Does TAA make Halo look worse?
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 1 ต.ค. 2024
- TAA or Temporal Anti Aliasing is a graphical feature that allows video game developers to smoothen over rough edges in a game's visual presentation. The issue with TAA comes with the cost of this technique. Games that use TAA often appear blurry and smeary and its become a controversial graphical feature in recent years. In today's video, I will be talking about Halo Infinite's form of TAA and if it does make the game look worse. This was not written with AI, I just wrote formally to see if the algorithm likes this description LOLOL
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Hey LNG, incase your audience is unaware I have a mod that disables TAA in Halo Infinite called "QoL - More Graphic Options" on Nexus if they want to disable it for themselves. Thanks for covering this topic!
I use your mod, the game would be unplayable without it! TAA makes me so sick, I thought I'd never be able to play Halo again, I'm so happy modders exist 💙 thank you so much
I've seen this mod and am very interested in trying it out. The problem is I've heard somewhere that EAC is even in the campaign. Is the mod (or reshade for SMAA) still safe to use in campaign or multiplayer?
Dude, I'm actually going to re-download Infinite just to try this. Idk why I didn't think to check Nexus......
Side note: I'm a hater of proprietary tech just as much as the next guy, but DLSS is by far the best anti-aliasing solution I've ever used [the wiki entry for DLSS specifically states it is an "Anti-Aliasing implementation"]. My hope is AMD's FSR can get to DLSS 2.0 levels of AA in short order - it'll be an immediate upgrade for literally everyone.
@@1Ayudon1 it's safe to use, EAC allows it!
@@Hybred ty for clarifying :D
There is a deep irony in that TAA is necessary to deal with the massive increase in shimmer due to the massive increase in geometric and shader complexity, but then the TAA goes and erases much of the detail it was built to compensate for.
This is a big part of why 4k keeps getting pushed, IMO. In my experience, even just downscaling with a 1080p monitor and running FSR2 Performance, a lot of the blur is eliminated. It's like TAA needs way more pixels to work with to not fall apart.
@@colbyboucher6391 Funny, I kind of theorized this conclusion but backwards when the 4k fad started happening...
because I noticed all of a sudden that no developers knew how to make functioning well-performing anti-aliasing and I just thought the push to 4K was to make it less noticeable, I didn't know that it was actually for a weird technical reason.
@@Coconut-219 The reason TAA became popular is because the pipeline of the big engines switched to preferencing a deferred shader rendering workflow. Essentially, the scene is rendered in multiple passes in a way that makes traditional MSAA anti-aliasing incompatible.
Playing modern games is like playing with vaseline wiped across your screen.
Depends on what you’re playing on. Games look great a powerful pc with decent anti aliasing
@@proggz39nah, TAA is dogshit 99% of the time, and 1% of the time it's just tolerable, never good
I've never played a game with TAA where I didn't think to myself that I'd rather just use FXAA or no anti aliasing at all
@@cyd_hunter99 That's why we've got FSR/DLSS in modern games now!
@@cyd_hunter99 If you have a *truly* powerful PC that can brute-force through 4k, even if it's upscaled, TAA doesn't look nearly as awful. (Doesn't really suggest anything good about TAA, still.)
Issue is that modern games use deferred rendering usually and no AA looks pretty awful as a result. FXAA is just as blurry as TAA, except then it's *always* blurry instead of only when you're moving.
@@zanesnep I hate FSR and DLSS and TAA, these are the worst part of modern gaming. If you think that makes it better, you're delusional.
The reason the explosions look like a that is because in TAA's quest to remove jaggies they will morph information together causing the image to look like an oil painting or like theirs vaseline on the image, and this problem is worsened the lower your resolution is. So the image isn't JUST blurry, its also oily...
Remove the "a" in the first sentence, typo. Hope it was understood
Holy mother, the explosion farm was a jawdropper. I knew the effects felt underwhelming, but god damn I didn't know TAA did this much.
I do feel like we've overstepped a bit when it comes to graphical fidelity, considering how many games need TAA to function as intended (looking at you, BF5). I both want to whack the fingers of the artists when they try to add too many details for the game to run reliably, but also give every gamer "Just wanting better graphics, bro" the same whack and a stern talking to when it comes to readability.
Cause I'd happily throw away the very pretty hair and go back to the solid, textured wigs we used to have even during the 360/ps3 era if it meant we could get particle effects like sparks back. Hell, I've been replaying MGS 3 on pc now in the original resolution, and I'm kind of awestruck at how much the blood, the sparks, and the impact dust clouds are visible in a well upscaled 720p resolution. It's actually a bit sad that I think particle effect, post processing, and readability in general peaked with Halo 3, with so many games after it doing more and achieving less
The issue is primarily to do with deferred rendering as opposed to traditional forward rendering. Deferred rendering makes dynamic lighting in particular much easier. However, it's clearly possible to make amazing looking forward-rendered games, an example being Half Life: Alyx, provided that you make heavy use of lightmapping rather than using entirely dynamic lights.
YES, less detail, clean forward rendering, please.
Sprite is either hit or miss with me. Don’t like it canned but if you get McDonald’s sprite, oh boy that is crisp. Imagine giving it to a caveman
They would be mind blown, I'm a Dr.Pepper and Ginger ale guy myself.
I think what makes Sprite great is its malleability. You want something to compliment alcohol? Want to mix syrup flavorings together? Want something non-offensive at a party? What about a punch? Sprite's just a good gender neutral compliment to whatever drink you want. I've heard people dislike sodas, but never Sprite.
Same for likes. No one loves Sprite.
No one.
He'll write a script for a Halo game better than anything old 343 ever did.
@@tomtheconqerurSprite can't write because Sprite is a liquid.
@@Nefnoj that's why you make the caveman drink the Sprite
Ah, I see someone has been browsing /r/fucktaa
@@TheLazyGamers or /r/MotionClarity
It's like r/fuckcars but the users are not stupid or worse cyclists.
