MSAA only samples the geometry multiple times, not the whole scene. It doesn’t work very well in games with a lot of shaders and other post process work, which is basically every game made in the last decade.

What GP is describing is SSAA (Super sampled anti-aliasing).

[–] LouNeko@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Thats what I meant by edge detection. I think part of the downfall of MSAA in modern gaming is foliage. Nowadays every field in videogames is filled with lush grass, same goes for trees and bushes. They aren't flat textures of low poly models anymore. Most engines use completely different rendering methods for foliage to get the 1000s of swaying leafs and grass on screen with minimum performance impact. But having to detect all the edges of every single piece of grass and apply oversampling to it, would make any game run at single digit frames. There are certainly a few other things that GPUs have to render in bulk to justfy novel rendering methods, but foliage is by far the best example. So I can understand why post processing AA is easier to implement. But is TAA really the best we cab do? Especially because things like swaying grass becomes a green blob through TAA. Slow and fine movement like swaying is really the bane of temporal sampling.