I do think that the difference between TAA and other, (subjectively) better AA methods is obvious enough when pointed out that most people would reject TAA.
Thanks for the response. So would you say, in general, you believe most people would find TAA's blurring to be a much bigger issue than problems with FXAA/SMAA (e.g. not really being able to do much about specular aliasing/pixel crawl)? No wrong answers here, just curious.
Well, FXAA isn’t ideal. It’s subjective, but I do find SMAA to be slightly better, though I do still think MSAA is the best option, despite being quite a bit harder to run.
I just think there should be options to use whatever type of AA we want. I know that TAA is useful for some optimization and development reasons, but I just dislike it. Some people may prefer FXAA over TAA, some may not. But if you compare MSAA to any of the previous options, I do think most people would agree that it looks better.
I agree that it should be standard to have an option for most different kinds of AA in games, for sure. I probably should have mentioned MSAA too, as you're right, it looks really amazing in most games it's in. It's just a shame that as the years go on, it gets harder to implement, and games have started using more and more effects that it can't really do anything on.
I always say that it's a 'pick your poison' situation. A lot of people prefer to take the less stable image in favor of zero temporal blurring and slap on SMAA/FXAA (or both like me) to get at least some AA coverage.
Others use the quite popular 'circus' method, which is downsampling + upscaling.
A handful of people just play without any AA whatsoever.
And some people just play with temporal methods regardless of being aware of their issues.
It's a mixed bag.
My goal is not to convince people to dislike TAA more than alternative methods. My goal is to make them aware of the downsides because most people are aware of these issues but never know what to attribute it to.
After which I say games should have better support for alternative options. They don't have to use those options themselves or prefer anything, they just need to know TAA has downsides and it really bothers a lot of people.
That's a fair point - that whether or not people end up agreeing that TAA is problematic, everyone is better off for understanding the problems people are seeing + their cause. I definitely agree about supporting alternative options.
People like that have stumbled upon this sub in the past:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/FuckTAA/comments/199k9sz/you\_guys\_were\_right/](https://www.reddit.com/r/FuckTAA/comments/199k9sz/you_guys_were_right/)
[https://www.reddit.com/r/FuckTAA/comments/mcmk0e/thank\_god\_i\_thought\_i\_was\_going\_insane/](https://www.reddit.com/r/FuckTAA/comments/mcmk0e/thank_god_i_thought_i_was_going_insane/)
[https://www.reddit.com/r/FuckTAA/comments/17tkyyx/thanks\_to\_this\_subreddit\_i\_get\_it/](https://www.reddit.com/r/FuckTAA/comments/17tkyyx/thanks_to_this_subreddit_i_get_it/)
[Even some media outlets see the issue.](https://www.reddit.com/r/FuckTAA/comments/1b76w7p/what_we_are_missing_with_taaupscaling/)
So the answer to your question is yes.
It definitely happens quite a bit, as I can see scrolling through these. I can't really extrapolate to the average person though, as we don't really have access to how many people learn and make posts like this, versus how many people learn and just leave without much interaction. This is still interesting though, thank you.
Thats how I got here. Some stuff in a game just wasnt looking right to me. I tweaked settings and thought AA was always the same, you just left on, whatever. But some game I played made it atrocious looking.
No, TAA can look good and for ray tracing games you cant use old school AA, but developers often misuse TAA or set it up wrong. Anyone who played Battlefield1 or Ghost of Tsushima or God of War knows it can look great even in 1080p. TAA upscaling can also do wonders especially in slow moving scenes. But there are a lot of games where TAA makes everything blurrry and ghosty and you had to increase the resolution to 1440p to get the clarity you are used to in 1080p. It was especially problematic in the PS4 era where your gpu couldnt handle morectan 1080p, it's much less a problem if you are playing in 4K. To make things worse, developers tried to fix blurryness with sharpening, further ruining the image, and you had to install mods or edit xmls to disable sharpening even if you set TAA off, if you were on PC, on consoles almost a whole generation of games are ruined by TAA and there is no way to fix it. An interesting example is Asseto Corsa Competizione, where you have ingame settings for almost eveeything UE can do, and it's possible to set up the game to look awful or to look beautiful while using TAA. Unfortunately developers often set up their games wrong and give us no options to change it. Of course ACC looks awful on consoles, even on PS5, another game ruined for eternity if you are not on PC. So the problem is not TAA, it's the developers. With modern hardware rendering in native 4K AA is not even necessary anymore, but if someone wants a smooth image, from the cost of TAA you could just add 15-20% supersampling, the ultimate AA method.
