Nvidia Researching Subpixel Reconstruction Antialiasing

**Regeneration** · January 28th, 2011, 06:20 PM

It seems that Nvidia is researching a new antialiasing technology to compete with AMD's MLAA (Morphological Anti-Aliasing). Nvidia has published the following abstract from its research: "Subpixel Reconstruction Antialiasing (SRAA) combines single-pixel (1x) shading with subpixel visibility to create antialiased images without increasing the shading cost. SRAA targets deferred-shading renderers, which cannot use multisample antialiasing. SRAA operates as a post-process on a rendered image with superresolution depth and normal buffers, so it can be incorporated into an existing renderer without modifying the shaders.

In this way SRAA resembles Morphological Antialiasing (MLAA), but the new algorithm can better respect geometric boundaries and has fixed runtime independent of scene and image complexity. SRAA benefits shading-bound applications. For example, our implementation evaluates SRAA in 1.8 ms (1280x720) to yield antialiasing quality comparable to 4-16x shading. Thus SRAA would produce a net speedup over supersampling for applications that spend 1 ms or more on shading; for comparison, most modern games spend 5-10 ms shading. We also describe simplifications that increase performance by reducing quality."

HaZe303 · January 29th, 2011, 01:55 AM

Nice, I love MLAA on my HD5870, now I can enjoy deferred rendered games with AA on my Nvidia cards as well, soon, hopefully?

squall_leonhart · January 29th, 2011, 04:29 AM

the entire problem with AMD's MLAA is the lack of subpixel processing.

squall_leonhart · January 29th, 2011, 04:33 AM

hey Reg, mind replying to overthebelow(<<<<<this is a link btw) and telling him that his precious radeon's MLAA doesn't even do subpixel reads, which results in a loss of quality

Promilus · January 29th, 2011, 08:13 AM

@squall - and Intel original implementation did subpixel processing? :>

**Regeneration** · January 29th, 2011, 09:36 AM

@squall_leonhart

The entire problem with AMD's MLAA is the lack of Catalyst's per application profile system.

squall_leonhart · January 29th, 2011, 03:51 PM

thats a secondary issue. the primary one is the inability to process subpixel information, gain depth information and use it to apply mlaa as it is needed.