MSAA... CSAA... FXAA... WTF is the Difference?
performance mostly and different sampling stuff
MSAA:the most taxing of the three on some gpus it stands for "multi sample anti aliasing"
CSAA: from what I read another nvidia invention on the 8 serires of cards(ancient as hell) it is basically just better optimised MSAA it stands for "Coverage Sampling Anti Aliasing"
FXAA: this is nvidia's recent AA invention stands for "Fast Approximate Anti Aliasing"
it is extremely low cost performance wise (from the article I read it is just faster and better and only costs 12 to 13 percent to enable FXAA
links to explain more:
https://developer.nvidia.com/csaa-coverage-sampling-antialiasing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multisample_anti-aliasing
http://www.kotaku.com.au/2011/12/what-is-fxaa/
and then in the kotaku article you can read about SSAA which is the oldest of them all. and why you need anti aliasing
awesome, thanks for the info. fuck msaa
The purest form of AA is SSAA (super sampling AA). It will look the best, but perform the worst. It simply renders the image at a higher resoultion (2x, 4x, 8x... ect), and then picks several values of colour per pixel, averages the colour, and then downscales the images again using avereged colour values.
MSAA is like SSAA, but is more optimized, it often uses edge detection which only applies supersampling to areas on the screen where there are edges, rather than doing the whole screen.
CSAA - that's probably just another varient of MSAA, never really heard of it much.
FXAA is something Nvidia came up with. In my experience it always looks shit.
FXAA (Fast Approximate AA) is literally just blurring pixels across an edge, that's why it looks like shit.
That's also why it's fast, and why it's "approximate".
Heh? Between the 3 of them, MSAA does have the highest quality....
yeah im yet to find a title where FXAA doesn't blur all the text and make everything just look a little pants.
i was wondering the same thing, but this clears things up.
Did anyone notice that CSAA randomly just popped up in all the Source Games just recently?
MSAA is the best of them all. What's TXAA though? I know it's another one of Nvidia's proprietary b-s, but how does it perform compared to, say, FXAA?
And what do you guys think of SMAA?
Dont forget about MLAA which is AMDs version of FXAA. It also blurs text and textures but in my opinion not as badly as FXAA