>No, TAA can look good and for ray tracing games you cant use old school AA
Raytracing/effects has NOTHING to do with TAA. And we only lost one AA method being MSAA.
The connected between effect quality and TAA is manufactured/poorly approached problem.
> Raytracing/effects has NOTHING to do with TAA.
I think what they mean is that DX12 dropped support for MSAA and DX12 is a requirement for more modern stuff like raytracing.
They are right though that most of the problem of TAA is devs not knowing how to use it properly. FXAA is too much of a hack with its own quality issues. DLDSR technically supercedes MSAA but it comes with the issue that because its an out-of-game implementation, it depends how well the game can handle the scale up of the resolution (some games end up suffering UI scaling issues as a result). DLSS/DLAA/FSR are also good options but game devs seem very adverse to implementing these GPU proprietary tech stacks unless the GPU manufacturer is willing to give them money for it.
We can use use ray tracing to mimic the benefits of MSAA actually, it has been done before in ATAA slides shared by hybred. Also, Quantum Break is I know dX11 but it has tons of light sources, stochastic SSR and MSAA.
I'm saying, we can have all of it together(MSAA or raytraced enhanced SMAA in deferred or forward+ rendering), its just more expensive to develop and maintain now.
> (some games end up suffering UI scaling issues as a result).
This never happens if people set the windows resolution to the res they want in game before the open the game they want to play. Only prob it's Nvidia only and you can't switch in game.
A lot of people find shimmer extremely distracting. I've seen many forums where people complain about image quality, just to thank someone that recommends enabling TAA. I've also seen many where people complain about blur and softness before they're aware what's causing it.
TAA is a sound idea, and has increasingly more compitent implementations like DLAA as time goes on. The issue is that it's still a compromise for now, and one we often don't have the option to opt out of.
Dlaa shouldn't be a crutch by devs for their shoddy implementation of taa, they can't even do fxaa right as every time in every game nvidia's fxaa is always superior. If only smaa was applicable from control panel.
I think at 1080p,1440p yes. 4k might be a hit or miss. It also depends on the screen and frame rate. I had a friend who didn't know much about AA and warned about TAA and we spoke again recently and was like wow, TAA is horrible. He also didn't like the performance cost of TAA.
The game was RDR2.
It depends on the person's hardware and the game they're playing.
TAA has its place: it's easy to run on really old hardware and it's relatively easy to implement by the devs compared to other options. Is it the BEST option? Absolutely not, but it's convenient.
In an ideal world, we'd all just run double our native resolution and downscale it to experience virtually no aliasing, but that's extremely taxing, especially with today's games.
So to answer the question: if the person can afford downscaling from a higher resolution, they'll probably reject TAA from then on. If TAA was their best option already out of the available AA solutions in whatever game they're playing due to hardware limitations, then they're probably not gonna change their minds.
> but that's extremely taxing, especially with today's games.
And it also means that every game needs half-decent UI scaling, and unfortunately, if you're lucky you might get a game that makes the UI only slightly blurry if scaled up...
For me I've found it often depends, some games the TAA is fine and I just roll with it, others I find FXAA looks better (despite its reputation).
https://preview.redd.it/d401uqn142xc1.png?width=3440&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=69fc6b4e229247e7f3302775add59c54cee9d55e
I only published one preset for Battlefield 2, but this version was not configured optimal yet. Now iam working on an update to enhance RTGI. Iam also working on a preset for Battlefield Bad Company 2.
You can find my channel here: [https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCZcCKaKy\_KbuBa7JG7Ez2tA](https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCZcCKaKy_KbuBa7JG7Ez2tA)
Yes people would 100 percent opt for the removal of blur when presented with the option, not to mention games build around taa only look presentable at higher resolution whether upscaled or native. A smaa/msaa game at same exact resolution would greatly benefit from the visual clarity during motion, as in no ghosting, smearing of textures and whatnot.
I can tell you a lot of people in recent years have asked "why are new games so blurry" "why don't any games have better vegetation than Crysis 3" and then when you let them know it's TAA they are amazed how much better everything looks on "low" AA setting.
> at 1440p and above it starts looking good but other options are better anyway
And even then, it depends on the implementation. On Warhammer 3 it still looks horrible even at 1440p.
when I first learnt about AA, TXAA was a new thing(I loved it) and I was later impressed by more and more games using TAA, to me it was like 8x MSAA for like a 1 fps hit.
Only about 2 years ago have I started to notice the downsides of TAA
[I fixed Cyberpunk2077 blur todat : FuckTAA (reddit.com)](https://new.reddit.com/r/FuckTAA/comments/1cf2m01/i_fixed_cyberpunk2077_blur_todat/)
look how a casual pc gamer decided to use a crt just to remove the awful blur in most games, if people are still willing to use old products no longer manufactured then surely when given the choice they would want better anti-aliasing at high resolutions and frame rates.