@@tomtheconqerur People like you are the majority of why r/fuckcars exists
It absolutely does, the game makes me feel like I need glasses everytime I play. A funny thing I found tho is the game looks sharper if you turn the sharpness setting all the way down
All the way down??!!??
If that's your experience, that just means you're over-sharpening the image, introducing more aliasing/artifacting. Sharpening is something that you need to find the sweet spot for, and each game has a different sweet spot.
Sounds like the game could us some PSSR
@Irizathylia The sweet spot is no sharpening on an OLED with high pixel count.
The game will be more detailed with sharpening disabled. Adding a bunch of halos around everything (which is how sharpening filters work, by exaggerating edge contrast) is inherently going to replace some detail, and cover up a lot of detail by making it comparatively lower contrast. Hated how early DLSS looked because of how oversharpened it was. Turn off the sharpening and games look so much more detailed and smooth up close. I suppose if I was playing on a TV 5 feet away it might look worse then, but I'm not.
It's hard to outright dismiss either option here, because TAA is a blurry mess and no AA is a pixelated nightmare. I think the best thing to do is simply also include more demanding yet more accurate AA methods like MSAA or SSAA. In a few years, an average gaming PC will be able to handle the more expensive methods, and that will be the definitive way to play the game. The best thing to do is always just provide a plethora of options.
MSAA either does not work well, or cannot be implemented with how most games are doing rendering nowadays. Technical limitation.
SSAA is just rendering the game at a higher resolution.
I am personally a fan of SMAA, in most games that supports it, it looks good.
@@Ozzianman MSAA is geometry only, isn't it? Shader shimmer and transparency shimmer will still be there.
MSAA doesn't work well at all in modern deferred rendered games. It's a big reason why the industry shifted away from it with the 8th console generation. Back in the 7th gen, you had hardware MSAA in the Xbox 360 and it legitimately looks great in games that used it, but you can't really use MSAA in a modern game with good results, see Red Dead Redemption 2 on PC for an example.
Most games these days have an SSAA slider. The problem is that SSAA or MSAA will not fix moving aliasing in motion. You need temporal frame blending regardless of SSAA and MSAA is what I'm trying to say. BUT it doesn't and never needed to be so blurry in the first place, the amount of TAA blur can be adjusted by the devs.
@@astreakaito5625Supersampling can also counteract blurriness caused by TAA.
Last and current gen Ubisoft titles are easy to do it with it's 0-200% resolution scalers.
DLAA is also useful and seems to be a standard to implement it now.
At 4K resolutions I don't even get why TAA is used. 4K is the equivalent is of Super Sampling AA for 1080p. And super sampling is the better looking AA method. Quite heavy though
Even in 4k, the game has minor aliasing issues. TAA just cleans it up for 4k and looks polished by that point.
Because everything in modern games is undersampled or built to work with taa exclusively.
Some game engines are really bad about this. The RE engine has terrible specular flickering that absolutely does not get fixed at a native 4k.
Supersampling requires the game to render at a resolution higher than the display. Playing a game at 4k won't get rid of aliasing on a 4k display. TAA is usually the best anti aliasing method when it comes to getting rid of aliasing but a poor implementation can be extremely detrimental to the image like it is in halo infinite.
Having tried 4k without TAA myself, it just... doesn't work out as well as you'd hope. Deferred rendering plus highly detailed images = loads of aliasing and other issues regardless of resolution. Plus, at 4k, TAA has way more to work with and isn't nearly as awful.
I always go for FXAA. Still a bit of pixels, but I like the crispness. With the push for TAA in damn near every game coming out.. Im just forced to pick a screen FULL of shimmering pixels, or vaseline on my eyes. I wish they didnt throw away the "middle ground"
fxaa looks worse in general, depends on the game though
I agree with this. A good edge FXAA implementation to me looks much better than the alternatives, especially when paired with some subtle sharpening. However, poorly implemented FXAA shaders have the same problem with making the overall image muddier, so it varies a lot game-to-game.
i really started liking cmaa2 on reshade
fxaa is a bit blurry for my tastes/my kinda low ppi monitor
I'm one of the moderators on r/fucktaa. These are the kinds of videos we want. Not everyone blindly hates on the technology. It's not an "echo chamber", we provide fixes and gather resources that show the differences. We have been advocating for player choice from the beginning. But the place does attract the wrong kinds of people...
Good to know things have become more nuanced! I dipped into that subreddit earlier this year and it seemed a little unhinged at points.
Any interesting developments in that subreddit? If it’s gotten more nuanced, I can only imagine actual game developers have been actively involved in there
@@LateNightHalo We have a few developers that actively help us create fixes, and a few more that have made videos to help convince developers to give player choice. The Hybred and Threat Interactive are two such developers that have gone to make videos about the topic. They are friends of the subreddit, and we chat with them often.
I cannot say that the subreddit isn't filled with passionate people. But that doesn't mean that the subreddit as a whole agrees with the negativity. It's hardly an echo chamber though, such places wouldn't give people the resources to chose for themselves. You'll find many different opinions, not many are advocating for the shimmering and aliasing.
@@ericthomas2388 Thats amazing to hear! I'll have to explore the subreddit more! Apologies for saying its an echo chamber! I stand corrected!
4:21 only real ones will have a winter soldier-style awakening upon hearing the Sonic Adventure 2 music again after 20 years
Amazing to see some footage of Call Of Duty 1 in there. Good to know someone else still goes back and revisits it
It's a shame that stuff like this is becoming super common especially on the the most powerful consoles to date. I get hitting those 60 frames but I wish there were more options to let us run games rendering natively without any upscaling or blurry workarounds. It kinda feels like the current gen games are leaning on all the fancy new shaders, lighting and the ability to cram in hi fidelity models and textures do a lot of the visual work but outside of cutscenes it's too difficult to maintain where as some of the old cheats devs used to get a "realistic" look like baking in lighting, adding contrast to textures and heck even bloom (in modest amounts) feel more clean and art directed even if they don't hit that "photorealistic" bar.
