menu, could adjust how many past frames TAA is allowed to pull from. This would allow fine tuning of how much ghosting and/or detail loss there is per TAA pass, right? Any game devs or modders, feel free to chime in, but i have a feeling this might not be the worst idea ever...
It gives me a minor headache and makes my 1440p screen look like trash. Meanwhile Mario Kart Wii online looks amazing despite being 480p. I don't dislike TAA at all hut Halo Infinite's TAA implementation isn't great. I understand the game was built around it but want the option
The root of the problem is deferred rendering. Forward rendered? Doesn't look too awful without AA (comparatively). Deferred rendering is the "render some things worse" bit and I'd gladly take less detailed games over the current magic tricks being used.
TAA is possibly the worst option for anti-aliasing and Infinite's implementation of it specifically is overly aggressive. Honestly, the best thing that could happen to this game is if they add support for MSAA, SSAA or god forbid DLSS and its equivalents. For consoles, they might be stuck with TAA because this game has to somehow run acceptably on base Xbox Ones, but PC should be given more options than we have. But there's definitely a conversation to have about how developers have been shoving so much extraneous detail into their games that we need all of these perfunctory tools just to help them run decently. I've been playing some older 7th gen titles on PC recently and I have to say, while the detail can be a bit lacking, I *miss* having the kind of picture quality we used to have. These games that run at fully native resolution with zero upscaling, fully maxed out graphics options running at triple-digit framerates these days, yes obviously you can point to the lower fidelity of most of the assets, lower poly counts, less detailed textures, a lack of expensive lighting effects, etc. But the image is just so *clean* and even older anti-aliasing solutions do their jobs better because they weren't given such impossibly detailed frames to figure out. When you take all that and apply it to a game with solid art direction that holds up, I've been replaying Darksiders for instance, damn, I kinda prefer this to what we've been doing recently.
Dude I’m loving your more in depth look into behind the scenes kind of issues, I’m someone who loves to hear the story behind the story and you bringing up things I wouldn’t notice on my own is so cool! Your videos are also super engaging and funny, and is just enthralling and educational entertainment. Keep up the good work!
1:00 What a fantastic thing I can use to show people. I Actually PREFER this over AA. I love seeing the crisp raw pixels on my 4K TV. I'll take crispy pixels over blurry smoothed pixels anyday
This is where developers need to give us the option to turn TAA off and then up the resolution of detail objects like hair and grass after it's been turned off on PC. I'm someone who despises TAA, with a passion. I would much rather brute force AA by super sampling the image along with some slight blur to clean it up, performance be damned. I'd rather run a a game at 30 FPS with a clean image than 60 with a blurred image that's lost detail and smears on the slightest movement.
Sprite is Like the default soda or the starting weapon to a game, it’s great start for soda but over time your taste for sugary drinks can become more refined.
Ok, but here is something strange. If the game was made WITH TAA IN MIND, why are the effects affected by it ? I mean if you make the game and you use TAA to test things, you would probably notice that the effects you worked on look so different
The ability to turn off the TAA and run the optimized effects at higher resolutions and all the way back up to native really should be more available on modern PC games, but should always be options and marked as high performance cost.
Halo infinite doesn't really run much, if anything, at a sub native resolution. It's shimmer usually comes from poor mipmaps and sub pixel detail. Hair is the only exception, which is dithered, still not half res.
Biggest reason this has been an issue is that a lot of the industry has switch from forward rendering to deferred rendering which MSAA doesn’t work well with as deferred rendering draws everything at once for performance gain instead of overdrawing triangles. No one has really come up with a good fix all algorithm for the issue. It’s different for each game since the order and specifics of when each render-pass is drawn can have a big affect on visuals. Like for example you’ll run into issues where you could draw the render passes in a way where you have really good anti-aliasing but it comes at the expense of having UI reflect off the water but then if you change the order around you could have really bad anti-aliasing for the water but it means no UI reflects off the water. It’s sometimes a lesser of two issues. It becomes a “Can’t have your cake and eat it to” type situation. Sometimes if you try having both it can tank performance depending on the render api used.
Something I noticed is that the TAA tends to look the worst when sprinting. Turns out the cause was screen shake and turning that off significantly reduced the blurriness. I'm guessing it's because TAA has a lot more to smooth over due to the difference in each frame introduced by the shaking.
Halo infinite’s screen shake is also bugged I believe. Something about it doesn’t play correctly. It feels like some frames are missing from the shake so it will “skip” every now and then. It looks pretty bad which is sad because Halo 5 had a really good implementation of screen shake
@@LateNightHaloThere are a bunch of visual effects and stuff broken in infinite that they just refuse to fix, just spreading the word, Halo Infinite has no material response or visual effect for the needler specifically hitting vehicles, it just vanishes unlike every other game that has it pop or stick.
TAA reduces aliasing very well with little performance cost... but that 1440p image? Yeah it's more like 1080p or less, especially in the distance. Nowadays I just lower my graphic settings for most games and super sample the best my 8GB VRAM can handle :') Which is weird to think that Infinite has upscaling capability built-in yet no option to toggle anti-aliasing. Also weird that MCC got FSR but Infinite has neither FSR or DLSS. Edit: wow can't believe how many details are straight up cut out because of TAA. It's much worse than just blurriness...
MCC's FSR is broken for Halo 2 Anniversary, the pre-rendered cutscene is shifted to the left in like a weird off-centre letterbox, works fine on consoles like the Series X though, MCC is full of issues, so is infinite and they just refuse to fix any of it.
I have a 1440p monitor, and I quite literally run the game at maxed out super sampling just so that I can see details in the game without feeling like I forgot to put my glasses on. And even then, in motion, the game is sickeningly blurry. Genuinely, fuck TAA. I cannot wait until this trend dies.
the issues I have with TAA are similar to the problems I have with AI upscaling, if it turns the game into a blurry and smeary mess why should I bother with turning that setting on? I would rather just let it be a little pixely, but if you are just looking for the best looking image quality performance be damned, super sampling is obviously the best option. Unfortunately game developers seem to be removing other options and using TAA as a crutch to hide rather terrible graphical blunders, rather than making the game without TAA as a requirement and using it as additional option for players. I have a hard time believing that most people would choose to use TAA over other Anti-Aliasing options even if they are a bit harder on performance.
This is exactly the thing I DESPISE about "modern" "photoreal" videogame "graphics" - using more development effort and more hardware resources to ultimately make the game actually look WORSE and still be horribly unoptimized. All of these *"cutting edge shaders"* that makes dithering on everything, and fake shortcuts like "screenspace reflections" that look worse than some games we had in 2004... It really seems sometimes like the actual people making the graphical shaders & the art design have completely lost the talent and artistry that previous generations of developers had. Like, go and learn OpenGL 3.0 first -then you can start playing with the multi billion dollar supercomputer...
It also helped our old CRT Tv's and CRT monitors had built in anti-aliasing. I have a 32 inch Sony Trinitron sitting next to me, and older games look so amazing on it, even through composite OR component cable. The reliance of TAA and DLSS is really bad in modern gaming, like Space Marine 2 has no sharpening filter to help with its anti-aliasing when you turn on DLSS to get higher framerates, since that game is so badly optimized. The problem begins when a video game offers ONLY TAA as Anti-aliasing. We need to get options, not just one that looks good at lower resolutions but bad at higher.
Source Engine games had MSAA X16Q, never knew what the Q ment, but I never seen anything reach it's level, the choices were no AA, FXAA, MSAA X2, X4, X4Q, X8, X8Q, X16Q.
Thanks for a good solid informative video with the good general message for developers in the end. I would like for you try to make videos other games, maybe something more appealing to greater audience
One thing I sorta wish you tried was a rendering the game at a higher than native resolution with TAA disabled to show how the game could look. Some of the older AA options like SSAA or MSAA largely achieved the anti-aliasing approach by rendering the image (or parts of it) at a higher than native resolution, then downscaling. The resulting image often looks much better than native, but at a significant performance cost.
Hopefully they add more AA options, maybe something simple like SMAA similar to MCC, but they could hypothetically add more options such as MSAA if they ever decide to.
This explains so much! I've always wondered why the graphics felt so bad even though everything is high resolution. Playing the campaign, I've noticed that grassy forrest areas look too smooth and too soft while forerunner architecture looks clear. I think this is because of the TAA! I'm thinking it's because outdoor areas have a lot of individual details like grass and gravel that get overlooked while the forerunner buildings were already smooth to begin with
Wondering if a second pass after TAA to re-draw details and particle effects specifically would help preserve detail without turning it off entirely and dealing with shimmery, crawly aliasing artifacts. It would add to development time, with artists having to designate what ignores TAA and what doesn't, but could potentially be a good solution with the right art direction.
