Turn off Temporal anti-aliasing?

[Ec8er]

Hello!
I am really interested in the game but I saw that there are no options for turning off TAA (Temporal anti-aliasing) or enabling any other AA method.
Are you planning on adding these options in the future?
I really disappointed that a lot of games force it as a default because it causes blurred picture and causes ghosting artifacts in motion.
Hope for the best!

[h3r2tic]

Hey! The softness of our game's presentation is a deliberate choice, and TAA is playing into it (together with DoF) rather than accidentally causing it. TAA also gives us denoising and supersampling, which many of our graphical effects need. As far as I know there is no real alternative.

Turning TAA off is possible via semi-secret developer menus, but you'll see a lot of flicker and visual noise. We aim to unlock internal resolution scaling to go above 1.0, but even at 2.0 it does not fix the noise & flicker.

FWIW I agree that TAA-induced blurriness and ghosting is a plague on many games, but do you think it's actually a problem in Tiny Glade specifically?

[Ec8er]

Originally posted by h3r2tic:

Hey! The softness of our game's presentation is a deliberate choice, and TAA is playing into it (together with DoF) rather than accidentally causing it. TAA also gives us denoising and supersampling, which many of our graphical effects need. As far as I know there is no real alternative.

Turning TAA off is possible via semi-secret developer menus, but you'll see a lot of flicker and visual noise. We aim to unlock internal resolution scaling to go above 1.0, but even at 2.0 it does not fix the noise & flicker.

FWIW I agree that TAA-induced blurriness and ghosting is a plague on many games, but do you think it's actually a problem in Tiny Glade specifically?

Hello! Thank you for your reply!

I don't think it's a HUGE issue in this game exactly, but I think is an HUGE issue in games in general. Lately I've been skipping new 3d games that are mostly AAA, mostly because of their overall quality and price. But for past couple of years I've been skipping them for their image quality related to the TAA.
I think this is a huge issue in the game industry that devs rely more and more on those temporal solutions to mask the aliasing. It makes the image blurry, especially in motion and creates ghosting artifacts, and without it, it creates image that is full of visual noice. I remember when couple of years ago games didn't have that problem and I could turn off any anti-aliasing method and still be able to play the game without major graphical glitches like shimmering, flicker or noice.
I'm worried that every future game will have blured visuals with subpar image quality full of artifacts.

I'm not saying that you should rework the entire game just so it would look good without TAA because probably the engine you're using won't allow it or you would have to rework all your assets or shaders (I'm not a dev so i don't know). I just wanted to point out the problem that i'm glad you're aware off. Also, having more options is always better because if one person have a problem with that, I'm sure there are more people who would like to have more options too. I personally like sharp looking games with visible pixels.

Also I just checked and depending on the screen resolution, the shimmering effect on shadows is more visible than on higher resolutions.

I also would like you to watch @ThreatInteractive Youtube channel. It's made by a developer who takes this topic seriously and who wants to fix blurry graphics in games.
Please give it a watch!

So, back to your question. It's not a HUGE problem and it doesn't make this game unplayable, but I think it's still a problem.

I hope your game becomes a great success and I wish you the best.

Dopiero teraz zauważyłem że posiadasz polskie nazwisko :)

[h3r2tic]

We made the engine ourselves, and wrote the renderer from scratch, so it technically "allows" anything, but if we got rid of TAA, then suddenly our shadows, volumetrics, SSAO, global illumination, DoF, reflections and refractions would all need additional denoisers - and that's expensive in terms of both GPU performance and VRAM utilization. And we'd still have aliasing... FXAA/SMAA and the whole family of morphological AA is a mess with high geometric density, and MSAA is expensive in a deferred renderer.

I take the topic seriously, and yet still opted to use TAA for the game. As flawed as it might be, it still is the sweet spot of performance and image quality for us.

[Ec8er]

Originally posted by h3r2tic:

We made the engine ourselves, and wrote the renderer from scratch, so it technically "allows" anything, but if we got rid of TAA, then suddenly our shadows, volumetrics, SSAO, global illumination, DoF, reflections and refractions would all need additional denoisers - and that's expensive in terms of both GPU performance and VRAM utilization. And we'd still have aliasing... FXAA/SMAA and the whole family of morphological AA is a mess with high geometric density, and MSAA is expensive in a deferred renderer.

I take the topic seriously, and yet still opted to use TAA for the game. As flawed as it might be, it still is the sweet spot of performance and image quality for us.

Hello!

I understand. Still I think it would be good to add an option to turn off TAA if someone wants to do it. Thank you for your replies and good luck with your game!

