Just FXAA, which may or may not work.

The anti aliasing is still god awful. If you can run the game in 4k then that basically fixes the issue and the game actually looks really good in 4k, too.
Someone needs to teach Gust how to implement TAA in their games...

Originally posted by Sharkitect:

The anti aliasing is still god awful. If you can run the game in 4k then that basically fixes the issue and the game actually looks really good in 4k, too.
Someone needs to teach Gust how to implement TAA in their games...

The old Atelier Sophie supported MSAA. Are you saying that it's not supported in this version?

OG Sophie you could force great AA from the driver on Nvidia cards with the right compatibility flag since it was DX9.
This looks like it needs DX11 now? And if they lazily ripped out MSAA (Obviously in most of their games there's not much reason why they shouldn't support arbitrary resolutions and MSAA to boot. Clearly OG Sophie is proof) then you are basically screwed lol. (Esepcially if it's like most other ass backwards TK games with hardcoded resolution support limited to a few select resolutions. Then you can't downsample from anything from higher than 4k. And if you have a 4k monitor and tons of GPU headroom then you have no options)

https://www.screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/13283
Sorry these are the only screenshots on my hard drive from way back when it first came out that show a comparison of just how nice this game can look. (And yes sorry for 1600x900.)

If TK still made games with a DX9 renderer you could likely still force good AA in those games , at least on an Nvidia GPU.

But it sucks because now I see that TK in their infinite wisdom have delisted the OG game basically and I never re bought it after how it was at launch. (And the hilariously low res UI assets) Forgot it even existed and now all you have is the DX version to buy with it's 0 graphical upgrades, removed MSAA and DX11. (And lord knows what else, like limited resolution support?)

Originally posted by Sharkitect:

The anti aliasing is still god awful. If you can run the game in 4k then that basically fixes the issue and the game actually looks really good in 4k, too.
Someone needs to teach Gust how to implement TAA in their games...

TAA, please no! That AA solution only makes blurry graphics.

As for Atelier Sophie DX, you can run the game in 4k or such, so theres no need for blurry AA solutions.

But MSAA does work on the nvidia control panel, not sure with Radeon cards.

Does MSAA work? I just tried it, and it looks the same as without. MFAA that is.

Originally posted by General Plastro:

Originally posted by Sharkitect:

The anti aliasing is still god awful. If you can run the game in 4k then that basically fixes the issue and the game actually looks really good in 4k, too.
Someone needs to teach Gust how to implement TAA in their games...

TAA, please no! That AA solution only makes blurry graphics.

As for Atelier Sophie DX, you can run the game in 4k or such, so theres no need for blurry AA solutions.

But MSAA does work on the nvidia control panel, not sure with Radeon cards.

TAA doesn't have to make the graphics blurrier inherently. (SMAA T2x is a good example of well tuned TAA that doesn't do the best job of fixing aliasing. But it adds the least obscene artifacts and image quality is consistent) That's how people have chosen to compensate for the fact that most TAA solutions are poorly tuned, make bad design decisions and/or are outright terrible. The irony is in the name, as TAA often does not consistently solve temporal aliasing problems and isn't consistent in image quality depending on whether the camera or any objects are moving in a lot of cases. That is one of the biggest issues is the lack of consistency. A consistently softer image also =/= inherently mean it's bad either depending on the context. Pixel quality and consistency of pixel quality over time in motion is a big hurdle. Where TAA introduces the most artifacts,the image is inconsistent, or while stationary the image looks great. Start moving and then the image gets increasingly more attenuated (And then sharpened in some cases). So it's constantly oscillating between states of being ultra sharp and ultra blurry. Causing a perceptual dissonance in image quality.
Fatshark's Vermintide engine is a good example, Crysis Remastered, Hitman 2016/2/3 as well as older versions of UE4TAA where as long as you don't actually move at all. It looks great. Start moving and suddenly it's blur city.
Examples of TAA that have consistent image quality even if softer and have visible artifacts are SMAAT2x (Depending on the game)The Order 1866,Left Alive (at high resolutions), RE-Engine (At higher resolutions),Doom 2016/Doom Eternal,TXAA (Depending on the game).

In general, TAA overly aggressively filters out information in a cheap way and try to add in some steps to recover that signal. RE-Engine TAA is a good example of this, if you hex edit and disable the built in sharpening pass in their TAA shaders you can see just how much they attenuate information. (In addition to creating a harder job as mentioned below for the TAA with how undersamping for different effects is handled.) The effect at lower resolutions is much more pronounced and it is less visible the higher resolution you go as it scales well. To RE Engine's credit, their TAA is actually one of the better quality techniques (At higher resolutions and the internal sharpening enabled), as long as you don't use Screen Space Reflections while using it. As enabling SSR causes severe smearing artifacts on many surfaces with TAA. While turning off SSR fixes does not. It is not however good at processing things like dithering that they seem to insist on using for hair. Which causes lots of ugly artifacts.