It’s been a problem across multiple games. Especially games in the unreal engine. You end up getting a lot of ghosting effects. What they could’ve done with halo infinite is have a renderpass after TAA for particle effects so they don’t get filtered out by TAA but I’m not sure if that would’ve tanked performance.
I tried the mod a while back. While it looked great at 100% internal resolution, I actually decided to keep TAA so I can run the internal as low as I want without much impact.
TAA in Halo Infinite looks pretty bad but TAA does have it's uses. Edit: I'm very glad that the video was more nuanced. I was kinda scared it would blindly hate on TAA...
TAA much like AI speeds up development and improves workflow efficiency, but it doesn't nessacarily increase quality like it should. What I mean by this is that aliasing mitigation use to be a process of game development, but because TAA is so effective it bypasses that step entirely speeding up game development slightly. As a result we're in a catch 22 situation where games look bad without TAA, but they only look bad without TAA BECAUSE TAA exist. If TAA didn't exist, games like Halo Infinite wouldn't be as aliased as it currently is without TAA, so you'd be able to enjoy a clear image without insufferable pixel crawl, but it might cost Microsoft an extra month or couple grand in development costs.
So I sort of agree with what you're saying, but its complicated. Anytime theirs bad pixel crawl thus TAA looks superior (a nessacary evil) I also see poorly authored materials, bad mip-maps, and awful overdraw which all create unnecessary aliasing that's easily avoidable because developers aren't even trying to reduce it at all, since you're not suppose to see the image without TAA on to begin with. So its not exactly fair to compare no TAA vs TAA on a game that was built around using it, because in those games developers aren't even taking the most basic steps in aliasing mitigation, which causes the illusition that TAA was nessacary to begin with.
Love these kinds of videos; even though I don’t want to go into game design (I’m already heading into psychology) they do teach me about the techniques and efforts behind games, like the BTS features of a movie.
Sometimes FSR, XeSS, TSR, (and DLSS), generate better results than TAA, depending on the game content, and how they are fine tunned, those should be optional in most games
Agreed, you can even downscale from higher resolutions to a lower-resolution monitor, then use upscaling like FSR to pull performance back. Still looks better.
That's why i use TSR whenever possible. TSR can be used for almost all Unreal Engine 4 Games. Other Engines must have it implemented. That resolves almost all ghosting and doesn't remove so much detail. It's not DLSS quality, but it's better than TAA.
This is why I'm glad reshade and forced selections in nvidia profile inspector exist. Thankfully at 1440p and with the right pixel density on screen, aliasing/shimmering is hard to notice depending on the game. I also very much love sprite 👀
Will happily turn off anti aliasing and motion blur any day of the week. A "simpler" or "outdated" looking game is always more enjoyable than a game with so much rubbish happening to the screen you get sick (see crysis 3)
It's really a fundamental flaw in the game honestly. We've had games giving us different versions of AA for ages now, but only recently have devs seemingly decided to try to force everyone onto the "modern" solutions which in most cases serve as incredibly obvious double edged swords. I will never understand it, and I dread the day we start getting games with framegen forcefully applied.
Sprite is a refreshing and zesty lemon-lime soda that has long been a favorite for its crisp flavor and effervescence, making it a perfect companion for hot days and social gatherings. Its balance of sweetness and citrus tang offers a delightful taste that many people enjoy. On the other hand, Sprite Zero, while marketed as a calorie-free alternative, often falls short for some consumers who miss the full-bodied taste and sweetness of the original. The artificial sweeteners used can give it a different aftertaste, which can detract from the overall enjoyment that comes with the classic Sprite experience.
12:22 Funny you should say "let us dip our toes into the sprite." One of the words for pixel art used in games is actually sprite. (If that was intentional or not, you made me chuckle all the same. 😆)
Really wish they would implement DLSS so we could use DLAA. DLAA looks pretty incredible nowadays with almost no drawback I know of. Edit: After watching I enjoyed the video but was disappointed that you did didn't mention that there are other AA options (Like DLAA) that 343 could presumably add relatively easily.
DLAA still softens in motion and can occasionally have ghosting. Any of its issues are orders of magnitudes worse with standard TAA, but DLAA isn't perfect. Also, infinites motion vectors are probably busted, which would explain why it's TAA is so sub par. Using the same data with DLAA would still have issues.
@@Epiousios18 SSAA is obviously the best, it's the ground truth, but obviously not always practical (though it is in Halo Infinite on newer systems). MSAA is best if your game can be forward rendered, though that's got severe limitations. SMAA can work well if MSAA is impossible, like deferred renderers, as long as mipmaps and LODs are carefully used, dithered transparencies are avoided for blended and masked effects instead, etc. DLAA is the catch all for games that dont fit any of the above, which is a lot of games, but it's quality compared to the other techniques at their best is still quite far behind. It's always better than standard TAA unless something is broken though (ahem, Forza).
Sprite is pretty solid as a soda. No caffeine opens its hours of accessibility, and lets people with medical conditions drink it. Though it can also cause heartburn, so that sort of sucks. Thank you for breaking down AA. I've never fully understood it.
A major issue of TAA is that it only resolves well at higher resolutions, which wouldn't be as much of an issue if we ever got a killer budget 4k GPU, but year after year as the hardware improves the optimization lowers pushing that high refresh 4k bar further and further away. I upgrade GPUs about every 3 years or so but I've never felt like it was necessary or even a good idea to upgrade my monitor. As a result, many games, especially third party UE5 titles, suffer from an extreme amount of blur that makes them look worse than games from several years ago.
Don't forget the worst part, since TAA is always blending previous frames with the current one, its essentially motion blur that you _cannot_ disable! Not having an option for disabling TAA is a crime against gamers >:( I'd also like to express my anger towards upscaling methods, like TAAU, FSR, XeSS, and especially DLSS for being a similar crutch AAA developers have come to rely on these days. There are plenty of games that look great and run great without relying on TAA or upscaling. It IS possible for a dev to optimize their game - it just takes time, and talent (which costs money, obviously). The fact of the matter is though, when you are targeting a console audience, they don't care about any of this, they won't even notice any of this. So the companies have no real reason to care I guess
TAA and SSR (screen space reflections, where objects in the foreground bleed into reflective surfaces on the background, and where reflections completely disappeare if you look at a surface the wrong way) are such annoying technologies, it bothers me to no end these things became industry standard.
A reason why sparks and thin glowy details get lost in TAA fuzzyness is that their slipspace game engine converts the output picture in a sdr colorspace before and not after applying TAA. Explosions are just as bright as white paint. TAA constantly offsets, or jitters the raw picture in a 2x2 pixel grid to counter the checkerboard dithering and reference subpixel detail. In a real hdr colorspace, those bright objects would have been more visible and likely to survive the TAA treatment. I'm glad their artists can finally shine with a Halo using UE5
I actually never noticed it, and for a long time I really liked TAA when it first appeared. FXAA I hated because it made the picture blurry, and MSAA had too much influence on the FPS Therefore, TAA, which always had the option to enable sharpening, did not look so bad when turned on But recently, after a break from gaming, I downloaded two games, Squad and Arma Reforged. And I noticed that Squad, which uses TAA, looks just awful. As if I was playing in 720p instead of 2K. That's how I came across this video in search of an answer
Idk why I was expecting some reshade tweaks now that you could disable taa, but amazing video, I agree that Halo infinite has this weird look where it can be gorgeous but also flat
In my case, I have a relatively cheap PC, and whenever I move around the entire game has this horrendous blurry effect to it. Once you stop it goes away, but the moment you're on the move again, it comes back and I've been having a straight up breakdown over it. lmao
I think modern games depends a lot on light and 3d stuff. When they were faking everything with beautiful paint textures that gave the appearence of 3d most things look amazing. Thinking about those perfect forerunner structures pillars in halo 3.
The game doesn't even rely on TAA to reconstruct anything (effects like SSR have reconstruction built in), yet the games TAA is the worst in the industry. Modding TAA out and using reshade SMAA is a vastly superior experience. Personally, I set my resolution scaling to 200% and use the minimum framerate option to always get the cleanest possible image at my fps target. Rarely notice shimmer outside the menus. The only remaining issues are that mipmaps on foliage get too low resolution at a distance, and the game doesn't correctly tonemap overexposed colors.
