Fifteen 2 Share Posted June 19, 2016 The whole list feels a bit cluttered to me, it could probably use some more hierarchy. Grouping those various methods by family would allow us to have broader descriptions for each of those families, whereas individual methods would only need to be compared to each other. Here's what I mean : *Buffer sampling methods** Color buffer*** SSAA*** QSAA (Nvidia)*** SGSSAA/OGSSAA (Nvidia)** Z/Stencil buffer*** MSAA** Coverage buffer*** CSAA (Nvidia)*** EQAA (AMD)* Temporal methods** MFAA (Nvidia)** TXAA (Nvidia)* Post-processing methods** FXAA ** MLAA ** SMAA ** CMAA* Hybrid methods** HRAA** HSAA The article could then focus on comparing each one of those in a more meaningful manner instead of aimlessly trying to name every algorythm under the sun and leaving it at that. What would you guys think? Mirh 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Blackbird 54 Author Share Posted June 19, 2016 Guys read the first post again please. You're not paying attention. (mirh only edited due to us chatting about it) Also that is way too technical. This is done for average PCGW user, not programmers. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Blackbird 54 Author Share Posted June 19, 2016 Doublepost. The page is up now. I am not some dictator of what is right or wrong, but please no stupid edit wars. I'd prefer it to being discussed here. Fixed redirects Mirh 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fifteen 2 Share Posted June 20, 2016 Guys read the first post again please. You're not paying attention. (mirh only edited due to us chatting about it) Also that is way too technical. This is done for average PCGW user, not programmers. I get that, but how is the average user supposed to figure out which one is better if the article skims over giving a brief explaination on what makes every method different? For all your average wiki-goer knows, the difference between all of these is the combination of letters before the "AA" part and that some of them only work on Nvidia cards. If you split them into families like that, you can say "Oh, EQAA a Cover-buffer samplig AA method, so it doesn't render everything at double the resolution but it at least checks for the edges of objects and uses that to blend those boundaries where it can. Now I know it's going to be far less taxing than MSAA. Thank you, PCGW!" At the very least, you need to start explaining somewhere. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Blackbird 54 Author Share Posted June 20, 2016 You are right on the explaining part. This is something that needs to be done. The current info is mostly from the old page since getting info on some of the methods is harder than it seems. The stuff you mention should be also added to individual AAs. I am quite happy with how they are divided already. It's simple and straight-forward. Most gamers aren't as tech literate as you think. Post this on some PC Gaming subreddit and you'll realize this. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fifteen 2 Share Posted June 23, 2016 You are right on the explaining part. This is something that needs to be done. The current info is mostly from the old page since getting info on some of the methods is harder than it seems. The stuff you mention should be also added to individual AAs. I am quite happy with how they are divided already. It's simple and straight-forward. Most gamers aren't as tech literate as you think. Post this on some PC Gaming subreddit and you'll realize this. I'll always defend more hierarchised models, but I see where you're coming from. I'll probably try forking this article on my own personnal page over the next few days to see if I can get some sort of a preview going, to better show how I envision that article. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Share Posted June 24, 2016 (This post looks kinda weird seeing as I wrote a big thing, then I deleted everything as I summarized it so, whatever.) TL:DR 2: Keep dis shit simpler, yo. Shit's too long too. TL:DR: People shouldn't have to Google fancy words in order to understand how something works, use simple words and short sentences as much as you can. If you have to look up an extremely techinical word (not just a common word or anything that can be deduced) then the explanation might not be that great. Also my TL:DR is literally an example of how I summarized a ton of crap into something really simple. It could be shorter and better but, it still conveys the same message either way, and you didn't lose any useful info. I don't know, just convey the important stuff with a bunch of easy words for the explanations. You've lost like the whole userbase by using the words "buffer" and "hierarchised models". Try not to go too crazy with the categorization, right now this page is kinda pointless though, the wiki doesn't focus much on explaining stuff, and more on how to do stuff easily and quickly in a clear and simple manner, but any explanations should also follow that formula too. Short, to the point, extremely clear and so on. The page could use some instrutions on how to force some of these AA methods, there's not much point in explaining how an AA method works, if we literally have no use for it right now, but I guess having an explanation is a nice thing to have anyway? I'm not saying that you shouldn't have your own take at it, but christ make it easy to read at least. We don't want to reach Wikipedia levels of unreadable. It's the same crap as with academical documents, people only write them that way just to feel better about themselves, but you end up wasting more time understanding the contents of the text instead of doing something better with your life, the author also has no idea what any of that crap he wrote back then even means anymore. TL:DR 3: BIG WORDS BAD, SIMPLE AND CLEAR IS GOOD FOR UGA BOOGA LIKE ME. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mirh 103 Share Posted June 26, 2016 Description shouldn't be very much technical, and they isn't if you ask me (they could be a little shortened probably) Actual mindblowing detail is linked in the reference. Anyway, as I was saying above, indeed the list is too damn long. And under these circumstances, I'd say ALL methods description should be moved in a separate page. Only for that. And there all the various MSAA, FSAA, HRAA... words in the wiki should point. The improved hierarchy idea isn't bad. "Vanilla" AA page, should then just talk about the phenomena itself, explaining the difference between traditional, postprocessing (and supersampling perhaps), offer a screenshot highlighting that, stop. As per forcing, there's nothing special to say if you ask me. It seems obvious, that where there's a performance margin for SSAA, that's undeniably the best choice. Then there are all those variants of MSAA, be it a bit qualitatively or speed superior. Last, post-processing. I'm starting to think that, similarly to how we shouldn't mention particular vendors in AA page*, prolly we oughtn't even with specific implementations? *= the ideal fixbox should say, along the lines "traditional/msaa/ssaa can only be forced through graphics card driver/control panel" And a link to either this or this should be placed there. subspoiler: I'm starting to question where we should explain graphics option in general: framerate, AF, gpu scaling.. general pages or graphics card control panels ones? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fifteen 2 Share Posted June 28, 2016 Description shouldn't be very much technical, and they isn't if you ask me (they could be a little shortened probably) Actual mindblowing detail is linked in the reference. Anyway, as I was saying above, indeed the list is too damn long. And under these circumstances, I'd say ALL methods description should be moved in a separate page. Only for that. And there all the various MSAA, FSAA, HRAA... words in the wiki should point. The improved hierarchy idea isn't bad. "Vanilla" AA page, should then just talk about the phenomena itself, explaining the difference between traditional, postprocessing (and supersampling perhaps), offer a screenshot highlighting that, stop. As per forcing, there's nothing special to say if you ask me. It seems obvious, that where there's a performance margin for SSAA, that's undeniably the best choice. Then there are all those variants of MSAA, be it a bit qualitatively or speed superior. Last, post-processing. I'm starting to think that, similarly to how we shouldn't mention particular vendors in AA page*, prolly we oughtn't even with specific implementations? The thing is that on the surface, most methods don't differ that much relative to each other aside from the general idea behind it (CSAA and EQAA are literally the exact same thing). If you make a page on each of those AA methods, you won't really have much to say beside stuff copy-parted from other articles about AA methods. What we *could* do, however, is split this article into 3 separate one, to highlight the fact that Supersampling AA, Temporal AA and Post-Processing AA are utlimately unrelated to each other and can actually be used simultaneously. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mirh 103 Share Posted June 28, 2016 The thing is that on the surface, most methods don't differ that much relative to each other aside from the general idea behind it (CSAA and EQAA are literally the exact same thing). Yes. And that's why I said above that probably, we shouldn't even mention single methods at all in the page (and perhaps I also mentioned this in some discussio with blackbird, forgetting to post back) Think to the "mental process". You know nothing. But you want to apply this AA thing to improve image quality. What would be the first thing that you could try to do, in an ideal world? SSAA! But that's usually (but totally NOT always) a performance killer. So, only if that's a no go, you say "hey, try lighter traditional methods otherwise". And there you link GPU/AMD/NVIDIA/Intel page, because graphics driver is the only thing capable to do it, and one's choice is restricted by that. Still not satisfied? Talk about post processing methods. If you make a page on each of those AA methods, you won't really have much to say beside stuff copy-parted from other articles about AA methods. Mhh, I dunno. EVERY copy-pasta I ever read, heavily lacked in references. And by the very nature of forums, once man got tired,everything stopped to get updated. And, if you ask me, 2 or at most 3 "lines" (be it a negative, positive or info point) is still brief enough not to "bore". Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fifteen 2 Share Posted July 5, 2016 (edited) If more justification is needed for why have separate pages, I'll introduce a template for linking to them ( {{AA|form of AA}}, e.g. {{AA|MSAA}} ) and then add a list of games that use this or that form of AA to said subpages. I'd rather he have 2 or 3 pages, one per "family" of AA methods, and have pages like "MSAA" or "FXAA" redirect to anchors on those pages. Like I said before, the differences between each family is generally minimal, meaning we can have more general explainations that apply to the family as a whole, then maybe add a few distinctions for each one of them, like vendor exclusivity, sample positionning, relative performance cost, etc. Might be worth experimenting with info-boxes too, I get a feeling those could be well-suited to hold that kind of information in a concise manner. EDIT : Also, if we're going to use sample images to show the difference between each AA method, it should probably be animated, otherwise we can't demonstrate Temporal AA methods, and aliasing tends to become noticeable on moving objects anyway. Edited July 5, 2016 by Fifteen Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Share Posted July 5, 2016 - I honestly have no idea where this page is going, I was mostly waiting for them to do whatever they wanted to and then streamline it with what actually matters or is important to the wiki or for the user. I really would rather avoid having multiple pages though, I really think it should be all kept in one page, otherwise it'll all get a bit too crazy. I would only split the pages if you really need to cover a ton of stuff, but from what I've seen right now there isn't much. I really don't know yet, I'll just let you all handle it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mirh 103 Share Posted July 5, 2016 I'd rather he have 2 or 3 pages, one per "family" of AA methods, and have pages like "MSAA" or "FXAA" redirect to anchors on those pages. Like I said before, the differences between each family is generally minimal, meaning we can have more general explainations that apply to the family as a whole, then maybe add a few distinctions for each one of them, like vendor exclusivity, sample positionning, relative performance cost, etc. Ehrm.. if you mean the "procedure to enable it", okay. It's not very different from what I was saying (again: in the hypothetical fixbox that goes from mentioning SSAA to fxaa, traditional AA should point to gpu page) If you mean the "List" page.. ehrm, no I think your original hierarchy idea was more polished. Also, another question for you experts: can we generally say that SMAA is *always* better than MLAA or FXAA ? In which case we could quite much cut the BS. (I read the last post since this is a quick reply - good job on being the last to post in here ;) ) You mean.. like always? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fifteen 2 Share Posted July 16, 2016 I've done some more research, and now I'm pretty much convinced that we need to split AA methods by family since none of the proper supersampling methods work on engines that rely on deferred shading, which is no small detail and should definitely be brought up in the article. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mirh 103 Share Posted July 17, 2016 Did you mean multisampling? I see no specific mention to SSAA. There are the usual 3 families for everything I think people care. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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