Xbox 360 to get PS3-style MLAA anti-aliasing, “quality bar raised”

[OG_Monkey]

http://beefjack.com/news/xbox-360-to...ty-bar-raised/

The PS3 may lose one of its graphical advantages over the Xbox 360, with a team working on implementing a version of Sony’s MLAA anti-aliasing technique seen in such games as God of War 3 and Killzone 3 on Microsoft’s console – and they claim that they’ve “raised the quality bar considerably” over other versions.

[Segitz]

It's nice... but I can't see a lot of sense in this. First, there already is Nvidias FXAA, which runs well on both 360 and PS3. And second of all, because of the eDRAM the 360 has more or less free 4xMSAA, which should be enough for most cases anyways. Well, you engine has to be able to tile the framebuffer and you can't use deferred rendering.

Still, it's always nice to have the option.

[frosty]

It also uses the GPU to achieve this, which leaves me wondering how much gain they'll get from it. For instance, in PS3's case the SPU's are doing it, which leaves the GPU freed up to do geometry, texturing, shading, etc... Doing all of it on the GPU just throws one more thing into the chain of things the GPU has to do before it can send a frame to the screen. I'm just not sure how practical that would be. If you're not GPU bound already, it would make for a good way to render a nice clean image. However if you are already taxing the hell out of the GPU, it does seem like using MSAA (since the EDRAM pretty much eliminates the performance hit from 4xMSAA) would be the better route to take, even if not as high quality.

[Segitz]

Makes me think the guys just misinterpreted FXAA as something 360 specific... which it is not (Duke3D uses it on all 3 systems already).