@@alanlee67 it's not the talent at all. It's the fact that the majority of the programmers were likely contractors that got cycled through every 18 months. You don't have the time to see any systems through to completion like that and any institutional knowledge is lost. The same happened with Turn 10 and Forza Motorsport. Using unreal is better for contractors because everyone already knows how to use it, and contractors are a terrible method of developing an engine, but it's not as good an option as a dedicated engine made by a core dev team.
Yeah they need to get their heads out of their asses and hire actually career employees. Yes they are more expensive, but they will become more efficient over time, and produce better work.
Give the option to render the hair, shadows etc. at full resolution rather than checkerboarded. Then you can disable TAA and inject something less intrusive like SMAA.
Total War Three Kingdoms was the game that taught me to hate TAA. It was more or less fine on the campaign map, but in the battles with thousands of small moving objects on screen at once? Whole armies became impressionist paintings. You could turn it off, but then the shadows stopped working and the vegetation became alias central. And this came out shortly after TW Warhammer 2, where I was able to use MSAA and it looked great. But no option for that in 3K.
This can lead into a bigger discussion about image quality in video games overall. I have always thought Halo infinite has an issue with overall image clarity.
Interesting discussion. I know that some implementations of AA can make things worse, but I didn't know that they could design the graphics to make use of it to make things look better. That some things will look worse with it on tells me that more work needs to be done on the algorithm. Perhaps if they marked particles that shouldn't be affected by the AA algorithm in use, they could get the best of both worlds.
sprite really benefits from being watered down with ice, otherwise it just ends up being sugary syrup-y slop. Best sprite I ever had was from chipotle, Like the lemon and lime flavor actually popped, and I have never got that experience anywhere else.
MSAA is an option people. I swear every time TAA is brought up it's like, oh no, do we have it on or off. And people completely forget about all the other anti aliasing. Just mod in and use MSAA.
this guy is like the VSauce of Halo
more like asumsaus for me
is he bald?
There is a deep irony in that TAA is necessary to deal with the massive increase in shimmer due to the massive increase in geometric and shader complexity, but then the TAA goes and erases much of the detail it was built to compensate for.
This is a big part of why 4k keeps getting pushed, IMO. In my experience, even just downscaling with a 1080p monitor and running FSR2 Performance, a lot of the blur is eliminated. It's like TAA needs way more pixels to work with to not fall apart.
@@colbyboucher6391 Funny, I kind of theorized this conclusion but backwards when the 4k fad started happening...
because I noticed all of a sudden that no developers knew how to make functioning well-performing anti-aliasing and I just thought the push to 4K was to make it less noticeable, I didn't know that it was actually for a weird technical reason.
@@Coconut-219 The reason TAA became popular is because the pipeline of the big engines switched to preferencing a deferred shader rendering workflow. Essentially, the scene is rendered in multiple passes in a way that makes traditional MSAA anti-aliasing incompatible.
@@JohnSmith-sk7cg To add to your comment MSAA is useless on in-object detail. It only works on geometric edges, so most of the shimmer issues here would still exist on non-geometric items like the facial hair (which use layered 2D cards), grid and bump-mapped texture details.
@@sean_mc That in my opinion could be solved with a form of fxaa on the texture faces or something of that ilk if one is still doing single pass rendering. There are a myriad of business and technical reasons why they switched that make total sense to me. But I think texture/lighting aliasing is pretty solvable when you don't have deferred rendering.
Hey LNG, incase your audience is unaware I have a mod that disables TAA in Halo Infinite called "QoL - More Graphic Options" on Nexus if they want to disable it for themselves. Thanks for covering this topic!
I use your mod, the game would be unplayable without it! TAA makes me so sick, I thought I'd never be able to play Halo again, I'm so happy modders exist 💙 thank you so much
I've seen this mod and am very interested in trying it out. The problem is I've heard somewhere that EAC is even in the campaign. Is the mod (or reshade for SMAA) still safe to use in campaign or multiplayer?
Dude, I'm actually going to re-download Infinite just to try this. Idk why I didn't think to check Nexus......
Side note: I'm a hater of proprietary tech just as much as the next guy, but DLSS is by far the best anti-aliasing solution I've ever used [the wiki entry for DLSS specifically states it is an "Anti-Aliasing implementation"]. My hope is AMD's FSR can get to DLSS 2.0 levels of AA in short order - it'll be an immediate upgrade for literally everyone.
@@1Ayudon1 it's safe to use, EAC allows it!
@@Hybred ty for clarifying :D
I'm one of the moderators on r/fucktaa. These are the kinds of videos we want. Not everyone blindly hates on the technology. It's not an "echo chamber", we provide fixes and gather resources that show the differences. We have been advocating for player choice from the beginning. But the place does attract the wrong kinds of people...
Good to know things have become more nuanced! I dipped into that subreddit earlier this year and it seemed a little unhinged at points.
Any interesting developments in that subreddit? If it’s gotten more nuanced, I can only imagine actual game developers have been actively involved in there
@@LateNightHalo We have a few developers that actively help us create fixes, and a few more that have made videos to help convince developers to give player choice. The Hybred and Threat Interactive are two such developers that have gone to make videos about the topic. They are friends of the subreddit, and we chat with them often.
I cannot say that the subreddit isn't filled with passionate people. But that doesn't mean that the subreddit as a whole agrees with the negativity. It's hardly an echo chamber though, such places wouldn't give people the resources to chose for themselves. You'll find many different opinions, not many are advocating for the shimmering and aliasing.
@@ericthomas2388 Thats amazing to hear! I'll have to explore the subreddit more! Apologies for saying its an echo chamber! I stand corrected!
@@ericthomas2388I have watched some of Threat Interactive’s videos. I feel he is a little misguided. Lots of passion, but maybe doesn’t fully understand the technology? That’s just based on his videos however. Personally TAA has only ever been a problem for me in FF15. And games with DLSS 1.0. (anthem…)
@@_SP259 Can you articulate what he doesn't understand? I've watched his videos and I haven't noticed anything incorrect. You need to back up your claims.
And personal anecdotes of you not finding any problem doesn't lend any merit to the conversation. Everyone perceives image quality differently, TAA's accessibility issues causes people headaches. It doesn't matter how you feel, it matters that everyone has options. That means including TAA (for people like you) and including other options (for people like me). Best of both worlds.
The reason the explosions look like a that is because in TAA's quest to remove jaggies they will morph information together causing the image to look like an oil painting or like theirs vaseline on the image, and this problem is worsened the lower your resolution is. So the image isn't JUST blurry, its also oily...
Remove the "a" in the first sentence, typo. Hope it was understood
Playing modern games is like playing with vaseline wiped across your screen.
Depends on what you’re playing on. Games look great a powerful pc with decent anti aliasing
@@proggz39nah, TAA is dogshit 99% of the time, and 1% of the time it's just tolerable, never good
I've never played a game with TAA where I didn't think to myself that I'd rather just use FXAA or no anti aliasing at all
@@cyd_hunter99 That's why we've got FSR/DLSS in modern games now!
@@cyd_hunter99 If you have a *truly* powerful PC that can brute-force through 4k, even if it's upscaled, TAA doesn't look nearly as awful. (Doesn't really suggest anything good about TAA, still.)
Issue is that modern games use deferred rendering usually and no AA looks pretty awful as a result. FXAA is just as blurry as TAA, except then it's *always* blurry instead of only when you're moving.
@@zanesnep I hate FSR and DLSS and TAA, these are the worst part of modern gaming. If you think that makes it better, you're delusional.
Holy mother, the explosion farm was a jawdropper. I knew the effects felt underwhelming, but god damn I didn't know TAA did this much.
I do feel like we've overstepped a bit when it comes to graphical fidelity, considering how many games need TAA to function as intended (looking at you, BF5). I both want to whack the fingers of the artists when they try to add too many details for the game to run reliably, but also give every gamer "Just wanting better graphics, bro" the same whack and a stern talking to when it comes to readability.
Cause I'd happily throw away the very pretty hair and go back to the solid, textured wigs we used to have even during the 360/ps3 era if it meant we could get particle effects like sparks back. Hell, I've been replaying MGS 3 on pc now in the original resolution, and I'm kind of awestruck at how much the blood, the sparks, and the impact dust clouds are visible in a well upscaled 720p resolution. It's actually a bit sad that I think particle effect, post processing, and readability in general peaked with Halo 3, with so many games after it doing more and achieving less
The issue is primarily to do with deferred rendering as opposed to traditional forward rendering. Deferred rendering makes dynamic lighting in particular much easier. However, it's clearly possible to make amazing looking forward-rendered games, an example being Half Life: Alyx, provided that you make heavy use of lightmapping rather than using entirely dynamic lights.