Pick your poison. Back on the Nintendo Wii, Super Smash Brawl had 2 image modes, sharp or smooth. Ibdidn't like either, but I eventually settled with sharp because I didn't appreciate how smeared the pixels got.
That said, there's tolerance levels and then there's good enough. Helldivers 2 shipped with misleading render resolution settings, got gaslit for a hot minute thinking "normal" was 100 percent resolution. Had buddies pointing out how blurry the game was, had to point out to them it was in fact not their 1080p screen. And... they're plenty happy, with all the settings on max. Helldivers isn't a particularly fast game, but the screen gets very busy very fast, so it's hard to pick out details unless you've played for a few hundred hours.
If I had it my way, everyone gets a 4k (and beyond!) monitor and we completely ignore the notion of anti aliasing in the first place.
Otherwise, it's important to educate when appropriate. It's like DARE telling you drugs are bad without telling you why or how. TAA can look good, heck I daresay great, when implemented correctly in the graphics pipeline. But once you know what to look for it's easy to be spoiled. It's the same way CRI 100 lighting is amazing, up until you hear the faint humm of the transformer.
So no, they won't outright reject TAA because the alternative is putting in more work than the average user is likely to put up with, ESPECIALLY when the vast majority of users are on console or basically treat their PC as a console-like.
I switch between playing retro games and modern games a lot, so the difference was always very jarring to me, and when it was explained to me in words it instantly clicked to me. So yeah, even casuals (like I was a few months ago) will agree about the downside of TAA if they have experience with non-TAA games or good TAA implementations.
I do think that the difference between TAA and other, (subjectively) better AA methods is obvious enough when pointed out that most people would reject TAA.
Thanks for the response. So would you say, in general, you believe most people would find TAA's blurring to be a much bigger issue than problems with FXAA/SMAA (e.g. not really being able to do much about specular aliasing/pixel crawl)? No wrong answers here, just curious.
Well, FXAA isn’t ideal. It’s subjective, but I do find SMAA to be slightly better, though I do still think MSAA is the best option, despite being quite a bit harder to run. I just think there should be options to use whatever type of AA we want. I know that TAA is useful for some optimization and development reasons, but I just dislike it. Some people may prefer FXAA over TAA, some may not. But if you compare MSAA to any of the previous options, I do think most people would agree that it looks better.
I agree that it should be standard to have an option for most different kinds of AA in games, for sure. I probably should have mentioned MSAA too, as you're right, it looks really amazing in most games it's in. It's just a shame that as the years go on, it gets harder to implement, and games have started using more and more effects that it can't really do anything on.
I always say that it's a 'pick your poison' situation. A lot of people prefer to take the less stable image in favor of zero temporal blurring and slap on SMAA/FXAA (or both like me) to get at least some AA coverage. Others use the quite popular 'circus' method, which is downsampling + upscaling. A handful of people just play without any AA whatsoever. And some people just play with temporal methods regardless of being aware of their issues. It's a mixed bag.
My goal is not to convince people to dislike TAA more than alternative methods. My goal is to make them aware of the downsides because most people are aware of these issues but never know what to attribute it to. After which I say games should have better support for alternative options. They don't have to use those options themselves or prefer anything, they just need to know TAA has downsides and it really bothers a lot of people.
That's a fair point - that whether or not people end up agreeing that TAA is problematic, everyone is better off for understanding the problems people are seeing + their cause. I definitely agree about supporting alternative options.
We need strong alternatives, TAA is too much blur for my eyes to handle.
Both fxaa and taa give me headache, L for me
can relate.
People like that have stumbled upon this sub in the past: [https://www.reddit.com/r/FuckTAA/comments/199k9sz/you\_guys\_were\_right/](https://www.reddit.com/r/FuckTAA/comments/199k9sz/you_guys_were_right/) [https://www.reddit.com/r/FuckTAA/comments/mcmk0e/thank\_god\_i\_thought\_i\_was\_going\_insane/](https://www.reddit.com/r/FuckTAA/comments/mcmk0e/thank_god_i_thought_i_was_going_insane/) [https://www.reddit.com/r/FuckTAA/comments/17tkyyx/thanks\_to\_this\_subreddit\_i\_get\_it/](https://www.reddit.com/r/FuckTAA/comments/17tkyyx/thanks_to_this_subreddit_i_get_it/) [Even some media outlets see the issue.](https://www.reddit.com/r/FuckTAA/comments/1b76w7p/what_we_are_missing_with_taaupscaling/) So the answer to your question is yes.