Deveopers keep throwing more and more complex undersampling problems (Like dithering, ray tracing, low resolution effects,etc)*cough UE4* into terrible quality TAA solutions hoping it will solve their issues. They are just making the job harder for the algorithm and in UE4's case it's so bad that even something that can produce decent results in the best circumstances, like DLSS, struggle even. Just try the recently released UE4 Ray Tracing and DLSS demo. You have two options in that demo, DLSS and UE4 TAA and they both look like garbage as they struggle to try and denoise the ray tracing and provide anti aliasing at the same time. It's horrendous.
Likewise the new System Shock Remake Demo throws DLSS and TAA for a loop in that it feeds the worst possible and most undersampled image it can to both techniques because it uses low resolution forced point sampled textures on every surface in the game except the UI. Try that and see the issues that creates as well.

As for Sophie, unless you can provide A/B screenshots showing MSAA is working in DX, you are seeing a placebo.

Some comparisons of what I mention
RE Engine TAA With/Without it's built in sharpening https://www.screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/13372
RE Engine without AA vs TAA without internal sharpening
https://www.screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/13373 (the internal sharpening is disabled because even with AA disabled the sharpening is still in effect. Which is why RE Engine games look horrendous without AA enabled. They are sharpened into oblivion even when TAA isn't used)

Here's some rough approximations of how the game is over attenuated with bad TAA and then sharpened showing how you get so many bad TAA techniques (like UE4) with those ugly splotchy looking dot artifacts.
Using Crysis OG as an example since I had the screens laying around.
No AA https://u.cubeupload.com/MrBonk/1edNoAA.png
Simple blur applied https://u.cubeupload.com/MrBonk/noaablurred.png
That scene is then sharpened strongly https://u.cubeupload.com/MrBonk/NoAAblurredthensharp.png (See the splotchy dot artifacts in the distance?)
Same scene with enhanced 4xSGSSAA using the built in MSAA https://u.cubeupload.com/MrBonk/270enhance4xSG.png

TAA stationary vs Movement
https://www.screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/13374

I think they don't support MSAA anymore. FXAA is not as good as MSAA, but the worst part is that the FXAA implementation is completely broken and destroys details.

Sophie DX - incorrectly applied FXAA: http://puu.sh/HAU9o.png
Sophie OG - MSAA 4x, crop of backpack: https://imgur.com/kcSOXLW

Originally posted by BONKERS:

text

Interesting read, altho i hope we are almost reaching the moment where traditional AA will start to become no longer relevant in lieu of using higher resolutions. I have yet to seen a game look good where either cheap AA solutions (FXAA and TAA) are used, even with RE games, give me the over-sharpened image in 4k over any other blurred option!

But then again, we still have developers using Chromatic Aberration all the time during gameplay with no rime or reason other to induce headaches in players, so i dont expect them to learn anytime soon.

Originally posted by General Plastro:

Interesting read, altho i hope we are almost reaching the moment where traditional AA will start to become no longer relevant in lieu of using higher resolutions. I have yet to seen a game look good where either cheap AA solutions (FXAA and TAA) are used, even with RE games, give me the over-sharpened image in 4k over any other blurred option!

But then again, we still have developers using Chromatic Aberration all the time during gameplay with no rime or reason other to induce headaches in players, so i dont expect them to learn anytime soon.

I don't think modern games will be using traditional AA anytime soon, particularly with the development of even more performance hungry techniques eg. raytracing.

It does make sense to categorize AA techniques, generally. From cheapest to heaviest:

Rendering one sample per pixel:
MLAA, FXAA, SMAA - Post-process AA is the "cheapest" kind of antialiasing. And since it's so terrible, it also basically costs no performance (SMAA Ultra is sub-1ms on modern GPUs today).

Rendering one sample per pixel, but integrated over time:
TAA is the graphics equivalent of trying to have your cake and eating it too. The cake is "supersampling image quality" and the eating it too part is "without the performance cost". The trick is to render multiple samples, one sample per frame over many frames, and integrate the output over multiple frames. Generally these are 2-3 ms on modern GPUs. Too bad it by definition integrates over time, leading to ghosting/shimmering tradeoff. DL approaches to this are improving this tradeoff, but haven't been adopted universally.

Rendering N samples per pixel, for geometry edges: MSAA
"Traditional" MSAA. It doesn't do anything for anything that isn't the edge of geometry, eg. textures, shader aliasing, etc. So its relevance today is not very high.