YES, less detail, clean forward rendering, please.
One of the sad results of the dbz spinoffs ruining gaming.
@@JuanLeon-oe6xe DBZ spinoffs?
that's actually a big mystery as halo reach was one of the first ever games to use TAA and id say it has better particle effect fidelity than halo 3(though art wise i still prefer halo 3). Maybe they had a unique implementation of TAA, i would not know as i don't know much about the topic.
MSAA was amazing but practically no game offers it these days due to all of them using "deferred rendering". We've gone through an anti aliasing regression where older games have better AA.
Even if you disable TAA, some games (particularly Unreal engine games) will STILL have ghosting artifacts because they use in built-in temporal solutions for certain lighting effects. "Threat Interactive" talks about this in detail.
The very recent guilty gear strive uses MSAA. The game looks stunning with it on. Then they released granblue fantasy versus and removed it...
Incredible waste.
The missing sparks are probably from over-aggressive window filtering. Basically, when you're reprojecting previous-frame data onto the newer frame, one way of checking whether a pixel is relevant in its new neighborhood is to check whether it has a similar color to other pixels in its vicinity. If it does, great, blend it in; if it doesn't, assume that it's out of date and filter over it. This works pretty well in many situations, but small sharp fast-moving details are a pathological case: the filter can very easily assume that they're a rendering artifact and smudge them over.
This is actually the best comment on this vid, lol, Halo's TAA implementation is one of if not the worst major game implementation.
It absolutely does, the game makes me feel like I need glasses everytime I play. A funny thing I found tho is the game looks sharper if you turn the sharpness setting all the way down
All the way down??!!??
Sounds like the game could us some PSSR
@Irizathylia The sweet spot is no sharpening on an OLED with high pixel count.
The game will be more detailed with sharpening disabled. Adding a bunch of halos around everything (which is how sharpening filters work, by exaggerating edge contrast) is inherently going to replace some detail, and cover up a lot of detail by making it comparatively lower contrast. Hated how early DLSS looked because of how oversharpened it was. Turn off the sharpening and games look so much more detailed and smooth up close. I suppose if I was playing on a TV 5 feet away it might look worse then, but I'm not.
4:21 only real ones will have a winter soldier-style awakening upon hearing the Sonic Adventure 2 music again after 20 years
The video explained everything perfectly imo. Obviously one could get into more technical detail, but for most people this explanation is more than enough.
Here are some other AA methods with their strengths and weaknesses:
_Super Sampling:_
(Happen during render pass and can not be added in post)
SSAA (Super Sample Anti Aliasing) - Renders the game at a higher resolution (2x, 4x etc.) and scales it down to the desired display resolution. Very effective, but also very costly since the game runs at 2x or 4x the resolution.
MSAA (Multi Sample Anti Aliasing) - Renders the game at a higher resolution, but only at the edges of the actual geometry of the scene. Very effective and not too taxing when used at 2x or 4x. Provides SSAA quality along geometry edges. Downside is that it iIgnores all Texture detail and alpha transparancies since it only looks for the geometry. So not suitable for modern games.
_Post Processing:_
(Happens after the render pass and can simply be added at the end of the finished render)
FXAA (Fast Approximate Anti Aliasing) - Uses contrast detection and simple blur algorithms to reduce jaggies along high contrast edges. It's super fast often doesn't even have a noticable performance impact. It's not particularely good at anti aliasing. On stronger implementations tends to cause the entire image to look blurry and low detail. On weaker implementations often not strong enough to effectively reduce aliasing.
SMAA (Subpixel Morphological Anti Aliasing) - Similar to FXAA uses the contrast detection and blur algorithms to remove aliasing along high contrast areas. Also uses more sophisticated edge detection and edge reconstruction algorithms to better get rid of jaggies while still preserving detail. Not as fast as FXAA, but still minor compared to other AA implementation. Not quite as effective in all scenarios as other AA methods.
_Temporal:_
(Also implemented at render pass which means it can also effect other effects as demonstated in the video)
TAA (Temporal Anti Aliasing) - Pretty much as explained in the video. Also uses ray jitter to sample slightly different points each frame. Low performance impact similar to SMAA thanks to the temporal component. Generally very effective for almost all scenarios. Introduces artifacts such as blur, ghosting or motion trails because of its temporal component.
_Hybrids:_
SMAA T2x (or Filmic SMAA T2x) - Uses SMAA with a temporal component on top. Because it doesn't only rely on temporal data only, but also on the SMAA algorithm it is more effective than SMAA while also having less ghosting than TAA. The Filmic version generally has even less temporal artifacts such as ghosting because it uses a temporal filter. Will provide good anti aliasing but at a higher performance cost than both SMAA and TAA.
MSAA + FXAA - Is as the name suggest, a hybrid of MSAA and FXAA. Since MSAA is fairly ineffective in modern games and FXAA is hit and miss this implementation attempts to use both in conjunction to mitigate the issues that they have individually with more or less success depending on the scene. Implementation is pretty rare and has the same performance cost as MSAA and FXAA combined.
______________
My personal choice for most scenarios would be SMAA or Filmic SMAA. Especially at higher resolutions like 1440p and 4k, SMAA is usually more than effective enough. At lower resolutions the argument for a temporal anti aliasing method gets stronger but pure TAA has too many drawbacks for me personally. SMAA T2x is also temporal but it's generarally more stable than pure TAA from my experience and in my opinion worth the extra performance cost.
Ah, I see someone has been browsing /r/fucktaa
@@TheLazyGamers or /r/MotionClarity
It's like r/fuckcars but the users are not stupid or worse cyclists.
@@tomtheconqerur People like you are the majority of why r/fuckcars exists
I always go for FXAA. Still a bit of pixels, but I like the crispness. With the push for TAA in damn near every game coming out.. Im just forced to pick a screen FULL of shimmering pixels, or vaseline on my eyes. I wish they didnt throw away the "middle ground"
fxaa looks worse in general, depends on the game though
I agree with this. A good edge FXAA implementation to me looks much better than the alternatives, especially when paired with some subtle sharpening. However, poorly implemented FXAA shaders have the same problem with making the overall image muddier, so it varies a lot game-to-game.
i really started liking cmaa2 on reshade
fxaa is a bit blurry for my tastes/my kinda low ppi monitor
why would you use FXAA when SMAA exists ?
@@autumn42762 That's expensive
It's a shame that stuff like this is becoming super common especially on the the most powerful consoles to date. I get hitting those 60 frames but I wish there were more options to let us run games rendering natively without any upscaling or blurry workarounds. It kinda feels like the current gen games are leaning on all the fancy new shaders, lighting and the ability to cram in hi fidelity models and textures do a lot of the visual work but outside of cutscenes it's too difficult to maintain where as some of the old cheats devs used to get a "realistic" look like baking in lighting, adding contrast to textures and heck even bloom (in modest amounts) feel more clean and art directed even if they don't hit that "photorealistic" bar.
High end PCs can’t even run current gen games at high native resolutions with a high frame rate. There’s nothing wrong with upscaling when done well like Nvidia’s DLSS, AMD’s FSR, PlayStation’s PSSR. TAA just sucks and hopefully the industry can move onto a better form of anti aliasing
Sprite is either hit or miss with me. Don’t like it canned but if you get McDonald’s sprite, oh boy that is crisp. Imagine giving it to a caveman
They would be mind blown, I'm a Dr.Pepper and Ginger ale guy myself.
I think what makes Sprite great is its malleability. You want something to compliment alcohol? Want to mix syrup flavorings together? Want something non-offensive at a party? What about a punch? Sprite's just a good gender neutral compliment to whatever drink you want. I've heard people dislike sodas, but never Sprite.
Same for likes. No one loves Sprite.
No one.
He'll write a script for a Halo game better than anything old 343 ever did.
@@tomtheconqerurSprite can't write because Sprite is a liquid.
@@Nefnoj that's why you make the caveman drink the Sprite
MSAA was the only good Anti Aliasing solution and then differed rendering ruined it. I'd rather play with AA entirely disabled than look at a blurry mess.
FXAA is good, too.
Slight improvement with very little performance impact
nah play it with graphic look shimering is bad experience, it look twice worse
Amazing to see some footage of Call Of Duty 1 in there. Good to know someone else still goes back and revisits it
0:23 That majestic Halo 2 music to pistol whipping a bear is all I needed to see.