High end PCs can’t even run current gen games at high native resolutions with a high frame rate. There’s nothing wrong with upscaling when done well like Nvidia’s DLSS, AMD’s FSR, PlayStation’s PSSR. TAA just sucks and hopefully the industry can move onto a better form of anti aliasing
The missing sparks are probably from over-aggressive window filtering. Basically, when you're reprojecting previous-frame data onto the newer frame, one way of checking whether a pixel is relevant in its new neighborhood is to check whether it has a similar color to other pixels in its vicinity. If it does, great, blend it in; if it doesn't, assume that it's out of date and filter over it. This works pretty well in many situations, but small sharp fast-moving details are a pathological case: the filter can very easily assume that they're a rendering artifact and smudge them over.
This is actually the best comment on this vid, lol, Halo's TAA implementation is one of if not the worst major game implementation.
It gives me a minor headache and makes my 1440p screen look like trash. Meanwhile Mario Kart Wii online looks amazing despite being 480p. I don't dislike TAA at all hut Halo Infinite's TAA implementation isn't great. I understand the game was built around it but want the option
Another thing to note is that forced TAA isn't just a slight inconvenience. For some people the motion blur/smear affect of TAA causes nausea, headaches or eye strain, much like regular motion blur it can induce motion sickness. For others even the stationary image can cause problems as people feel like their eyes are out of focus so their eyes keep trying to "focus" on the image repeatedly which obviously causes problems.
This is at its core an accessibility issue as much as it is a preference. As a result providing options for alternative anti-aliasing methods that don't accumulate past frames or at minimum offering an off option is essential.
I totally understand people who prefer TAA's stable image, but some people, myself included, get physically ill after using TAA for 20 minutes or more. A 20 minute game session isn't ideal. Everyone should be mindful of this before they judge anyone for their preference, supporting more options is allowing more people to enjoy Halo 🎮
yup I can only play games with TAA for about an hour before I get actually nauseous and start vomiting
Oh yes this, so much this. I remember seeing a leafy tree fall over in BF5 and couldn't tell if my monitor was broken or I was having an eye migraine from all the ghosting that happened.
I also remember playing a game called Derail Valley, which whilst gorgeous when running trains through vistas, made think I was going mad seeing all the paper diagrams and maps take half a second to morph into their final shapes with all the text and small images on them. Thank god there was an option to turn it off
sadly i am one of those people. makes it hard to play more than half an hour.
i dont understand why so many games force it on you instead of just making it an optional thing.... like most aa is...
In fact, it'd make sense for "disable anti-aliasing" to be in accessibility setings, wouldn't it? It'd better communicate that it isn't an ideal choice.
Precisely, when I look at almsot any TAA implementations, I feel as if my glasses are one dioptre off the mark, which worsens when I move camera. Most egregious example of this is Talos Principle 2, my eyes literally start hurting after only a few seconds of looking at the image, and the game itself is very beautiful (alas, not playable with TAA off due to extreme shimmering)
Turning off AA entirely makes the game look bad, but there are many AA options that arent Temporal, kinda wish we could at least try them.
Also, when Temporal AA is implemented into a game, that means that generally Nvidias DLSS can be modded into it too, and its version of TAA works much better and preserves a lot more quality.
You mention that TAA covers up the corners cut by developers, which it does (and that's a large part of why those corners are cut in the first place), but the bigger question is whether it's fundamentally necessary to cut those corners in the first place. I've seen some strong arguments from graphics programmers that studios and publishers are leaning on TAA as a crutch so they don't have to bother with implementing optimizations that don't require TAA to get away with, and that optimizing games without TAA is totally feasible, allowing for a better presentation. The issue is just getting publishers and studio heads commit to that near-term investment of time and resources on the matter so their games can benefit more in the long term. Those decision makers tend to focus more on maximizing ROI in the near term, so they're not likely to be keen on the idea if they can get away with letting TAA handle the consequences of doing things the quick and easy way.
I'm quite certain those developers have never worked on graphics programming for a modern triple A project. If it was a case of laziness, why has not one single developer ever done those optimisations? Why has Epic, adding all these cutting edge features to UE5 not just also hit the 'fix graphics' button? *Every* triple A game has to be fairly well optimised to run well at all. Clearly The Last of Us was decently optimised on consoles, but with imperfect optimisation on PC at launch it ran like complete shit. Every one-person indie game that uses modern UE also inevitably run like shit compared to AAA releases too, with titles taking place in a single room not necessarily running at 60fps across the board, because the devs aren't able to properly optimise their games the way a studio can. Badly optimised games are how you end up with the Arkham Knight PC port at release. But Cyberpunk (now)? Doom Eternal? Fortnite? The Hunt: Showdown? These are all deeply optimised titles trying to squeeze as much graphical power out of their systems as possible without making it prohibitively difficult to develop a large game.
That kind of sentiment just feels like antivax sentiment. Sure you might believe that a single doctor might lie about a treatment, but essentially all doctors across the entire globe? If a lack of optimisation was the issue, you'd necessarily expect there to be some titles in the space that did have those optimisations and thus shipped without TAA while maintaining equivalent graphical parity in other areas. But they do not exist. TAA + temporal effects are absolutely an optimisation too, I think gamers forget that optimising code means making code do less 99% of the time. Not rendering the entire gameworld at once at fully detail even if you can't see it is an optimisation, but if you want to frame 'degrading the image' as a fake optimisation, then any form of level of detail or texture streaming is also that. Doing ambient occlusion as a post-process effect at a limited resolution instead of just raytracing it every frame would also be a fake optimisation. In fact just doing lighting in a shader instead of by tracing rays is again, just 'fake optimisation'. Or alternatively, you can embrace that 'downgrades' to improve performance are in fact optimisations. Just ones that come with shortcomings too.
