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Jumat, 16 September 2011

What is Anti Aliasing and What Does It Do? part 2


Why does Anti-Aliasing slow down frame rates?

This is a simple. Anti-Aliasing is done by specific calculations to choose which pixels are drawn additional & in what shade to accomplish the desired result. The graphics card usually takes charge of this task. Due to these additional calculations the graphics card has to give a quantity of its processing power to finishing these calculations. This affects the amount of processing power left to render the scene.
Usually the frame rates are affected by the amount of pixels per second your graphics card can render, providing the CPU & other parts can keep up. When you are using anti-aliasing the amount of pixels that your graphics card can render will lower by a degree & therefore cut your frame rates in games down.

What is FSAA?

FSAA stands for Full Scene Anti Aliasing & is used as the most common term for Anti-Aliasing in the gaming world. FSAA refers to a process of Anti-Aliasing that affects the whole screen not a certain picture. When playing a game with FSAA turned on the graphics card will run an Anti-Aliasing algorithm on every frame from top to bottom removing jagged edges from the whole scene. This can have a giant hit on performance in games & has only been overcome recently by having much more powerful graphics cards on the market.

Types of Anti Aliasing

There are main types of Anti-Aliasing techniques, Multisampling & Supersampling. There are varieties of each as graphics card manufacturers find improved ways of getting the same result. Finding ways to limit the performance hit is the main priority. Here they will look at the general picture of the techniques. First they will concentrate on Supersampling.

Supersampling

Supersampling is a process of Anti-Aliasing by taking the corners of each pixel & generating what would be the average color. This is then the displayed pixel on the screen. By doing this you are effectively smudging the picture & averaging out the color along a curve.


This basic graphic shows you what would happen when Supersampling is used in the squares in the center of this picture. Three of the four squares are in both red & white areas & so will be displayed as a shade of orange. One of the squares is fully in the white zone & so that pixel will be displayed as a pure white pixel. If of the samples was taken from an area that was full in the red zone then that pixel would be displayed as fully red.

Obviously samples are much more complex than this, having plenty of more colors to average out; however the principles stay the same. A mathematical calculation is done to choose the average color for each pixel. Effectively Supersampling renders the scene times larger than the true scene & is then scaled down time the calculations are complete. This process has a giant performance hit but does give the best results.
continued in part 3, stay tuned and subscribe to us for updates!

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