Another thing to note is that forced TAA isn't just a slight inconvenience. For some people the motion blur/smear affect of TAA causes nausea, headaches or eye strain, much like regular motion blur it can induce motion sickness. For others even the stationary image can cause problems as people feel like their eyes are out of focus so their eyes keep trying to "focus" on the image repeatedly which obviously causes problems.
This is at its core an accessibility issue as much as it is a preference. As a result providing options for alternative anti-aliasing methods that don't accumulate past frames or at minimum offering an off option is essential.
I totally understand people who prefer TAA's stable image, but some people, myself included, get physically ill after using TAA for 20 minutes or more. A 20 minute game session isn't ideal. Everyone should be mindful of this before they judge anyone for their preference, supporting more options is allowing more people to enjoy Halo 🎮
yup I can only play games with TAA for about an hour before I get actually nauseous and start vomiting
Oh yes this, so much this. I remember seeing a leafy tree fall over in BF5 and couldn't tell if my monitor was broken or I was having an eye migraine from all the ghosting that happened.
I also remember playing a game called Derail Valley, which whilst gorgeous when running trains through vistas, made think I was going mad seeing all the paper diagrams and maps take half a second to morph into their final shapes with all the text and small images on them. Thank god there was an option to turn it off
sadly i am one of those people. makes it hard to play more than half an hour.
i dont understand why so many games force it on you instead of just making it an optional thing.... like most aa is...
In fact, it'd make sense for "disable anti-aliasing" to be in accessibility setings, wouldn't it? It'd better communicate that it isn't an ideal choice.
Precisely, when I look at almsot any TAA implementations, I feel as if my glasses are one dioptre off the mark, which worsens when I move camera. Most egregious example of this is Talos Principle 2, my eyes literally start hurting after only a few seconds of looking at the image, and the game itself is very beautiful (alas, not playable with TAA off due to extreme shimmering)
Turning off AA entirely makes the game look bad, but there are many AA options that arent Temporal, kinda wish we could at least try them.
Also, when Temporal AA is implemented into a game, that means that generally Nvidias DLSS can be modded into it too, and its version of TAA works much better and preserves a lot more quality.
You mention that TAA covers up the corners cut by developers, which it does (and that's a large part of why those corners are cut in the first place), but the bigger question is whether it's fundamentally necessary to cut those corners in the first place. I've seen some strong arguments from graphics programmers that studios and publishers are leaning on TAA as a crutch so they don't have to bother with implementing optimizations that don't require TAA to get away with, and that optimizing games without TAA is totally feasible, allowing for a better presentation. The issue is just getting publishers and studio heads commit to that near-term investment of time and resources on the matter so their games can benefit more in the long term. Those decision makers tend to focus more on maximizing ROI in the near term, so they're not likely to be keen on the idea if they can get away with letting TAA handle the consequences of doing things the quick and easy way.
I'm quite certain those developers have never worked on graphics programming for a modern triple A project. If it was a case of laziness, why has not one single developer ever done those optimisations? Why has Epic, adding all these cutting edge features to UE5 not just also hit the 'fix graphics' button? *Every* triple A game has to be fairly well optimised to run well at all. Clearly The Last of Us was decently optimised on consoles, but with imperfect optimisation on PC at launch it ran like complete shit. Every one-person indie game that uses modern UE also inevitably run like shit compared to AAA releases too, with titles taking place in a single room not necessarily running at 60fps across the board, because the devs aren't able to properly optimise their games the way a studio can. Badly optimised games are how you end up with the Arkham Knight PC port at release. But Cyberpunk (now)? Doom Eternal? Fortnite? The Hunt: Showdown? These are all deeply optimised titles trying to squeeze as much graphical power out of their systems as possible without making it prohibitively difficult to develop a large game.
That kind of sentiment just feels like antivax sentiment. Sure you might believe that a single doctor might lie about a treatment, but essentially all doctors across the entire globe? If a lack of optimisation was the issue, you'd necessarily expect there to be some titles in the space that did have those optimisations and thus shipped without TAA while maintaining equivalent graphical parity in other areas. But they do not exist. TAA + temporal effects are absolutely an optimisation too, I think gamers forget that optimising code means making code do less 99% of the time. Not rendering the entire gameworld at once at fully detail even if you can't see it is an optimisation, but if you want to frame 'degrading the image' as a fake optimisation, then any form of level of detail or texture streaming is also that. Doing ambient occlusion as a post-process effect at a limited resolution instead of just raytracing it every frame would also be a fake optimisation. In fact just doing lighting in a shader instead of by tracing rays is again, just 'fake optimisation'. Or alternatively, you can embrace that 'downgrades' to improve performance are in fact optimisations. Just ones that come with shortcomings too.
@@GrandHighGamer You clearly didn't read my comment. I never said that AAA devs weren't optimizing their games, I never said anything about "fake optimizations" (wtf would that even be?), nor did I say that anyone was doing anything out of laziness.
Please try to read and understand what someone writes before responding to them.
@@GrandHighGamer Devs optimize their games not to run well (in some abstract fashion, although some clearly do that, que in Crystal Dynamics and Nixxes console ports), they do it to reach certain KPI which is usually formulatd as 'we need the frames to be cooked within X ms'. So if devs can use some cheat like fake frames, TAA or other techniques to reach this KPI goal and simultaneously save time they'd do it. Also, since most people don't really care about image quality or have no idea what a game might look like with non-temporal AA (as in the last 10 years TAA is what devs use to reach these KPI goals), it doesn't bother them.
@@GrandHighGamer It has been done before, what are you saying? theirs a ton of deferred rendered games with minimal aliasing and temporal independent effects. I recommend watching my video where I highlight multiple solutions, many of which are rarley ever ployed.
These are the reasons games are built around TA
1) some developers are lazy (it's not like AAA gaming is friendly, extra effort isn't expected or required, we don't get paid for working harder but for getting the job done)
2) some developers are hamstrung by the current industry standards and/or engine they're working with
3) some developers are hamstrung by leadership and their lack of knowledge on what to prioritize on a technical-level, and/or
4) some of these things are technically doable and known by all involved, but are ultimately cost/scope prohibitive within the given project, and thus are deprioritized for more profitable endeavors (I.E. lower hanging fruit).
Thank you, I appreciate you pointing out this. When this video mentioned that Halo Infinite without TAA looks rough, I thought that it's a fault of the developers, or their higher ups, who make games with TAA in mind, and therefore making it forced, rather than making proper fundamentally solid graphics, that would look well with various settings, and not be so dependent on one that has such an overkill efficiency that may not please everyone
It's hard to outright dismiss either option here, because TAA is a blurry mess and no AA is a pixelated nightmare. I think the best thing to do is simply also include more demanding yet more accurate AA methods like MSAA or SSAA. In a few years, an average gaming PC will be able to handle the more expensive methods, and that will be the definitive way to play the game. The best thing to do is always just provide a plethora of options.
MSAA either does not work well, or cannot be implemented with how most games are doing rendering nowadays. Technical limitation.
SSAA is just rendering the game at a higher resolution.
I am personally a fan of SMAA, in most games that supports it, it looks good.
@@Ozzianman MSAA is geometry only, isn't it? Shader shimmer and transparency shimmer will still be there.
MSAA doesn't work well at all in modern deferred rendered games. It's a big reason why the industry shifted away from it with the 8th console generation. Back in the 7th gen, you had hardware MSAA in the Xbox 360 and it legitimately looks great in games that used it, but you can't really use MSAA in a modern game with good results, see Red Dead Redemption 2 on PC for an example.
Most games these days have an SSAA slider. The problem is that SSAA or MSAA will not fix moving aliasing in motion. You need temporal frame blending regardless of SSAA and MSAA is what I'm trying to say. BUT it doesn't and never needed to be so blurry in the first place, the amount of TAA blur can be adjusted by the devs.
@@astrea555Supersampling can also counteract blurriness caused by TAA.
Last and current gen Ubisoft titles are easy to do it with it's 0-200% resolution scalers.
DLAA is also useful and seems to be a standard to implement it now.
That detail of the pilot getting bored if you idle during the tutorial is pretty funny
The problem with the TAA is that the assets and textures of the game are created in such a way that they accommodate the use of the TAA, things like: shadows, post-processing, hair, grass, etc. This means that when you remove the TAA the game looks terrible👎 . And adding that, this antialiasing method looks bad/blurred when you are moving🏃 in the game. The problem I have is that often developers don't give the user other options like: MSAA, SSAA, FXAA and others.🤔
In another game called Ground Branch, TAA makes picture-in-picture rendering of magnified optics look really smuggy and mutes glowing elements too (sparks from bullet impacts, red dot sights especially under NVGs at full reticule brightness).
