{"id":31233,"date":"2012-08-08T07:41:16","date_gmt":"2012-08-08T06:41:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/alienbabeltech.com\/main\/?p=31233"},"modified":"2012-08-08T15:49:06","modified_gmt":"2012-08-08T14:49:06","slug":"fxaa-and-txaa-compared-in-the-secret-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/alienbabeltech.com\/main\/fxaa-and-txaa-compared-in-the-secret-world\/","title":{"rendered":"FXAA and TXAA compared in The Secret World"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"text-align: center;\" align=\"center\"><script type=\"text\/javascript\">\/\/ <![CDATA[\n                                        google_ad_client = \"pub-7021221536180758\"; \/* 468x60, created 11\/11\/09 *\/ google_ad_slot = \"1949837292\"; google_ad_width = 468; google_ad_height = 60;\n\/\/ ]]><\/script><\/p>\n<p><em>The Secret World<\/em> is the latest MMO from Funcom and it is proving to be an excellent game.\u00a0 It reminds this editor of what <em>Hellgate: London<\/em> should have been.\u00a0 <em>The Secret\u00a0World<\/em> is huge and there are hundreds of ways to develop your character.\u00a0 <em>TSW<\/em> is engrossing, large, varied, and professionally done.\u00a0 It is much better than the <em>Age of Conan <\/em>as it appears that the developers\u00a0learned from it.\u00a0 Also <em>TSW<\/em> takes the best elements of all the current MMOs and melds them into something that so far, is really fun to play.\u00a0\u00a0 It is also an extraordinarily good-looking DX11 game that uses tessellation with displacement mapping, Ambient Occlusion, 3D Vision technology, and more, including new methods of anti-alising.<\/p>\n<p><em>The Secret World<\/em>\u00a0aas become\u00a0an ABT benchmark.\u00a0 It is ground-breaking in that it also includes two anti-aliasing technologies developed by\u00a0Nvidia to enhance the game&#8217;s visuals, one of which is brand new.\u00a0 Today, <em>The Secret World<\/em> got a new patch that enables TXAA &#8211; or Temporal Anti-Aliasing &#8211; for Kepler GeForce cards, and we spent the better part of the day testing it out.<\/p>\n<p>In this short evaluation\u00a0at 2560&#215;1600 resolution, we are going to compare no AA versus FXAA (regular\u00a0and HQ)\u00a0versus TXAA (2x and 4X),\u00a0and the performance hit each mode incurs with a stock GTX 680 and a\u00a0GTX 690 running on a Core i7-3770K at 4.8GHz and 8GB of DDR3 at 1867MHz on a EVGA Z77 FTW motherboard.\u00a0 We are using the GeForce Beta driver 304.79 and using the drop-down box in-game to change the AA settings.<\/p>\n<p><strong>FXAA<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>FXAA technology is a post-processing technique that harnesses the power of the GPU to reduce visible aliasing. It is applied along with other post processing steps like motion blur and bloom. For game engines like <em>The Secret World<\/em> that make use of deferred shading, FXAA provides a performance and memory advantage over deferred shading with multi-sample anti-aliasing (MSAA). Nvidia&#8217;s FXAA was first implemented in games last year beginning with Ag<em>e of Conan<\/em>. Since then, FXAA has shipped in 15 additional titles. FXAA is a good solution at any performance level to enhance the visual quality of <em>The Secret World<\/em> experience\u00a0as it takes only\u00a0a minor performance penalty.<\/p>\n<p align=\"LEFT\"><strong>TXAA<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Nvidia&#8217;s TXAA is a new film-style anti-aliasing technique designed specifically to reduce temporal aliasing (crawling and flickering in motion) through a combination of hardware AA, custom CG film style AA resolve, and a temporal filter.\u00a0 We are getting our first look at it today in any game.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><strong>SCREENSHOTS<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>First up is a scene with <strong>no Anti-alaising<\/strong> applied.\u00a0 You can see jagged edges and with the camera\u00a0in motion there is a lot of shimmering.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter  wp-image-31238\" title=\"FXTX-NONE\" src=\"http:\/\/i0.wp.com\/alienbabeltech.com\/main\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/08\/FXTX-NONE.jpg?resize=553%2C346\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"http:\/\/i0.wp.com\/alienbabeltech.com\/main\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/08\/FXTX-NONE.jpg?resize=553%2C346 2560w, http:\/\/alienbabeltech.com\/main\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/08\/FXTX-NONE-300x187.jpg 300w, http:\/\/alienbabeltech.com\/main\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/08\/FXTX-NONE-1024x640.jpg 1024w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 553px) 100vw, 553px\" data-recalc-dims=\"1\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Next is <strong>FXAA is\u00a0applied<\/strong>\u00a0to the same scene and the jagged edges are less obvious.\u00a0 Performance takes a very minor hit for a cleaner look.