Xbox anti aliasing

And this doesn't have to turn into a 30fps vs 60fps war, it is a discussion about xbox AA... as far as I'm concerned, using various games as reference. Sheesh :)
 
Its funny how halo 3 has went the way of the pgr series with copius amounts of aa slapped on in the screenshots (maybe replays as well) but not ingame.

Does get pretty annoying though, you'd think the flagship title would definately have it but nope.
 
To be fair to H3.. the scale the levels are on and the texture quality.. it is still a graphical feast for the eyes.
 
gord said:
To be fair to H3.. the scale the levels are on and the texture quality.. it is still a graphical feast for the eyes.
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You'd be surpsied at how any people ive seen saying some of the textures in the game look like they were lifted out of halo 1. Still waiting on my copy ariving. :mad:
 
Heatsinked said:
Excuse me, but what the hell was that for? I said I enjoyed that part of the level and asked if what you said was a known fact, that is all! I haven't owned an xbox for long and don't know what it should be capable of, is capable of, if AA is standard in all games etc. I am learning. Your response was unessessary and did not provide any useful information, unlike your first reply.
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Your response came off as hostile - I took it wrong, and I apologize for answering in so. It's all anecdotal talk of the AA, but a lot of the people who are saying it has no AA are gamers who run PC systems at varying graphical levels - I can tell the difference between 0xAA, 2xAA and 4xAA with a fair amount of confidence, and on my 32" HDTV it is quite clear that there is no anti-aliasing applied.
 
lowrider007 said:
So how many FPS does Halo 3 run at then ?, it feels very smooth, even when theres lots of enemys on screen.
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As far as I know it runs the standard 2xAA, which for the style and type of game (a fast paced FPS) is more than enough.

^---- which don changed that and made me look a twonk?

As I was saying before somebody changed the post, I think it runs at 30FPS.
 
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Gerard said:
The standard for 360 games was meant to be 4x though because of the edram on the xenos.
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I think this is where the confusion lies.

As far as I knew, the 4x was at 720 but the 2x was at higher. I may be wrong as I'm no hardware expert but I seem to remember some confusion with various developers about this. The AA is, as you said, built into the DRAM but you can't have MAX resolution and MAX AA. There has to be some cost.

*edit* Yes I am right. At E3 2005 and various press releases before it, Microsoft stated that the GPU would offer 4x AA and that was a minimum. Towards the launch they said the developers could flip between 2x and 4x at 720. So whilst perhaps not a "standard" in the right sense of the word, the minimum amount is 2xAA for ANY game.
 
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want to see what no AA looks like, look no further than the darkness on the PS3 :(

although at a lot of resolutions on some screens the 2xAA just doesn't cut it. Forza 2 looks rough on my Dell 2005fpw
 
Want to see 4xAA, check out Condemned on the 360.

The AA issue is a weird one. I have only just moved to Component with my launch day 360 and AA is really noticeable on titles that previously displayed no jaggies via VGA Expanded.

Gears on VGA had no jaggies and Dummy Dom/Marcus were smooth, yet upon moving to component I can see jaggies. Ditto for quite a few titles of mine.

Forza's AA looks poor because of the lighting system they're running. It shows up jaggies really bad and to me I feel the game was rushed out prematurely.

As for the 360's 'Free' AA, the game engine has to be written from scratch to support it. Right now only a few exclusive games have done this, whilst most games don't because its easier to port the engine across to another platform...y helo thar PS3 Darkness.

Condemned, Kameo, Dead Rising are all exclusive examples of games where jaggies should not be apparent. I know I can't see them over Component let alone VGA. MS have given the devs the hardware for quality non jaggy gaming but its just not being used to that effect yet.
 
^--- what you've pointed out though is EXACTLY what should be happening.

As you know, the idea behind AA is to, in very basic terms, smooth a line by adding additional pixels of different shades to make the 'line' more smooth. It works, it's a wonderful thing of modern computer graphics.

But add something like component or even HDMI which increases the clarity of the image and all that hard work, all those millions of computations on a GPU simply go to waste because you're wonderful console with it's wonderful new fandangly cable is simply making the image more clear, which is gonna highlight those AA pixels even more!

It's an area in consoles that at the moment there is just NO clear winner.

*edit*

And Kainz is also corrent about the developers rewriting their own graphics routines. Give the developers a new console, they'll work wonders with it. Then they'll go away and learn how to 'better' things. I can guarantee that, PGR4 as an example, will use the GPU to perform some graphics calculations like shadows, lights, reflections etc and some of this 'power' will have been nabbed from the section that deals with the AA to speed things up because the developers have found tricks, hacks, or their own algo's which can do what they want, how they want it.
 
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What gets me about halo 3 is the lack of AF, the game's got all these lovely textures that you can't see unless they're 2 feet from your point of view.

But overall I do think they did a decent job on the visuals when you consider the large outdoor areas and lots of onscreen action that takes place.

PC IQ just has us spoiled :p
 
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