Cyberpunk 2077 also has forced TAA that when disabled, also causes other issues such as global shadows showing light seaping through seams in the world as if the map was stitched together like a quilt, and distant objects sometimes getting "fizzed out" by artifacting making scenic vistas kinda hard to enjoy.
Devs really need to give us different AA methods or perhaps not make a game that would be heavilly reliant on AA for its visuals.
this is exactly why i try to turn off AA or TAA in any game i play, even if the game itself looks a little worse. its that loss of information, and for me, someone who tries to get every piece of information off my screen as much as i can, its a huge difference. Titanfall 2 in particular really benefited me from having the TAA turned off, i was able to spot pilots much more easily and from farther away as well. and with some TAA in some games, it can cause a little bit of motion blur if you move your aim a little too fast. and for someone who plays on a really high sense like myself, its almost immediatly noticable.
Sprint is my go-to drink when I get my Big Kahunah Burger.
At 4K resolutions I don't even get why TAA is used. 4K is the equivalent is of Super Sampling AA for 1080p. And super sampling is the better looking AA method. Quite heavy though
Even in 4k, the game has minor aliasing issues. TAA just cleans it up for 4k and looks polished by that point.
Because everything in modern games is undersampled or built to work with taa exclusively.
Some game engines are really bad about this. The RE engine has terrible specular flickering that absolutely does not get fixed at a native 4k.
Supersampling requires the game to render at a resolution higher than the display. Playing a game at 4k won't get rid of aliasing on a 4k display. TAA is usually the best anti aliasing method when it comes to getting rid of aliasing but a poor implementation can be extremely detrimental to the image like it is in halo infinite.
Having tried 4k without TAA myself, it just... doesn't work out as well as you'd hope. Deferred rendering plus highly detailed images = loads of aliasing and other issues regardless of resolution. Plus, at 4k, TAA has way more to work with and isn't nearly as awful.
It's like everyone forgot MSAA was invented over 2 decades ago for this reason. Deferred rendering fucked that all up. We traded having clear rendering for having hundreds of lights on screen, when on average you'll only have a couple.
It wasn’t just having hundreds of lights on screen. There were multiple reasons that deferred rendering became the norm as more advanced materials and lighting models became taxing on performance.
MSAA, while nice, is just not realistic unless console gamers are willing to drop their 4K, 60+ fps games.
@@LateNightHalo Deferred rendering also aligns with Hollywood CGI which means they could both open up a new market with compatible workflows and utilize the pool of research already paid for by that industry.
@@LateNightHalo I'm more convinced deferred became popular because its convenient, not because its the right tool for the job.
Most deferred effects can be achieved in forward. Newer variations such as Tiled/Clustered Forward Rendering (Doom, MW2019, Unity HDRP), can handle hundreds of lights with similar costs as deferred. Meanwhile, there is *a lot* that deferred throws a wrench in. Transparency isn't possible, you either have to render afterward in forward, *or do that pixelated dithered hair mess you often see*. It makes stylized rendering or special one-off effects very difficult, as it very much wants you to use a unified lighting model on the entire screen. Its performance cost scales poorly with resolution, as there are usually 2-4 fullscreen sized GBuffer images in the background also being rendered. This also means its expensive to render things like mirrors, portals, or extra cameras, as they add a lot of pixels to be shaded and stored in VRAM. Its particularly taxing on GPU memory bandwidth. Its also another contributor to having to render at lower than native resolution and upscaling.
We honestly don't deserve Halo video content this stylish and polished. I'm really glad you're still making stuff.
I remember I complained about this "blurriness" when games started to implement this but I always got gaslighted into thinking that I was becoming blind and that I needed glasses.
I then played older games and MCC and everything was crystal clear on my screen.
Personally I think playing with TAA feels like I'm playing in a dream, nothing looks like I'm watching a real image.
Instead of focusing on supersampling they focused on crappy temporal technics and upscaling only to add "subsurface scattering" to the games.
Ok, hear me out, im not a game dev or anything, but, what if there was a way to have "configurable" TAA sample counts, and that those values could be game specific.
For example, the game dev, or even better, the player through a menu, could adjust how many past frames TAA is allowed to pull from. This would allow fine tuning of how much ghosting and/or detail loss there is per TAA pass, right?
Any game devs or modders, feel free to chime in, but i have a feeling this might not be the worst idea ever...
It gives me a minor headache and makes my 1440p screen look like trash. Meanwhile Mario Kart Wii online looks amazing despite being 480p. I don't dislike TAA at all hut Halo Infinite's TAA implementation isn't great. I understand the game was built around it but want the option
The root of the problem is deferred rendering. Forward rendered? Doesn't look too awful without AA (comparatively). Deferred rendering is the "render some things worse" bit and I'd gladly take less detailed games over the current magic tricks being used.
TAA is possibly the worst option for anti-aliasing and Infinite's implementation of it specifically is overly aggressive. Honestly, the best thing that could happen to this game is if they add support for MSAA, SSAA or god forbid DLSS and its equivalents.
For consoles, they might be stuck with TAA because this game has to somehow run acceptably on base Xbox Ones, but PC should be given more options than we have. But there's definitely a conversation to have about how developers have been shoving so much extraneous detail into their games that we need all of these perfunctory tools just to help them run decently.
I've been playing some older 7th gen titles on PC recently and I have to say, while the detail can be a bit lacking, I *miss* having the kind of picture quality we used to have. These games that run at fully native resolution with zero upscaling, fully maxed out graphics options running at triple-digit framerates these days, yes obviously you can point to the lower fidelity of most of the assets, lower poly counts, less detailed textures, a lack of expensive lighting effects, etc. But the image is just so *clean* and even older anti-aliasing solutions do their jobs better because they weren't given such impossibly detailed frames to figure out.
When you take all that and apply it to a game with solid art direction that holds up, I've been replaying Darksiders for instance, damn, I kinda prefer this to what we've been doing recently.
My first time watching a video from your channel. Learned a bunch and really enjoyed the way you laid it out.
Glad to hear it!
Dude I’m loving your more in depth look into behind the scenes kind of issues, I’m someone who loves to hear the story behind the story and you bringing up things I wouldn’t notice on my own is so cool! Your videos are also super engaging and funny, and is just enthralling and educational entertainment. Keep up the good work!
1:00 What a fantastic thing I can use to show people. I Actually PREFER this over AA. I love seeing the crisp raw pixels on my 4K TV. I'll take crispy pixels over blurry smoothed pixels anyday
This is where developers need to give us the option to turn TAA off and then up the resolution of detail objects like hair and grass after it's been turned off on PC.
I'm someone who despises TAA, with a passion. I would much rather brute force AA by super sampling the image along with some slight blur to clean it up, performance be damned.
I'd rather run a a game at 30 FPS with a clean image than 60 with a blurred image that's lost detail and smears on the slightest movement.
Sprite is Like the default soda or the starting weapon to a game, it’s great start for soda but over time your taste for sugary drinks can become more refined.
Ok, but here is something strange. If the game was made WITH TAA IN MIND, why are the effects affected by it ? I mean if you make the game and you use TAA to test things, you would probably notice that the effects you worked on look so different
The ability to turn off the TAA and run the optimized effects at higher resolutions and all the way back up to native really should be more available on modern PC games, but should always be options and marked as high performance cost.
Halo infinite doesn't really run much, if anything, at a sub native resolution. It's shimmer usually comes from poor mipmaps and sub pixel detail.
Hair is the only exception, which is dithered, still not half res.
Biggest reason this has been an issue is that a lot of the industry has switch from forward rendering to deferred rendering which MSAA doesn’t work well with as deferred rendering draws everything at once for performance gain instead of overdrawing triangles.
No one has really come up with a good fix all algorithm for the issue.
It’s different for each game since the order and specifics of when each render-pass is drawn can have a big affect on visuals.
Like for example you’ll run into issues where you could draw the render passes in a way where you have really good anti-aliasing but it comes at the expense of having UI reflect off the water but then if you change the order around you could have really bad anti-aliasing for the water but it means no UI reflects off the water.
It’s sometimes a lesser of two issues.
It becomes a “Can’t have your cake and eat it to” type situation.
Sometimes if you try having both it can tank performance depending on the render api used.