@@GrandHighGamer You clearly didn't read my comment. I never said that AAA devs weren't optimizing their games, I never said anything about "fake optimizations" (wtf would that even be?), nor did I say that anyone was doing anything out of laziness.
Please try to read and understand what someone writes before responding to them.
@@GrandHighGamer Devs optimize their games not to run well (in some abstract fashion, although some clearly do that, que in Crystal Dynamics and Nixxes console ports), they do it to reach certain KPI which is usually formulatd as 'we need the frames to be cooked within X ms'. So if devs can use some cheat like fake frames, TAA or other techniques to reach this KPI goal and simultaneously save time they'd do it. Also, since most people don't really care about image quality or have no idea what a game might look like with non-temporal AA (as in the last 10 years TAA is what devs use to reach these KPI goals), it doesn't bother them.
TAA reduces aliasing very well with little performance cost... but that 1440p image? Yeah it's more like 1080p or less, especially in the distance. Nowadays I just lower my graphic settings for most games and super sample the best my 8GB VRAM can handle :')
Which is weird to think that Infinite has upscaling capability built-in yet no option to toggle anti-aliasing. Also weird that MCC got FSR but Infinite has neither FSR or DLSS.
Edit: wow can't believe how many details are straight up cut out because of TAA. It's much worse than just blurriness...
Yeah no fsr or dlss in infinite was odd to see.
MCC's FSR is broken for Halo 2 Anniversary, the pre-rendered cutscene is shifted to the left in like a weird off-centre letterbox, works fine on consoles like the Series X though, MCC is full of issues, so is infinite and they just refuse to fix any of it.
the issues I have with TAA are similar to the problems I have with AI upscaling, if it turns the game into a blurry and smeary mess why should I bother with turning that setting on? I would rather just let it be a little pixely, but if you are just looking for the best looking image quality performance be damned, super sampling is obviously the best option.
Unfortunately game developers seem to be removing other options and using TAA as a crutch to hide rather terrible graphical blunders, rather than making the game without TAA as a requirement and using it as additional option for players.
I have a hard time believing that most people would choose to use TAA over other Anti-Aliasing options even if they are a bit harder on performance.
TAA has a place, but it should _NOT_ be forced and be the ONLY solution.
Depending on the implementation, TAA has a _SERIOUS_ ghosting issue to the point where it can actually trigger migraines.
TAA replaced FXAA for a cheap/free solution (at least FXAA didn't have ghosting when moving), but there are other solutions, including advanced version of TAA (used in Nvidia's DLAA and AMD's "Native AA").
I would be happy to lose some performance for less aliasing like you could do _A DECADE AGO_ with SMAA, SSAA, etc.
Really wish they would implement DLSS so we could use DLAA. DLAA looks pretty incredible nowadays with almost no drawback I know of.
Edit: After watching I enjoyed the video but was disappointed that you did didn't mention that there are other AA options (Like DLAA) that 343 could presumably add relatively easily.
DLAA still softens in motion and can occasionally have ghosting. Any of its issues are orders of magnitudes worse with standard TAA, but DLAA isn't perfect.
Also, infinites motion vectors are probably busted, which would explain why it's TAA is so sub par. Using the same data with DLAA would still have issues.
@@existentialselkath1264 What would you consider to be the best AA technique?
@@Epiousios18 SSAA is obviously the best, it's the ground truth, but obviously not always practical (though it is in Halo Infinite on newer systems).
MSAA is best if your game can be forward rendered, though that's got severe limitations.
SMAA can work well if MSAA is impossible, like deferred renderers, as long as mipmaps and LODs are carefully used, dithered transparencies are avoided for blended and masked effects instead, etc.
DLAA is the catch all for games that dont fit any of the above, which is a lot of games, but it's quality compared to the other techniques at their best is still quite far behind. It's always better than standard TAA unless something is broken though (ahem, Forza).
@@existentialselkath1264 appreciate it the response, I’m still learning the real ins and outs of this stuff.
@@existentialselkath1264 Also, If I run Infinite at Natie 4k (or a little above that), should I turn the TAA setting on Low or keep it on high?
TAA makes basically everything look bad. I'd genuinely take jaggies over vasoline smear-o-vision.
The video explained everything perfectly imo. Obviously one could get into more technical detail, but for most people this explanation is more than enough.
Here are some other AA methods with their strengths and weaknesses:
_Super Sampling:_
(Happen during render pass and can not be added in post)
SSAA (Super Sample Anti Aliasing) - Renders the game at a higher resolution (2x, 4x etc.) and scales it down to the desired display resolution. Very effective, but also very costly since the game runs at 2x or 4x the resolution.
MSAA (Multi Sample Anti Aliasing) - Renders the game at a higher resolution, but only at the edges of the actual geometry of the scene. Very effective and not too taxing when used at 2x or 4x. Provides SSAA quality along geometry edges. Downside is that it iIgnores all Texture detail and alpha transparancies since it only looks for the geometry. So not suitable for modern games.
_Post Processing:_
(Happens after the render pass and can simply be added at the end of the finished render)
FXAA (Fast Approximate Anti Aliasing) - Uses contrast detection and simple blur algorithms to reduce jaggies along high contrast edges. It's super fast often doesn't even have a noticable performance impact. It's not particularely good at anti aliasing. On stronger implementations tends to cause the entire image to look blurry and low detail. On weaker implementations often not strong enough to effectively reduce aliasing.
SMAA (Subpixel Morphological Anti Aliasing) - Similar to FXAA uses the contrast detection and blur algorithms to remove aliasing along high contrast areas. Also uses more sophisticated edge detection and edge reconstruction algorithms to better get rid of jaggies while still preserving detail. Not as fast as FXAA, but still minor compared to other AA implementation. Not quite as effective in all scenarios as other AA methods.