Rendering N samples per pixel: SSAA / Supersampling
The typical N-samples-per-pixel sampling, which cost scales with number of samples. Mostly impractical. TAA should resolve to this when there is no motion.

Originally posted by 百合 姫:

Originally posted by General Plastro:

Interesting read, altho i hope we are almost reaching the moment where traditional AA will start to become no longer relevant in lieu of using higher resolutions. I have yet to seen a game look good where either cheap AA solutions (FXAA and TAA) are used, even with RE games, give me the over-sharpened image in 4k over any other blurred option!

But then again, we still have developers using Chromatic Aberration all the time during gameplay with no rime or reason other to induce headaches in players, so i dont expect them to learn anytime soon.

I don't think modern games will be using traditional AA anytime soon, particularly with the development of even more performance hungry techniques eg. raytracing.

It does make sense to categorize AA techniques, generally. From cheapest to heaviest:

Rendering one sample per pixel:
MLAA, FXAA, SMAA - Post-process AA is the "cheapest" kind of antialiasing. And since it's so terrible, it also basically costs no performance (SMAA Ultra is sub-1ms on modern GPUs today).

Rendering one sample per pixel, but integrated over time:
TAA is the graphics equivalent of trying to have your cake and eating it too. The cake is "supersampling image quality" and the eating it too part is "without the performance cost". The trick is to render multiple samples, one sample per frame over many frames, and integrate the output over multiple frames. Generally these are 2-3 ms on modern GPUs. Too bad it by definition integrates over time, leading to ghosting/shimmering tradeoff. DL approaches to this are improving this tradeoff, but haven't been adopted universally.

Rendering N samples per pixel, for geometry edges: MSAA
"Traditional" MSAA. It doesn't do anything for anything that isn't the edge of geometry, eg. textures, shader aliasing, etc. So its relevance today is not very high.

Rendering N samples per pixel: SSAA / Supersampling
The typical N-samples-per-pixel sampling, which cost scales with number of samples. Mostly impractical. TAA should resolve to this when there is no motion.

Oh... what i meant by this is the adoption of higher resolutions in lieu of Anti Aliasing, if 4k becomes a more commonly used resolution, AA becomes mostly redundant.

Unless we suddenly start using bigger monitors (i mean literal bigger 4k monitors)... then the problem arises again... lol

But then again, this is the post processing obsessed game development, wouldnt suprise me if devs also would want to apply AA to a 4k resolution thats gonna be displayed 99% of the time on either a standard 4k monitor or lower res one.

Hell, we have VR developers applying TAA to their games and getting flak from the community for doing so, as in VR, any blur is not only easily noticiable, but causes nausea for most people, since your essentially simulating astigmatism for everyone.

Originally posted by General Plastro:

Oh... what i meant by this is the adoption of higher resolutions in lieu of Anti Aliasing, if 4k becomes a more commonly used resolution, AA becomes mostly redundant.

That's the worse type of AA, i.e., FXAA.
Huge cost but close-to-invisible improvement over MSAA.

I made a patch to enable MSAA https://github.com/TellowKrinkle/atelier-sync-fix/releases/tag/atelier-sophie-20230817

Drop its d3d11.dll next to the game and edit the atfix.ini it creates with your preferred MSAA sample count

Thank you for that. Maybe i'll finally buy it again. I bought it originally with the first version and the downgraded 2D assets were so appalling that I refunded it and forgot it existed because it seem to take them forever to actually patch it. When this came out, to find out they removed DX9 and MSAA support made it another nope. (The DX9 port was one of the few good TK PC ports they made too aside from the 2D asset resolution blunders. Proper arbitrary resolution support,etc)Because correct me if I am wrong, but the original DX9 game is no longer accessible right?
This game was too beautiful with good AA to play without it.
https://u.cubeupload.com/MrBonk/3680x000100C18xSG3.png (8xSGSSAA ; which needs MSAA to work)

Originally posted by BONKERS:

Thank you for that. Maybe i'll finally buy it again. I bought it originally with the first version and the downgraded 2D assets were so appalling that I refunded it and forgot it existed because it seem to take them forever to actually patch it. When this came out, to find out they removed DX9 and MSAA support made it another nope. (The DX9 port was one of the few good TK PC ports they made too aside from the 2D asset resolution blunders. Proper arbitrary resolution support,etc)Because correct me if I am wrong, but the original DX9 game is no longer accessible right?
This game was too beautiful with good AA to play without it.
https://u.cubeupload.com/MrBonk/3680x000100C18xSG3.png (8xSGSSAA ; which needs MSAA to work)

It's still buyable on Humble Bundle as individual game and as pack:
https://www.humblebundle.com/store/atelier-sophie-the-alchemist-of-the-mysterious-book
https://www.humblebundle.com/store/gust-bundle-atelier-sophie-and-nights-of-azure