Temporal Anti-Aliasing and Adaptive Anti-Aliasing

[i an not a nerd]

Hey all,

Does anyone here know what Temporal Anti-Aliasing and Adaptive Anti-Aliasing are? In my ATI control panel it lists them, I have no idea what they do and I am curious. I checked ATI's site and they have no explination beyond "this innovative technologie enhances your gaming experience" and Wikipedia didn't have a good description. ("Temporal Anti-Aliasing involves a form of motion blur"). Anyone know about these terms?

Thanks,

MikeB

[saphalline]

Temporal AA is used more for video/movies. It has to do with smoothing the edges of effects between frames, just like you quoted. It's important for image quality because blurring is much less noticeable than pixelation - or rather is interpreted by the human brain as a higher quality image. Certain games with blurring effects can also use temporal AA, but it's not as good as other AA implementations for games in general. Typically it's used as a filter, for certain effects like in NFS: Underground in those "super-fast" modes.

Adaptive AA is used for games. It's much more efficient than a static full-screen modeling scheme like super-sampling or multi-sampling, and the image quality is just as good if not better. What happens is that all rasterized polygon regions encompassing an edge are tiled into blocks of pixels. The blocks are then tested for edges: if the block contains an edge, then AA is rendered over it - if not, it is left alone and performance gains a boost. Adaptive AA is a recent scheme and I believe is only supported by the latest VPU's/GPU's. The R5xx and the G7x for sure, but I think the R420/480 and NV4x support it to a lesser extent as well. I'd have to look that up, though.

[i an not a nerd]

okey thanks man!