<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter  wp-image-31236\" title=\"FX\" src=\"http:\/\/i1.wp.com\/alienbabeltech.com\/main\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/08\/FX.jpg?resize=553%2C346\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"http:\/\/i1.wp.com\/alienbabeltech.com\/main\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/08\/FX.jpg?resize=553%2C346 2560w, http:\/\/alienbabeltech.com\/main\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/08\/FX-300x187.jpg 300w, http:\/\/alienbabeltech.com\/main\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/08\/FX-1024x640.jpg 1024w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 553px) 100vw, 553px\" data-recalc-dims=\"1\" \/><\/p>\n<p>With <strong>FXHQ,<\/strong> there is a more anti-aliasing introduced and also a little more blur to the scene.\u00a0 Performance takes another miniscule hit over FXAA when HQ is enabled.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter  wp-image-31237\" title=\"FX-HQ\" src=\"http:\/\/i1.wp.com\/alienbabeltech.com\/main\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/08\/FX-HQ.jpg?resize=553%2C346\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"http:\/\/i1.wp.com\/alienbabeltech.com\/main\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/08\/FX-HQ.jpg?resize=553%2C346 2560w, http:\/\/alienbabeltech.com\/main\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/08\/FX-HQ-300x187.jpg 300w, http:\/\/alienbabeltech.com\/main\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/08\/FX-HQ-1024x640.jpg 1024w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 553px) 100vw, 553px\" data-recalc-dims=\"1\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Now we apply\u00a0<strong>2xTXAA<\/strong> and we see that aliasing is reduced further along with a change in lightening, and the scene is softer.\u00a0 What really is noticeable is that the shimmering is gone when the camera is in motion compared\u00a0with using FXAA.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter  wp-image-31235\" title=\"TX2A\" src=\"http:\/\/i0.wp.com\/alienbabeltech.com\/main\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/08\/TX2A.jpg?resize=553%2C346\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"http:\/\/i0.wp.com\/alienbabeltech.com\/main\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/08\/TX2A.jpg?resize=553%2C346 2560w, http:\/\/alienbabeltech.com\/main\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/08\/TX2A-300x187.jpg 300w, http:\/\/alienbabeltech.com\/main\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/08\/TX2A-1024x640.jpg 1024w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 553px) 100vw, 553px\" data-recalc-dims=\"1\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Finally we apply<strong> 4xTXAA<\/strong>, the maximum available in game, \u00a0and the scene softens a bit further but jagged lines are also reduced further.\u00a0 In action, however, the performance hit on a GTX 680 is too severe to play without slowdowns at 2560&#215;1600\u00a0and there is artifacting with a GTX 690 when the camera is in motion.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter  wp-image-31234\" title=\"TX4A\" src=\"http:\/\/i1.wp.com\/alienbabeltech.com\/main\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/08\/TX4A.jpg?resize=553%2C346\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"http:\/\/i1.wp.com\/alienbabeltech.com\/main\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/08\/TX4A.jpg?resize=553%2C346 2560w, http:\/\/alienbabeltech.com\/main\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/08\/TX4A-300x187.jpg 300w, http:\/\/alienbabeltech.com\/main\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/08\/TX4A-1024x640.jpg 1024w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 553px) 100vw, 553px\" data-recalc-dims=\"1\" \/><\/p>\n<p><strong>\u00a0Performance<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Looking at the performance hit from FXAA, we can see that it is minimal on either a GTX 680 or a GTX 690 over using no AA at all.\u00a0\u00a0Unfortunately, we cannot compare TXAA or FXAA\u00a0with MSAA as the\u00a0game engine\u00a0doesn&#8217;t support it.\u00a0 However, looking at the performance hit from TXAA, it is far more substantial than with FXAA\u00a0&#8211;\u00a0dropping from 48 fps with a GTX 680\u00a0down to the barely playable 37\u00a0fps with only 2xTXAA enabled.\u00a0 Of course, there will be no issues playing with\u00a0TXAA at 1920&#215;1200 or lower resolution with a GTX 680 or GTX 670.<\/p>\n<p>We see SLI scaling with a GTX 690 is decent over a GTX 680 and the game is quite playable at 53 FPS with\u00a02xTXAA, down from 83\u00a0fps with no AA at all.\u00a0 Unfortunately, we get severe artifacting with the GTX 690 and\u00a04xTXAA\u00a0that we did not see with a single GTX 680, so we assume the issues are with SLI and drivers.\u00a0 SLI does not scale quite as well with TXAA as it does without.