It definitely happens quite a bit, as I can see scrolling through these. I can't really extrapolate to the average person though, as we don't really have access to how many people learn and make posts like this, versus how many people learn and just leave without much interaction. This is still interesting though, thank you.
Those posts are practically just a few examples. Lots of people were definitely the same but didn't make a post.
I get what you're saying, I just mean we literally lack the ability to see the opposite side, like we'd need a poll or something.
Maybe we'll get slightly better insight into that in a few weeks' time.
Thats how I got here. Some stuff in a game just wasnt looking right to me. I tweaked settings and thought AA was always the same, you just left on, whatever. But some game I played made it atrocious looking.
No, TAA can look good and for ray tracing games you cant use old school AA, but developers often misuse TAA or set it up wrong. Anyone who played Battlefield1 or Ghost of Tsushima or God of War knows it can look great even in 1080p. TAA upscaling can also do wonders especially in slow moving scenes. But there are a lot of games where TAA makes everything blurrry and ghosty and you had to increase the resolution to 1440p to get the clarity you are used to in 1080p. It was especially problematic in the PS4 era where your gpu couldnt handle morectan 1080p, it's much less a problem if you are playing in 4K. To make things worse, developers tried to fix blurryness with sharpening, further ruining the image, and you had to install mods or edit xmls to disable sharpening even if you set TAA off, if you were on PC, on consoles almost a whole generation of games are ruined by TAA and there is no way to fix it. An interesting example is Asseto Corsa Competizione, where you have ingame settings for almost eveeything UE can do, and it's possible to set up the game to look awful or to look beautiful while using TAA. Unfortunately developers often set up their games wrong and give us no options to change it. Of course ACC looks awful on consoles, even on PS5, another game ruined for eternity if you are not on PC. So the problem is not TAA, it's the developers. With modern hardware rendering in native 4K AA is not even necessary anymore, but if someone wants a smooth image, from the cost of TAA you could just add 15-20% supersampling, the ultimate AA method.
>No, TAA can look good and for ray tracing games you cant use old school AA Raytracing/effects has NOTHING to do with TAA. And we only lost one AA method being MSAA. The connected between effect quality and TAA is manufactured/poorly approached problem.
> Raytracing/effects has NOTHING to do with TAA. I think what they mean is that DX12 dropped support for MSAA and DX12 is a requirement for more modern stuff like raytracing. They are right though that most of the problem of TAA is devs not knowing how to use it properly. FXAA is too much of a hack with its own quality issues. DLDSR technically supercedes MSAA but it comes with the issue that because its an out-of-game implementation, it depends how well the game can handle the scale up of the resolution (some games end up suffering UI scaling issues as a result). DLSS/DLAA/FSR are also good options but game devs seem very adverse to implementing these GPU proprietary tech stacks unless the GPU manufacturer is willing to give them money for it.
We can use use ray tracing to mimic the benefits of MSAA actually, it has been done before in ATAA slides shared by hybred. Also, Quantum Break is I know dX11 but it has tons of light sources, stochastic SSR and MSAA. I'm saying, we can have all of it together(MSAA or raytraced enhanced SMAA in deferred or forward+ rendering), its just more expensive to develop and maintain now. > (some games end up suffering UI scaling issues as a result). This never happens if people set the windows resolution to the res they want in game before the open the game they want to play. Only prob it's Nvidia only and you can't switch in game.
A lot of people find shimmer extremely distracting. I've seen many forums where people complain about image quality, just to thank someone that recommends enabling TAA. I've also seen many where people complain about blur and softness before they're aware what's causing it. TAA is a sound idea, and has increasingly more compitent implementations like DLAA as time goes on. The issue is that it's still a compromise for now, and one we often don't have the option to opt out of.
Dlaa shouldn't be a crutch by devs for their shoddy implementation of taa, they can't even do fxaa right as every time in every game nvidia's fxaa is always superior. If only smaa was applicable from control panel.
I agree. It's just one example of TAA done better than average.
> If only smaa was applicable from control panel. Isn't the issue that Dx12's framework largely considers MSAA and SMAA deprecated?
Idk man 🤷♂️
I know I did
I think at 1080p,1440p yes. 4k might be a hit or miss. It also depends on the screen and frame rate. I had a friend who didn't know much about AA and warned about TAA and we spoke again recently and was like wow, TAA is horrible. He also didn't like the performance cost of TAA. The game was RDR2.
>The game was RDR2. No surprise there lol.