_Temporal:_
(Also implemented at render pass which means it can also effect other effects as demonstated in the video)
TAA (Temporal Anti Aliasing) - Pretty much as explained in the video. Also uses ray jitter to sample slightly different points each frame. Low performance impact similar to SMAA thanks to the temporal component. Generally very effective for almost all scenarios. Introduces artifacts such as blur, ghosting or motion trails because of its temporal component.
_Hybrids:_
SMAA T2x (or Filmic SMAA T2x) - Uses SMAA with a temporal component on top. Because it doesn't only rely on temporal data only, but also on the SMAA algorithm it is more effective than SMAA while also having less ghosting than TAA. The Filmic version generally has even less temporal artifacts such as ghosting because it uses a temporal filter. Will provide good anti aliasing but at a higher performance cost than both SMAA and TAA.
MSAA + FXAA - Is as the name suggest, a hybrid of MSAA and FXAA. Since MSAA is fairly ineffective in modern games and FXAA is hit and miss this implementation attempts to use both in conjunction to mitigate the issues that they have individually with more or less success depending on the scene. Implementation is pretty rare and has the same performance cost as MSAA and FXAA combined.
______________
My personal choice for most scenarios would be SMAA or Filmic SMAA. Especially at higher resolutions like 1440p and 4k, SMAA is usually more than effective enough. At lower resolutions the argument for a temporal anti aliasing method gets stronger but pure TAA has too many drawbacks for me personally. SMAA T2x is also temporal but it's generarally more stable than pure TAA from my experience and in my opinion worth the extra performance cost.
The root of the problem is deferred rendering. Forward rendered? Doesn't look too awful without AA (comparatively). Deferred rendering is the "render some things worse" bit and I'd gladly take less detailed games over the current magic tricks being used.
We honestly don't deserve Halo video content this stylish and polished. I'm really glad you're still making stuff.
I have a 1440p monitor, and I quite literally run the game at maxed out super sampling just so that I can see details in the game without feeling like I forgot to put my glasses on.
And even then, in motion, the game is sickeningly blurry. Genuinely, fuck TAA. I cannot wait until this trend dies.
this is exactly why i try to turn off AA or TAA in any game i play, even if the game itself looks a little worse. its that loss of information, and for me, someone who tries to get every piece of information off my screen as much as i can, its a huge difference. Titanfall 2 in particular really benefited me from having the TAA turned off, i was able to spot pilots much more easily and from farther away as well. and with some TAA in some games, it can cause a little bit of motion blur if you move your aim a little too fast. and for someone who plays on a really high sense like myself, its almost immediatly noticable.
The ability to turn off the TAA and run the optimized effects at higher resolutions and all the way back up to native really should be more available on modern PC games, but should always be options and marked as high performance cost.
Halo infinite doesn't really run much, if anything, at a sub native resolution. It's shimmer usually comes from poor mipmaps and sub pixel detail.
Hair is the only exception, which is dithered, still not half res.
The only good "TAA bad, modern games blurry" video essay. You actually understand the nuances.
The game doesn't even rely on TAA to reconstruct anything (effects like SSR have reconstruction built in), yet the games TAA is the worst in the industry.
Modding TAA out and using reshade SMAA is a vastly superior experience. Personally, I set my resolution scaling to 200% and use the minimum framerate option to always get the cleanest possible image at my fps target. Rarely notice shimmer outside the menus.
The only remaining issues are that mipmaps on foliage get too low resolution at a distance, and the game doesn't correctly tonemap overexposed colors.
It's clear that 343 does not have the coding talent that og bungie did. They should've just used unreal like everyone else
@@alanlee67 Unreal is even more reliant on temporal effects and TAA, especially now with UE5
@@alanlee67 it's not the talent at all. It's the fact that the majority of the programmers were likely contractors that got cycled through every 18 months. You don't have the time to see any systems through to completion like that and any institutional knowledge is lost. The same happened with Turn 10 and Forza Motorsport.
Using unreal is better for contractors because everyone already knows how to use it, and contractors are a terrible method of developing an engine, but it's not as good an option as a dedicated engine made by a core dev team.
Yeah they need to get their heads out of their asses and hire actually career employees. Yes they are more expensive, but they will become more efficient over time, and produce better work.
@@aboveaveragebayleaf9216 it seems like a Microsoft wide policy, I just hope few games continue to suffer before they change it.
This makes me think of a topic:
Graphics for games will likely peak soon, only currently limited by gddr memory and bandwidth -- albeit NVIDIA is going to dominate:
Unfairly.
Their DLSS frame generation tech (which also will feed EXTRA frames to TLSS) will be the key.
It's so monumental to develop a competitor, especially one that works easily out of the box -- because of the monumental amount of data and training needed to make it well.
And as graphics become even more demanding (4k @ 120fps for most games is impossible) and hardware physically cannot keep up because of moore's law -- DLSS will be necessary to get ok resolution and fidelity.
This is even more reinforced when develops opt to cut costs/time on optimization and fall back on DLSS for solving issues.
This means anybody who can't provide DLSS competition will be unable to compete and games just won't perform well or will look like garbage.
And you know NVIDIA won't share their AI model. It's easy to copy the hardware for the AI, but the hard part is training an AI model, as well as retraining on new data incrementally. It's almost impossible, unless you just copy the output AI model -- and it's likely optimized to run specifically on nvidia hardware too. AI model data, when looked at, looks like random data essentially.
The future imho is a bit bleak, especially now that AMD is pulling out of high-end.
TAA is possibly the worst option for anti-aliasing and Infinite's implementation of it specifically is overly aggressive. Honestly, the best thing that could happen to this game is if they add support for MSAA, SSAA or god forbid DLSS and its equivalents.