<\/p>\n<p><strong>The Performance Penalty Chart<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-31259\" title=\"TSWcharttxaa\" src=\"http:\/\/i1.wp.com\/alienbabeltech.com\/main\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/08\/TSWcharttxaa.jpg?resize=482%2C483\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"http:\/\/i1.wp.com\/alienbabeltech.com\/main\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/08\/TSWcharttxaa.jpg?resize=482%2C483 482w, http:\/\/alienbabeltech.com\/main\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/08\/TSWcharttxaa-150x150.jpg 150w, http:\/\/alienbabeltech.com\/main\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/08\/TSWcharttxaa-300x300.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 482px) 100vw, 482px\" data-recalc-dims=\"1\" \/><\/p>\n<p><strong>The Conclusion<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>It is impossible to give a conclusion from just a few hours spent evaluating TXAA.\u00a0 And <em>the screenshots absolutely do not show the strengths of this type of AA which is mostly useful for eliminating or minimizing shimmering in motion<\/em>.\u00a0 The trade-off is a softer (or more blurred) image.\u00a0 In this editor&#8217;s opinion, the game&#8217;s immersion is better with TXAA and without the crawling textures that are very annoying whenever the camera is in motion.<\/p>\n<p>We also see TXAA extract a substantial performance penalty similar to 4xAA, but MSAA still does not usually resolve shimmering nearly\u00a0as well as TXAA does when the camera is in motion.\u00a0 We note that there are some issues with SLI and 4xTXAA and perhaps there will be further improvements\u00a0with\u00a0newer drivers.\u00a0 We will continue to evaluate TXAA and will also work on getting a TXAA video comparison published in the future.<\/p>\n<p><em>The Secret World<\/em> is an excellent-looking and innovative fun MMO, and ABT will be using it\u00a0as a benchmark and for evaluating 3D Vision 2 in the future.\u00a0 Next up is a\u00a0Z77\u00a0EVGA FTW\u00a0motherboard evaluation.\u00a0 Stay tuned, there\u00a0are lots of good evaluations, articles, and reviews\u00a0scheduled.\u00a0 News has also become a regular feature at ABT.<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\">Mark Poppin<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\">ABT Senior Editor<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Please join us in our <a href=\"http:\/\/alienbabeltech.com\/abt\/index.php\" target=\"_blank\">Forums<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Become a Fan on <a href=\"http:\/\/www.facebook.com\/pages\/AlienBabelTech\/123268467142\" onclick=\"_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'outbound-article', 'http:\/\/www.facebook.com\/pages\/AlienBabelTech\/123268467142', 'Facebook']);\" target=\"_blank\">Facebook<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Follow us on <a href=\"http:\/\/twitter.com\/alienbabeltech\" onclick=\"_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'outbound-article', 'http:\/\/twitter.com\/alienbabeltech', 'Twitter']);\" target=\"_blank\">Twitter<\/a><\/p>\n<p>For the latest updates from ABT, please <a href=\"http:\/\/alienbabeltech.com\/main\/?feed=rss2\" target=\"_blank\">join our RSS News Feed<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Join our Distributed Computing teams<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Folding@Home &#8211; Team 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and&#46;&#46;&#46;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":31259,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2533,5,4453],"tags":[5549,5550,5127,5551,5552,121,4753,5548,5128],"class_list":["post-31233","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-abt-news","category-gaming","category-software-2","tag-2xtxaa","tag-4xtxaa","tag-fxaa","tag-fxhq","tag-gtx-680-gtx-680","tag-nvidia","tag-performance-evaluation","tag-the-secret-world","tag-txaa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/alienbabeltech.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31233","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/alienbabeltech.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/alienbabeltech.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/alienbabeltech.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/alienbabeltech.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31233"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/alienbabeltech.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31233\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/alienbabeltech.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/31259"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/alienbabeltech.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31233"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/alienbabeltech.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31233"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/alienbabeltech.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31233"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}