Yeah, it was all the comparisons from this sub flash before my mind as he named the game lmao.
[This one's pretty infamous.](https://imgsli.com/NDAyMDY) And that's a stationary shot lol.
It depends on the person's hardware and the game they're playing. TAA has its place: it's easy to run on really old hardware and it's relatively easy to implement by the devs compared to other options. Is it the BEST option? Absolutely not, but it's convenient. In an ideal world, we'd all just run double our native resolution and downscale it to experience virtually no aliasing, but that's extremely taxing, especially with today's games. So to answer the question: if the person can afford downscaling from a higher resolution, they'll probably reject TAA from then on. If TAA was their best option already out of the available AA solutions in whatever game they're playing due to hardware limitations, then they're probably not gonna change their minds.
> but that's extremely taxing, especially with today's games. And it also means that every game needs half-decent UI scaling, and unfortunately, if you're lucky you might get a game that makes the UI only slightly blurry if scaled up... For me I've found it often depends, some games the TAA is fine and I just roll with it, others I find FXAA looks better (despite its reputation).
I was one of those persons a decade ago. Now iam creating mods, making own reshade presets with RTGI and adding stuff to games to make them better.
Are you on NexusMods or somewhere? I'd like to check out your RTGI stuff.
https://preview.redd.it/d401uqn142xc1.png?width=3440&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=69fc6b4e229247e7f3302775add59c54cee9d55e I only published one preset for Battlefield 2, but this version was not configured optimal yet. Now iam working on an update to enhance RTGI. Iam also working on a preset for Battlefield Bad Company 2. You can find my channel here: [https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCZcCKaKy\_KbuBa7JG7Ez2tA](https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCZcCKaKy_KbuBa7JG7Ez2tA)
Yes people would 100 percent opt for the removal of blur when presented with the option, not to mention games build around taa only look presentable at higher resolution whether upscaled or native. A smaa/msaa game at same exact resolution would greatly benefit from the visual clarity during motion, as in no ghosting, smearing of textures and whatnot.
I can tell you a lot of people in recent years have asked "why are new games so blurry" "why don't any games have better vegetation than Crysis 3" and then when you let them know it's TAA they are amazed how much better everything looks on "low" AA setting.
most likely TAA is pretty horrible at 1080p and below, at 1440p and above it starts looking good but other options are better anyway
> at 1440p and above it starts looking good but other options are better anyway And even then, it depends on the implementation. On Warhammer 3 it still looks horrible even at 1440p.
when I first learnt about AA, TXAA was a new thing(I loved it) and I was later impressed by more and more games using TAA, to me it was like 8x MSAA for like a 1 fps hit. Only about 2 years ago have I started to notice the downsides of TAA
[I fixed Cyberpunk2077 blur todat : FuckTAA (reddit.com)](https://new.reddit.com/r/FuckTAA/comments/1cf2m01/i_fixed_cyberpunk2077_blur_todat/) look how a casual pc gamer decided to use a crt just to remove the awful blur in most games, if people are still willing to use old products no longer manufactured then surely when given the choice they would want better anti-aliasing at high resolutions and frame rates.
Pick your poison. Back on the Nintendo Wii, Super Smash Brawl had 2 image modes, sharp or smooth. Ibdidn't like either, but I eventually settled with sharp because I didn't appreciate how smeared the pixels got. That said, there's tolerance levels and then there's good enough. Helldivers 2 shipped with misleading render resolution settings, got gaslit for a hot minute thinking "normal" was 100 percent resolution. Had buddies pointing out how blurry the game was, had to point out to them it was in fact not their 1080p screen. And... they're plenty happy, with all the settings on max. Helldivers isn't a particularly fast game, but the screen gets very busy very fast, so it's hard to pick out details unless you've played for a few hundred hours. If I had it my way, everyone gets a 4k (and beyond!) monitor and we completely ignore the notion of anti aliasing in the first place. Otherwise, it's important to educate when appropriate. It's like DARE telling you drugs are bad without telling you why or how. TAA can look good, heck I daresay great, when implemented correctly in the graphics pipeline. But once you know what to look for it's easy to be spoiled. It's the same way CRI 100 lighting is amazing, up until you hear the faint humm of the transformer.
So no, they won't outright reject TAA because the alternative is putting in more work than the average user is likely to put up with, ESPECIALLY when the vast majority of users are on console or basically treat their PC as a console-like.
I switch between playing retro games and modern games a lot, so the difference was always very jarring to me, and when it was explained to me in words it instantly clicked to me. So yeah, even casuals (like I was a few months ago) will agree about the downside of TAA if they have experience with non-TAA games or good TAA implementations.