For consoles, they might be stuck with TAA because this game has to somehow run acceptably on base Xbox Ones, but PC should be given more options than we have. But there's definitely a conversation to have about how developers have been shoving so much extraneous detail into their games that we need all of these perfunctory tools just to help them run decently.
I've been playing some older 7th gen titles on PC recently and I have to say, while the detail can be a bit lacking, I *miss* having the kind of picture quality we used to have. These games that run at fully native resolution with zero upscaling, fully maxed out graphics options running at triple-digit framerates these days, yes obviously you can point to the lower fidelity of most of the assets, lower poly counts, less detailed textures, a lack of expensive lighting effects, etc. But the image is just so *clean* and even older anti-aliasing solutions do their jobs better because they weren't given such impossibly detailed frames to figure out.
When you take all that and apply it to a game with solid art direction that holds up, I've been replaying Darksiders for instance, damn, I kinda prefer this to what we've been doing recently.
The problem with the TAA is that the assets and textures of the game are created in such a way that they accommodate the use of the TAA, things like: shadows, post-processing, hair, grass, etc. This means that when you remove the TAA the game looks terrible👎 . And adding that, this antialiasing method looks bad/blurred when you are moving🏃 in the game. The problem I have is that often developers don't give the user other options like: MSAA, SSAA, FXAA and others.🤔
Ok, hear me out, im not a game dev or anything, but, what if there was a way to have "configurable" TAA sample counts, and that those values could be game specific.
For example, the game dev, or even better, the player through a menu, could adjust how many past frames TAA is allowed to pull from. This would allow fine tuning of how much ghosting and/or detail loss there is per TAA pass, right?
Any game devs or modders, feel free to chime in, but i have a feeling this might not be the worst idea ever...
In another game called Ground Branch, TAA makes picture-in-picture rendering of magnified optics look really smuggy and mutes glowing elements too (sparks from bullet impacts, red dot sights especially under NVGs at full reticule brightness).
Cyberpunk 2077 also has forced TAA that when disabled, also causes other issues such as global shadows showing light seaping through seams in the world as if the map was stitched together like a quilt, and distant objects sometimes getting "fizzed out" by artifacting making scenic vistas kinda hard to enjoy.
Devs really need to give us different AA methods or perhaps not make a game that would be heavilly reliant on AA for its visuals.
TAA in Halo Infinite looks pretty bad but TAA does have it's uses.
Edit: I'm very glad that the video was more nuanced. I was kinda scared it would blindly hate on TAA...
TAA much like AI speeds up development and improves workflow efficiency, but it doesn't nessacarily increase quality like it should.
What I mean by this is that aliasing mitigation use to be a process of game development, but because TAA is so effective it bypasses that step entirely speeding up game development slightly.
As a result we're in a catch 22 situation where games look bad without TAA, but they only look bad without TAA BECAUSE TAA exist. If TAA didn't exist, games like Halo Infinite wouldn't be as aliased as it currently is without TAA, so you'd be able to enjoy a clear image without insufferable pixel crawl, but it might cost Microsoft an extra month or couple grand in development costs.
So I sort of agree with what you're saying, but its complicated. Anytime theirs bad pixel crawl thus TAA looks superior (a nessacary evil) I also see poorly authored materials, bad mip-maps, and awful overdraw which all create unnecessary aliasing that's easily avoidable because developers aren't even trying to reduce it at all, since you're not suppose to see the image without TAA on to begin with.
So its not exactly fair to compare no TAA vs TAA on a game that was built around using it, because in those games developers aren't even taking the most basic steps in aliasing mitigation, which causes the illusition that TAA was nessacary to begin with.
Nah, fuck TAA, that shit gives me migraines within minutes of playing, modern gaming is trash because of this crap.
Yea it's a cute achievement on technical level don't get me wrong - but I like being able to SEE the videogame I'm playing.
Will happily turn off anti aliasing and motion blur any day of the week. A "simpler" or "outdated" looking game is always more enjoyable than a game with so much rubbish happening to the screen you get sick (see crysis 3)
Fuck anti aliasing, i'm paying for the pixels i want to see all of them. I sometimes use FXAA at MOST. Imagine using 300+ watts of electricity rendering high-fidelity games just to turn it into a blurry mess at the last moment. Diiiiisgusting
Do you not get distracted by the awful artifacts?
The TAA flaws in the game could be cleaned up a lot with DLAA, still baffles me why it was never added to the game, or at the very least regular DLSS.
And they should also allow to disable TAA in-game so that we in the future can just run the game in much higher resolution instead as the form of AA (Supersampling)
Hopefully they add more AA options, maybe something simple like SMAA similar to MCC, but they could hypothetically add more options such as MSAA if they ever decide to.
Why does his beard look like sand 😭
This is exactly the thing I DESPISE about "modern" "photoreal" videogame "graphics" - using more development effort and more hardware resources to ultimately make the game actually look WORSE and still be horribly unoptimized.
All of these *"cutting edge shaders"* that makes dithering on everything, and fake shortcuts like "screenspace reflections" that look worse than some games we had in 2004...
It really seems sometimes like the actual people making the graphical shaders & the art design have completely lost the talent and artistry that previous generations of developers had. Like, go and learn OpenGL 3.0 first -then you can start playing with the multi billion dollar supercomputer...
MSAA was the only good Anti Aliasing solution and then differed rendering ruined it. I'd rather play with AA entirely disabled than look at a blurry mess.
I can confirm I'm in the group that asked "What TAA?"
Sprint is my go-to drink when I get my Big Kahunah Burger.
That detail of the pilot getting bored if you idle during the tutorial is pretty funny
It's like everyone forgot MSAA was invented over 2 decades ago for this reason. Deferred rendering fucked that all up. We traded having clear rendering for having hundreds of lights on screen, when on average you'll only have a couple.
It wasn’t just having hundreds of lights on screen. There were multiple reasons that deferred rendering became the norm as more advanced materials and lighting models became taxing on performance.
