Digital Foundry video on TAA - the biggest culprit of making games look worse AND better

Going back to older games you can really grasp how much sharper they used to look.

Going back to older games and using 4x upscaling highlights the difference even more.

TAA might not be the most awful solution out there, especially for you TV users who sit very far from their screens.

But the issues of TAA are many and they are present in many games:

• Ghosting
• Blurry image
• Destroys texture quality

Many games will try to eleviate these problems with the use of sharpening but sharpening has its own downsides and at the end of the day... doesn't even work very well.

Man, I just thinking back to the days when I was happy if a game ran smooth a 640x480.

I can't say I am bothered by this. Games look great as is. Nitpicking is a luxury I will explore when gameplay advancements have expired.

@lamprey263: I remember I was happy my nes game worked after hitting reset 50 times lol. Gamers are such bitches today. Pissed over a frame drop. Calling it a bad port. Omg it dropped to 1080p its so last gen.

Just spreading some awareness tbh. You are blaming other people for bitching about something while at the same time bitching about something.

@R4gn4r0k: I'm not complaining. Huge difference between a frame drop and getting your system to work. I was giving examples what 80s kids had to go through. Heck ever had deal with Ms dos. getting your pc game to work was a chore. Kids today has it made and bitch about every little thing. I feel bad for developers today. Even though there is few developers that makes sure there game is finished.

I think technology is interesting. Trouble shooting can give me a headache but it has also made me a lot smarter and better equipped to handle problems.

I enjoy playing games but I love tweaking them too.

Don’t you want to learn more about how TAA works and what its benefits and downsides are?

TAA was always either hit or miss, hugely dependent on the implementation. RDR 2 was one such case where the TAA implementation was ass, before DLSS.

DLSS and FSR kinda cleans up better than TAA. I'm glad these upscalers have caught on at least.

@R4gn4r0k: yeah but my comment was for lamprey. Happy when a game is 480 running smooth. Not much back then bothered me like they do now. Even I expect so much from these developers today. I remember my ps1 top cover broke and I had to figure out how to fix it. So it would read the disc.

I hate TAA, it's something I usually turn off. I'd rather deal with some jaggies than a smeared image.

@pixievalerie: DLAA and dldsr I found are good replacements. A lot of the benefits with close to zero of the downsides

When it comes to using TAA, it really and I mean really depends on the implementation. First thing I do is disable TAA completely and see how the game looks without it. Most games look great without TAA if your use a higher resolution. Nowadays, I'll just stick to DLSS/DLAA.

asset have stay the same rez tbh.

idk wht people listen to df.

they dont game dev people on staff.

For unreal engine games there are a bunch of tweaks you can use to make TAA run better. Jedi fallen order with or without tweaks is night and day. But in general yeah dlaa tends to look better.

@gifford38: "I remember I was happy my nes game worked after hitting reset 50 times lol."

Did nobody teach you? You take it out, blow, re-insert cartridge, power on. Took a magic touch.

I don't like Taa. I play in 4k so, it's not needed. Plus, I don't want blur over my screen either.

TAA without any sharpening added is extremely ugly, but with sharpening, its pretty good in 1440p.

Sharpening helps a tiny bit, if ever so slightly.

But the thing is, most games already have sharpening built in to its rendering pass.

So you might end up with a game that has sharpening, then has FSR plus sharpening, and then people use an outside program to apply extra sharpening. It becomes comical at that point.

Yeah at the very least games should have a TAA off toggle for people that don't want it.

I really hope this technology becomes further developed and we get more advanced AA or AI solutions in future.

lol every nes was a bit different.

I have more appreciation for TAA now.

That's good man, never said it was a bad piece of technology.

All I'm saying is that it comes with serious downsides.

Fun fact, i was playing BG3 while watching this, and in BG3 i've been using MSAA pretty much since the beginning because its not a blurry mess. But after watching the video, and hearing him explain how the technic is applied, i swapped to TAA and put amd's sharpening to like 75% to remove the messy blur.

I honestly never really found TAA to be a problem. I guess when you're running native 4K it doesn't matter much.

I did notice it in RDR2 however, and have since downloaded better DLSS mods (including 'Ultra Quality' preset) That gives me AA that is as good as the TAA, but without any blur whatsoever.

8X MSAA looks about as good as 'DLAA', but it also completely tanks even a 4090. at 4K max (I think my FPS was in the 40s or so, yuck.)

How close do you sit to your monitor?

Also some games MSAA just taxed the VRAM, which I always liked. It didn't effen affect the framerate all that much, just used more and more of the VRAM and I always settled on 4XMSAA.

Pretty static game so the sharpening will help there. A game with a lot of camera/mouse movement? yeah not even gonna help a bit bruv.

Apply liberally.😌

Interesting Vid. Definitely interesting to see why the old ways just won't scale with high res screens and why devs have turned away from the likes of MSAA.

As for TAA itself.....yeah I have had very mixed experiences with the various methods. My biggest pet peeve is ghosting/pixel trails. It can add some fuzziness but, at 4K at least, any loss in detail is pretty minimal imho. So if there is a good TAA that can keep shimmering to a minimum and have no ghosting: win.

.....I have yet to see any perfect solution (though i don't have access to DLSS. Maybe Nvidia have it solved. Some vids i have seen suggest that it's reduced but not eliminated). But, with more modern games anyway, it is getting better.

On a related note though: I do miss the sharpness of some of the older tech. I was playing Arkham City and, at 4K with MSAA, it still looks fab. Primitive technology and sheer brute force can still provide a nice end result.

I wonder if that will be Nintendos approach to the Switch 2: Make Switch games and just have them run at a higher res and useMSAA :P. j/k.

Was a good video.

Played an old 2015 game a few weeks ago, Wolfenstein the New Order. Even on PC in 4K some of those jaggies would cut you in half 😅

Hahaha, I'm planning to replay Wolfenstein II The New Colossus this weekend. I remember loving it when it came out but I never ended up replaying it. It got a cool new QOL mod and I'm interested in modding in that Nvidia HDR.

@R4gn4r0k: The New Collosus looks good, Hardly any jaggies. Same engine as Doom 2016 thankfully. But that first one, crikey!

They did add some AA settings into the story prequel 'The Old Blood'. So you'd just get a nasty paper cut with that one lol 🤣