Something I noticed is that the TAA tends to look the worst when sprinting. Turns out the cause was screen shake and turning that off significantly reduced the blurriness. I'm guessing it's because TAA has a lot more to smooth over due to the difference in each frame introduced by the shaking.
Halo infinite’s screen shake is also bugged I believe. Something about it doesn’t play correctly.
It feels like some frames are missing from the shake so it will “skip” every now and then.
It looks pretty bad which is sad because Halo 5 had a really good implementation of screen shake
@@LateNightHaloThere are a bunch of visual effects and stuff broken in infinite that they just refuse to fix, just spreading the word, Halo Infinite has no material response or visual effect for the needler specifically hitting vehicles, it just vanishes unlike every other game that has it pop or stick.
TAA reduces aliasing very well with little performance cost... but that 1440p image? Yeah it's more like 1080p or less, especially in the distance. Nowadays I just lower my graphic settings for most games and super sample the best my 8GB VRAM can handle :')
Which is weird to think that Infinite has upscaling capability built-in yet no option to toggle anti-aliasing. Also weird that MCC got FSR but Infinite has neither FSR or DLSS.
Edit: wow can't believe how many details are straight up cut out because of TAA. It's much worse than just blurriness...
Yeah no fsr or dlss in infinite was odd to see.
MCC's FSR is broken for Halo 2 Anniversary, the pre-rendered cutscene is shifted to the left in like a weird off-centre letterbox, works fine on consoles like the Series X though, MCC is full of issues, so is infinite and they just refuse to fix any of it.
I have a 1440p monitor, and I quite literally run the game at maxed out super sampling just so that I can see details in the game without feeling like I forgot to put my glasses on.
And even then, in motion, the game is sickeningly blurry. Genuinely, fuck TAA. I cannot wait until this trend dies.
the issues I have with TAA are similar to the problems I have with AI upscaling, if it turns the game into a blurry and smeary mess why should I bother with turning that setting on? I would rather just let it be a little pixely, but if you are just looking for the best looking image quality performance be damned, super sampling is obviously the best option.
Unfortunately game developers seem to be removing other options and using TAA as a crutch to hide rather terrible graphical blunders, rather than making the game without TAA as a requirement and using it as additional option for players.
I have a hard time believing that most people would choose to use TAA over other Anti-Aliasing options even if they are a bit harder on performance.
This is exactly the thing I DESPISE about "modern" "photoreal" videogame "graphics" - using more development effort and more hardware resources to ultimately make the game actually look WORSE and still be horribly unoptimized.
All of these *"cutting edge shaders"* that makes dithering on everything, and fake shortcuts like "screenspace reflections" that look worse than some games we had in 2004...
It really seems sometimes like the actual people making the graphical shaders & the art design have completely lost the talent and artistry that previous generations of developers had. Like, go and learn OpenGL 3.0 first -then you can start playing with the multi billion dollar supercomputer...
It also helped our old CRT Tv's and CRT monitors had built in anti-aliasing. I have a 32 inch Sony Trinitron sitting next to me, and older games look so amazing on it, even through composite OR component cable.
The reliance of TAA and DLSS is really bad in modern gaming, like Space Marine 2 has no sharpening filter to help with its anti-aliasing when you turn on DLSS to get higher framerates, since that game is so badly optimized.
The problem begins when a video game offers ONLY TAA as Anti-aliasing. We need to get options, not just one that looks good at lower resolutions but bad at higher.
I miss MSAA.
deferred rendering for every game was a mistake.
Yeah, it's very expensive, but MSAA X8 is glorious on Forza Horizon 5
Source Engine games had MSAA X16Q, never knew what the Q ment, but I never seen anything reach it's level, the choices were no AA, FXAA, MSAA X2, X4, X4Q, X8, X8Q, X16Q.
The real villain were the ants
Those damned ants
I find it frustrating when developers don't give you the option to choose between different types of anti-aliasing.
Thanks for a good solid informative video with the good general message for developers in the end. I would like for you try to make videos other games, maybe something more appealing to greater audience
Great suggestion!
TAA makes basically everything look bad. I'd genuinely take jaggies over vasoline smear-o-vision.
One thing I sorta wish you tried was a rendering the game at a higher than native resolution with TAA disabled to show how the game could look. Some of the older AA options like SSAA or MSAA largely achieved the anti-aliasing approach by rendering the image (or parts of it) at a higher than native resolution, then downscaling. The resulting image often looks much better than native, but at a significant performance cost.
The only good "TAA bad, modern games blurry" video essay. You actually understand the nuances.
@@bananaboy482 I've seen other good ones, but this one is excellent too!
Hopefully they add more AA options, maybe something simple like SMAA similar to MCC, but they could hypothetically add more options such as MSAA if they ever decide to.
I go absolutely feral when late night gaming post.
I can confirm I'm in the group that asked "What TAA?"
This explains so much! I've always wondered why the graphics felt so bad even though everything is high resolution. Playing the campaign, I've noticed that grassy forrest areas look too smooth and too soft while forerunner architecture looks clear. I think this is because of the TAA! I'm thinking it's because outdoor areas have a lot of individual details like grass and gravel that get overlooked while the forerunner buildings were already smooth to begin with
Wondering if a second pass after TAA to re-draw details and particle effects specifically would help preserve detail without turning it off entirely and dealing with shimmery, crawly aliasing artifacts. It would add to development time, with artists having to designate what ignores TAA and what doesn't, but could potentially be a good solution with the right art direction.
The evolution videos are still my favorite but these technical videos are also very neat and interesting
It’s been a problem across multiple games. Especially games in the unreal engine. You end up getting a lot of ghosting effects.
What they could’ve done with halo infinite is have a renderpass after TAA for particle effects so they don’t get filtered out by TAA but I’m not sure if that would’ve tanked performance.
I tried the mod a while back. While it looked great at 100% internal resolution, I actually decided to keep TAA so I can run the internal as low as I want without much impact.
TAA in Halo Infinite looks pretty bad but TAA does have it's uses.
Edit: I'm very glad that the video was more nuanced. I was kinda scared it would blindly hate on TAA...
TAA much like AI speeds up development and improves workflow efficiency, but it doesn't nessacarily increase quality like it should.
What I mean by this is that aliasing mitigation use to be a process of game development, but because TAA is so effective it bypasses that step entirely speeding up game development slightly.
As a result we're in a catch 22 situation where games look bad without TAA, but they only look bad without TAA BECAUSE TAA exist. If TAA didn't exist, games like Halo Infinite wouldn't be as aliased as it currently is without TAA, so you'd be able to enjoy a clear image without insufferable pixel crawl, but it might cost Microsoft an extra month or couple grand in development costs.
So I sort of agree with what you're saying, but its complicated. Anytime theirs bad pixel crawl thus TAA looks superior (a nessacary evil) I also see poorly authored materials, bad mip-maps, and awful overdraw which all create unnecessary aliasing that's easily avoidable because developers aren't even trying to reduce it at all, since you're not suppose to see the image without TAA on to begin with.
So its not exactly fair to compare no TAA vs TAA on a game that was built around using it, because in those games developers aren't even taking the most basic steps in aliasing mitigation, which causes the illusition that TAA was nessacary to begin with.
Nah, fuck TAA, that shit gives me migraines within minutes of playing, modern gaming is trash because of this crap.
Yea it's a cute achievement on technical level don't get me wrong - but I like being able to SEE the videogame I'm playing.
Love these kinds of videos; even though I don’t want to go into game design (I’m already heading into psychology) they do teach me about the techniques and efforts behind games, like the BTS features of a movie.
Sometimes FSR, XeSS, TSR, (and DLSS), generate better results than TAA, depending on the game content, and how they are fine tunned, those should be optional in most games
Agreed, you can even downscale from higher resolutions to a lower-resolution monitor, then use upscaling like FSR to pull performance back. Still looks better.
That's why i use TSR whenever possible. TSR can be used for almost all Unreal Engine 4 Games. Other Engines must have it implemented.
That resolves almost all ghosting and doesn't remove so much detail. It's not DLSS quality, but it's better than TAA.
This is why I'm glad reshade and forced selections in nvidia profile inspector exist. Thankfully at 1440p and with the right pixel density on screen, aliasing/shimmering is hard to notice depending on the game.
I also very much love sprite 👀
Will happily turn off anti aliasing and motion blur any day of the week. A "simpler" or "outdated" looking game is always more enjoyable than a game with so much rubbish happening to the screen you get sick (see crysis 3)
It's really a fundamental flaw in the game honestly. We've had games giving us different versions of AA for ages now, but only recently have devs seemingly decided to try to force everyone onto the "modern" solutions which in most cases serve as incredibly obvious double edged swords. I will never understand it, and I dread the day we start getting games with framegen forcefully applied.