[Pepe]

Originally posted by h3r2tic:

Hey! The softness of our game's presentation is a deliberate choice, and TAA is playing into it (together with DoF) rather than accidentally causing it. TAA also gives us denoising and supersampling, which many of our graphical effects need. As far as I know there is no real alternative.

Turning TAA off is possible via semi-secret developer menus, but you'll see a lot of flicker and visual noise. We aim to unlock internal resolution scaling to go above 1.0, but even at 2.0 it does not fix the noise & flicker.

FWIW I agree that TAA-induced blurriness and ghosting is a plague on many games, but do you think it's actually a problem in Tiny Glade specifically?

Originally posted by h3r2tic:

We made the engine ourselves, and wrote the renderer from scratch, so it technically "allows" anything, but if we got rid of TAA, then suddenly our shadows, volumetrics, SSAO, global illumination, DoF, reflections and refractions would all need additional denoisers - and that's expensive in terms of both GPU performance and VRAM utilization. And we'd still have aliasing... FXAA/SMAA and the whole family of morphological AA is a mess with high geometric density, and MSAA is expensive in a deferred renderer.

I take the topic seriously, and yet still opted to use TAA for the game. As flawed as it might be, it still is the sweet spot of performance and image quality for us.

Wow! Congrats in making your own game engine. After posting about turning off antialiasing, I've seen this post. It does seem like a good tradeoff to have some sort of antialiasing on and to skip post processing other effects.

The reason I'd like a way to turn off the antialiasing is to be able to play on a HiDPI monitor with an iGPU without compromising too much on the render resolution. HiDPI monitors don't suffer from aliasing that much, it's barely visible, but the antialiasing really hit the performance on high res.

Now, I'm sure I know a lot less about 3D engines than you, still I have a couple of silly questions I'd like to ask related to noise and flickering. What do you mean by noise? Is it moire effect like noise? That could be countered with anisotropic filtering, which, as far as I can tell from many games played, it's way less intensive on the GPU than antialiasing. I haven't seen an option for this in the game, that's why I'm asking. I've heard of flickering in other games and it could be happening for various reasons. The most basic anti-flickering option even I know of is the use of double buffering (or triple buffering). Are you using double or triple buffering already?

[Ec8er]

Originally posted by Pepe:

Originally posted by h3r2tic:

Hey! The softness of our game's presentation is a deliberate choice, and TAA is playing into it (together with DoF) rather than accidentally causing it. TAA also gives us denoising and supersampling, which many of our graphical effects need. As far as I know there is no real alternative.

Turning TAA off is possible via semi-secret developer menus, but you'll see a lot of flicker and visual noise. We aim to unlock internal resolution scaling to go above 1.0, but even at 2.0 it does not fix the noise & flicker.

FWIW I agree that TAA-induced blurriness and ghosting is a plague on many games, but do you think it's actually a problem in Tiny Glade specifically?

Originally posted by h3r2tic:

We made the engine ourselves, and wrote the renderer from scratch, so it technically "allows" anything, but if we got rid of TAA, then suddenly our shadows, volumetrics, SSAO, global illumination, DoF, reflections and refractions would all need additional denoisers - and that's expensive in terms of both GPU performance and VRAM utilization. And we'd still have aliasing... FXAA/SMAA and the whole family of morphological AA is a mess with high geometric density, and MSAA is expensive in a deferred renderer.

I take the topic seriously, and yet still opted to use TAA for the game. As flawed as it might be, it still is the sweet spot of performance and image quality for us.

Wow! Congrats in making your own game engine. After posting about turning off antialiasing, I've seen this post. It does seem like a good tradeoff to have some sort of antialiasing on and to skip post processing other effects.

The reason I'd like a way to turn off the antialiasing is to be able to play on a HiDPI monitor with an iGPU without compromising too much on the render resolution. HiDPI monitors don't suffer from aliasing that much, it's barely visible, but the antialiasing really hit the performance on high res.

Now, I'm sure I know a lot less about 3D engines than you, still I have a couple of silly questions I'd like to ask related to noise and flickering. What do you mean by noise? Is it moire effect like noise? That could be countered with anisotropic filtering, which, as far as I can tell from many games played, it's way less intensive on the GPU than antialiasing. I haven't seen an option for this in the game, that's why I'm asking. I've heard of flickering in other games and it could be happening for various reasons. The most basic anti-flickering option even I know of is the use of double buffering (or triple buffering). Are you using double or triple buffering already?

Hi I'm not a gamedev but I can show you an example of "noise" with TAA off:
https://youtu.be/lJu_DgCHfx4?t=369

I recommend you watching all videos on this channel because that guy explains in detail this huge problem in modern games.