MSAA, while nice, is just not realistic unless console gamers are willing to drop their 4K, 60+ fps games.
Sometimes FSR, XeSS, TSR, (and DLSS), generate better results than TAA, depending on the game content, and how they are fine tunned, those should be optional in most games
Agreed, you can even downscale from higher resolutions to a lower-resolution monitor, then use upscaling like FSR to pull performance back. Still looks better.
The answer is yes, it makes almost every game look worse
Nice informative video. It’s so funny how many people seem to dislike taa, when I turn it on I’m always like: Thank god those jaggies are gone. Jaggies bother me WAY more than the image being blurry. I’m playing on a 27” 144 VA panel at 1080p. So for me the jaggies are so apparent that it’s very hard to ignore in most games. I also feel like there really isn’t a solution to this that both gives clarity and removes shimmering except for maybe DLSS. Personall
Don't forget the worst part, since TAA is always blending previous frames with the current one, its essentially motion blur that you _cannot_ disable! Not having an option for disabling TAA is a crime against gamers >:(
I'd also like to express my anger towards upscaling methods, like TAAU, FSR, XeSS, and especially DLSS for being a similar crutch AAA developers have come to rely on these days. There are plenty of games that look great and run great without relying on TAA or upscaling. It IS possible for a dev to optimize their game - it just takes time, and talent (which costs money, obviously).
The fact of the matter is though, when you are targeting a console audience, they don't care about any of this, they won't even notice any of this. So the companies have no real reason to care I guess
This is where developers need to give us the option to turn TAA off and then up the resolution of detail objects like hair and grass after it's been turned off on PC.
I'm someone who despises TAA, with a passion. I would much rather brute force AA by super sampling the image along with some slight blur to clean it up, performance be damned.
I'd rather run a a game at 30 FPS with a clean image than 60 with a blurred image that's lost detail and smears on the slightest movement.
My first time watching a video from your channel. Learned a bunch and really enjoyed the way you laid it out.
Glad to hear it!
Thinking about this, I think a solution that uses "layers" could work, with most of the pixels on the screen ("layer 1") are subjected to TAA, whereas a few effects ("layer 2") could be whitelisted so that they're allowed to stand out
AMAZING video! more of this 🥰
The real villain were the ants
Those damned ants
TAA is the worst thing to happen to gaming. At higher resolutions shimmering and aliasing is, maybe not ideal, but it is 1000x more desirable than everything being a ghosting, smearing, illegible mess. I turn off TAA in every game I can, even if it breaks things. I'm near sighted, and TAA is worse than walking around with my glasses off.
The fact that hair looks bad with TAA off is an infuriating argument to make. The only reason it looks bad is because developers have used TAA as a crutch. It's like saying no one can get anywhere without a car because you need to get on the highway to get anywhere. Well, yeah... Stop making more highways. Stop making everything require TAA.
Halo infinite has the worst implemented TAA I've ever seen. It stopped me from playing the game. I last booted it in 2022. Sad. DLSS really has the best integrated AA solution I've ever seen. Too bad infinite is partnered with AMD. Their solution isn't nearly as good
Instead of focusing on supersampling they focused on crappy temporal technics and upscaling only to add "subsurface scattering" to the games.
It's really a fundamental flaw in the game honestly. We've had games giving us different versions of AA for ages now, but only recently have devs seemingly decided to try to force everyone onto the "modern" solutions which in most cases serve as incredibly obvious double edged swords. I will never understand it, and I dread the day we start getting games with framegen forcefully applied.
Infinite should have been updated to use DLSS/DLAA on PC.
I tried the mod a while back. While it looked great at 100% internal resolution, I actually decided to keep TAA so I can run the internal as low as I want without much impact.
My never ending hatred for TAA…
I miss MSAA.
deferred rendering for every game was a mistake.
Yeah, it's very expensive, but MSAA X8 is glorious on Forza Horizon 5
Source Engine games had MSAA X16Q, never knew what the Q ment, but I never seen anything reach it's level, the choices were no AA, FXAA, MSAA X2, X4, X4Q, X8, X8Q, X16Q.
I find it frustrating when developers don't give you the option to choose between different types of anti-aliasing.
games would look a lot better if they designed for the limitations of the systems instead of trying to smudge together something better with post processing.
It's probably due to growing up with Minecraft and 3DS games with no AA, but games just look wrong to me now if they have any form of AA besides maybe FXAA. Am I alone on this?
Never understood it. I'd rather a gritty/sharp image, than a blurry one that has more latency
@@user-ne9sd4ow1o Agreed, though I’m more concerned with lost detail.
OGSSAA was the absolute goat for maximizing accuracy in detail before deferred rendering took a vaseline dump all over our screens.
Talk about COD ZOMBIES!! I see those references !
I go absolutely feral when late night gaming post.
Ok, but here is something strange. If the game was made WITH TAA IN MIND, why are the effects affected by it ? I mean if you make the game and you use TAA to test things, you would probably notice that the effects you worked on look so different
TXAA is so much better than TAA. It's probably the sharpest AA I've ever seen, specifically the form that appears in Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus. My biggest problem with TAA is how you get the after-imaging in games like Gears of War 4. But now, seeing Halo Infinite's crappy explosions made so much better without TAA... well, now I have another bone to pick with it.
The loss of highlights was probably intentional tuning to get rid of specular antialiasing in the shaders. Checkboards are also a massive optimisation, not just a cheap shortcuts. With a checkboard you can replace all partial transparency with just a grid of fully opaque and fully transparent pixels. Transparency is always super slow (and a real problem for deferred rendering), so checkboards let you just not do that. Even games like The Witcher 2 in 2010 used it when possible. But TAA and DLSS let you just erase the checkboard almost entirely. Turning fake transparency into real transparency. I suspect the tradeoffs are considered acceptable with most games being developed with the intention that they'd be played on a 4K TV. I suspect TAA on Halo Infinite goes from looking like shit at 1080p to the most minor of annoyances at 4K. A higher resolution, or downscaling from a higher resolution, is the only real way to fix the image without introducing issues. DLSS is definitely a lot superior though, but still not close to perfect (early iterations were still pretty crunchy, and it still will break up if there's too much motion in a frame).