Infinite should have been updated to use DLSS/DLAA on PC.
thank the lord i can now see the random sign in the background, now everything else looks crappy
Sprite is a refreshing and zesty lemon-lime soda that has long been a favorite for its crisp flavor and effervescence, making it a perfect companion for hot days and social gatherings. Its balance of sweetness and citrus tang offers a delightful taste that many people enjoy. On the other hand, Sprite Zero, while marketed as a calorie-free alternative, often falls short for some consumers who miss the full-bodied taste and sweetness of the original. The artificial sweeteners used can give it a different aftertaste, which can detract from the overall enjoyment that comes with the classic Sprite experience.
12:22
Funny you should say "let us dip our toes into the sprite."
One of the words for pixel art used in games is actually sprite.
(If that was intentional or not, you made me chuckle all the same. 😆)
Really wish they would implement DLSS so we could use DLAA. DLAA looks pretty incredible nowadays with almost no drawback I know of.
Edit: After watching I enjoyed the video but was disappointed that you did didn't mention that there are other AA options (Like DLAA) that 343 could presumably add relatively easily.
DLAA still softens in motion and can occasionally have ghosting. Any of its issues are orders of magnitudes worse with standard TAA, but DLAA isn't perfect.
Also, infinites motion vectors are probably busted, which would explain why it's TAA is so sub par. Using the same data with DLAA would still have issues.
@@existentialselkath1264 What would you consider to be the best AA technique?
@@Epiousios18 SSAA is obviously the best, it's the ground truth, but obviously not always practical (though it is in Halo Infinite on newer systems).
MSAA is best if your game can be forward rendered, though that's got severe limitations.
SMAA can work well if MSAA is impossible, like deferred renderers, as long as mipmaps and LODs are carefully used, dithered transparencies are avoided for blended and masked effects instead, etc.
DLAA is the catch all for games that dont fit any of the above, which is a lot of games, but it's quality compared to the other techniques at their best is still quite far behind. It's always better than standard TAA unless something is broken though (ahem, Forza).
@@existentialselkath1264 appreciate it the response, I’m still learning the real ins and outs of this stuff.
@@existentialselkath1264 Also, If I run Infinite at Natie 4k (or a little above that), should I turn the TAA setting on Low or keep it on high?
This video transports me back to 2017...
Sprite is pretty solid as a soda. No caffeine opens its hours of accessibility, and lets people with medical conditions drink it. Though it can also cause heartburn, so that sort of sucks.
Thank you for breaking down AA. I've never fully understood it.
A major issue of TAA is that it only resolves well at higher resolutions, which wouldn't be as much of an issue if we ever got a killer budget 4k GPU, but year after year as the hardware improves the optimization lowers pushing that high refresh 4k bar further and further away. I upgrade GPUs about every 3 years or so but I've never felt like it was necessary or even a good idea to upgrade my monitor. As a result, many games, especially third party UE5 titles, suffer from an extreme amount of blur that makes them look worse than games from several years ago.
13 minute video about TAA? uh yes please!
Bro, the next-generation Halo is going to look amazing!
The next-generation of Halo:
Don't forget the worst part, since TAA is always blending previous frames with the current one, its essentially motion blur that you _cannot_ disable! Not having an option for disabling TAA is a crime against gamers >:(
I'd also like to express my anger towards upscaling methods, like TAAU, FSR, XeSS, and especially DLSS for being a similar crutch AAA developers have come to rely on these days. There are plenty of games that look great and run great without relying on TAA or upscaling. It IS possible for a dev to optimize their game - it just takes time, and talent (which costs money, obviously).
The fact of the matter is though, when you are targeting a console audience, they don't care about any of this, they won't even notice any of this. So the companies have no real reason to care I guess
TAA and SSR (screen space reflections, where objects in the foreground bleed into reflective surfaces on the background, and where reflections completely disappeare if you look at a surface the wrong way) are such annoying technologies, it bothers me to no end these things became industry standard.
A reason why sparks and thin glowy details get lost in TAA fuzzyness is that their slipspace game engine converts the output picture in a sdr colorspace before and not after applying TAA. Explosions are just as bright as white paint. TAA constantly offsets, or jitters the raw picture in a 2x2 pixel grid to counter the checkerboard dithering and reference subpixel detail. In a real hdr colorspace, those bright objects would have been more visible and likely to survive the TAA treatment.
I'm glad their artists can finally shine with a Halo using UE5
I really miss MSAA. In every game it appeared in I always felt it worked incredibly well despite the high computational cost.
I actually never noticed it, and for a long time I really liked TAA when it first appeared.
FXAA I hated because it made the picture blurry, and MSAA had too much influence on the FPS
Therefore, TAA, which always had the option to enable sharpening, did not look so bad when turned on
But recently, after a break from gaming, I downloaded two games, Squad and Arma Reforged. And I noticed that Squad, which uses TAA, looks just awful. As if I was playing in 720p instead of 2K.
That's how I came across this video in search of an answer
Idk why I was expecting some reshade tweaks now that you could disable taa, but amazing video, I agree that Halo infinite has this weird look where it can be gorgeous but also flat
Sprite is good, but I remember Sierra Mist. I miss that bubbly drink :3
In my case, I have a relatively cheap PC, and whenever I move around the entire game has this horrendous blurry effect to it. Once you stop it goes away, but the moment you're on the move again, it comes back and I've been having a straight up breakdown over it. lmao
"Let us dip our toes in the sprite" is not a sentence I thought I'd hear today lmao
I think modern games depends a lot on light and 3d stuff. When they were faking everything with beautiful paint textures that gave the appearence of 3d most things look amazing. Thinking about those perfect forerunner structures pillars in halo 3.
The game doesn't even rely on TAA to reconstruct anything (effects like SSR have reconstruction built in), yet the games TAA is the worst in the industry.
Modding TAA out and using reshade SMAA is a vastly superior experience. Personally, I set my resolution scaling to 200% and use the minimum framerate option to always get the cleanest possible image at my fps target. Rarely notice shimmer outside the menus.
The only remaining issues are that mipmaps on foliage get too low resolution at a distance, and the game doesn't correctly tonemap overexposed colors.
It's clear that 343 does not have the coding talent that og bungie did. They should've just used unreal like everyone else
@@alanlee67 Unreal is even more reliant on temporal effects and TAA, especially now with UE5
@@alanlee67 it's not the talent at all. It's the fact that the majority of the programmers were likely contractors that got cycled through every 18 months. You don't have the time to see any systems through to completion like that and any institutional knowledge is lost. The same happened with Turn 10 and Forza Motorsport.
Using unreal is better for contractors because everyone already knows how to use it, and contractors are a terrible method of developing an engine, but it's not as good an option as a dedicated engine made by a core dev team.
Yeah they need to get their heads out of their asses and hire actually career employees. Yes they are more expensive, but they will become more efficient over time, and produce better work.
@@aboveaveragebayleaf9216 it seems like a Microsoft wide policy, I just hope few games continue to suffer before they change it.
Give the option to render the hair, shadows etc. at full resolution rather than checkerboarded. Then you can disable TAA and inject something less intrusive like SMAA.
Total War Three Kingdoms was the game that taught me to hate TAA. It was more or less fine on the campaign map, but in the battles with thousands of small moving objects on screen at once? Whole armies became impressionist paintings. You could turn it off, but then the shadows stopped working and the vegetation became alias central.
And this came out shortly after TW Warhammer 2, where I was able to use MSAA and it looked great. But no option for that in 3K.
This can lead into a bigger discussion about image quality in video games overall. I have always thought Halo infinite has an issue with overall image clarity.
Interesting discussion. I know that some implementations of AA can make things worse, but I didn't know that they could design the graphics to make use of it to make things look better. That some things will look worse with it on tells me that more work needs to be done on the algorithm. Perhaps if they marked particles that shouldn't be affected by the AA algorithm in use, they could get the best of both worlds.
sprite really benefits from being watered down with ice, otherwise it just ends up being sugary syrup-y slop. Best sprite I ever had was from chipotle, Like the lemon and lime flavor actually popped, and I have never got that experience anywhere else.
MSAA is an option people. I swear every time TAA is brought up it's like, oh no, do we have it on or off. And people completely forget about all the other anti aliasing. Just mod in and use MSAA.