LNG I’d love a video speaking on the possibility of 343i returning to the Blam engine - or at least mimicking it in Unreal 5 or porting it, idk anything about engines but yea I feel Slipspace effectively set the franchise back years
with great HD hair comes great responsibility.
Any interfaces and electronic displays on weapons just turn into…an unreadable mush.
Something I noticed is that the TAA tends to look the worst when sprinting. Turns out the cause was screen shake and turning that off significantly reduced the blurriness. I'm guessing it's because TAA has a lot more to smooth over due to the difference in each frame introduced by the shaking.
Halo infinite’s screen shake is also bugged I believe. Something about it doesn’t play correctly.
It feels like some frames are missing from the shake so it will “skip” every now and then.
It looks pretty bad which is sad because Halo 5 had a really good implementation of screen shake
@@LateNightHaloThere are a bunch of visual effects and stuff broken in infinite that they just refuse to fix, just spreading the word, Halo Infinite has no material response or visual effect for the needler specifically hitting vehicles, it just vanishes unlike every other game that has it pop or stick.
TAA is a curse upon modern graphics. It's like how bloom cursed the 2000's and early 2010's.
I dunno if this is really relevant but I also noticed a weird thing with the guns in Infinite where parts of the models will weirdly jitter around for no reason while you’re holding it
I do not think that the TAA makes Halo Infinite look worse than it does without TAA. As you showed off in the in-motion comparison, the game looks absolutely awful without any anti aliasing. However, I would really appreciate it if 343 would have provided other anti aliasing options in the graphics menus. I really don't understand why they didn't. What sucks is that Doom Eternal suffers from the exact same blurriness problem.
Great video thank you for bringing attention to this topic. Halo infinite cutscenes look like pure ass in my opinion
Wondering if a second pass after TAA to re-draw details and particle effects specifically would help preserve detail without turning it off entirely and dealing with shimmery, crawly aliasing artifacts. It would add to development time, with artists having to designate what ignores TAA and what doesn't, but could potentially be a good solution with the right art direction.
2:14 very first call of duty WOOOOO!
Is there such thing in some recent games like dynamic taa? (DTAA)
Would make sense in incorporating a smart system that lowers or disables taa for any far or specific details, and increase it for areas with repeated patterns or sharp edges.
Seems like a no brainer for graphics tech to look into.
Also, reach objectively did explosions the best out of any game in the halo series just saying.
its not a big deal. but ever since reach my eyes work overload when playing halo. personally id rather have a 30 fps game with good graphics and little fizz than a 60 fps game with worse visuals and very fizzy shit, look at halo 5. when animations die just a view feet away just to run at 60
if your game cant run steady at 60 there is NOTHING wrong with making it run at 30, 40, or 50 fps just dont sabotage the visuals
I think being able to disable TAA in only multiplayer is a good compromise, campaign is already trying to be a visual spectacle with a big demanding map and tons of foliage that really makes TAA more ideal. You aren't reading any man-made street signs or losing much detail when you're just exploring the grassy open world, only really the explosive and electric effects look particularly bad.
And I'm sure multiplayer users would appreciate the visual cues like the sparks from an explosion just out of view or the eye-catching effect around the pickups across the map.
Xbox Series X supersamples to 4k at 60 FPS from my 1080p TV, allthough campaign is a stutter fest, it really can't keep up, i wish i could run it at 1080p 60 FPS without supersampling.
That's why i use TSR whenever possible. TSR can be used for almost all Unreal Engine 4 Games. Other Engines must have it implemented.
That resolves almost all ghosting and doesn't remove so much detail. It's not DLSS quality, but it's better than TAA.
Love these kinds of videos; even though I don’t want to go into game design (I’m already heading into psychology) they do teach me about the techniques and efforts behind games, like the BTS features of a movie.
TAA fuckin sucks, even ignoring the visual issues with it. Temporal post processing gives me migraines, but at the same time bad aliasing gives me headaches and motion sickness sometimes. In Infinite I run Hybred's mod, in addition to ReShade SMAA. The lack of issues in Infinite without TAA just shows that it'll be fine with MSAA
TAA is garbage in every game and I hate it, gives me headaches within minutes of play. TAA is a scourge of modern gaming!
Total War Three Kingdoms was the game that taught me to hate TAA. It was more or less fine on the campaign map, but in the battles with thousands of small moving objects on screen at once? Whole armies became impressionist paintings. You could turn it off, but then the shadows stopped working and the vegetation became alias central.
And this came out shortly after TW Warhammer 2, where I was able to use MSAA and it looked great. But no option for that in 3K.
Now I want to play og zombies.
Edit: This also shows how rushed the game was, which sucks because the forge with ai was the best thing we've had in a long time if it was in halo reach forge it would have 100% taken off. But now even that is mostly dead, which sucks.
Yes, TAA is fucking terrible. Cyberpunk 2077 has it forced on with no way to turn it off and causes artifacting on walls, clothing, and shadow smearing/trailing.
I wonder if it's possible to make it dynamic so that TAA turns on when you move then automatically turns off when the image is still.
T-AA makes everything look awful, just run DLSS if possible. If not then run literally anything else for antialiasing 🤷♂️
People unironically praising the usage of upscalers when a modern GPU running modern games should be capable of taking the MSAA or 150% resolution scale bullet to get "perfect" AA. Yes for aging GPUs its a great idea or alternative
And dont get me started on fake frame generation
TAA makes everything look worse. If you want an extreme example of terrible TAA play Jedi Survivor. You can't even turn it off!