PS3 to lose another console exclusive to the Xbox 360

[CerebralTiger]

While multi-sample anti-aliasing (MSAA) has been available on both Xbox 360 and PS3 since day one, RAM and bandwidth limitations on the Sony console often meant that early cross-platform games would only feature anti-aliasing on the 360 version.

Sony didn’t take this lying down though, and created a new effect – dubbed MLAA – that used five of the PlayStation 3 SPUs to produce far superior results to traditional MSAA techniques in minimising “jaggies” and creating a smoother overall image. Debuted with God of War III, MLAA has since come to be a regular feature of both first and third party PS3 games.

It was, seemingly, an effect the Xbox 360′s CPU couldn’t match – but now a team of two developers have got it working on not only the 360 but also PC by using the GPU to achieve the MLAA – and they believe their implementation is superior.

MLAA is considered highly demanding, taking 3-4ms to render on the PS3 while using five SPUS, but Jorge Jimenez and Jose I. Echevarria say their 360 version is faster: “On the Xbox 360 we run at 2.47ms, with still a lot of optimisations to try,” Jimenez said.

“We can’t speak for all the MLAA(-like) implementations out there, but we think our current version 1.6 (the one used for these comparisons) has raised the quality bar considerably,” Jimenez told gamesindustry.biz. “In our tests, it produces results on par (when not superior) to CPU MLAA.”

It’ll certainly be fascinating to see if 360 developers can put MLAA to the same striking effect as seen on the PS3, and, whatever platform you game on, the ability of programmers to continue to push higher performance out of the ageing consoles is impressive.

Full interview here: http://www.gamesindustry.biz/article...-360-pc?page=2



Should be interesting to see whether these guys can actually live up to their claims :P

[Magma]

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[deoX Dna]

in ur face ps fan boys rizwan

[USUF]

From what i've heard, despite the amount of time it takes to create the MLAA effect, it barely impacts performance of the game. That right?

[Necrokiller]

Sony didn’t take this lying down though, and created a new effect – dubbed MLAA

Sony didn't 'create' MLAA, Intel did.

AMD gpus already do MLAA.

FXAA > MLAA anyway. Which is faster on the 360 than PS3.

[CerebralTiger]

From what i've heard, despite the amount of time it takes to create the MLAA effect, it barely impacts performance of the game. That right?

Correct.

Sony didn't 'create' MLAA, Intel did.

True, but Sony Santa Monica's implementation is the best one so far, so I guess they get some bragging rights. AMD's implementation isn't all that great either.

FXAA > MLAA anyway.

Not really. I'll just reiterate what a well-informed neogaf user said on the matter:

msaa has best visuals but is expensive to compute and also doesnt work if theres tone mapping
mlaa looks good except it causes alot of pixel crawling and also affects texture quality
fxaa looks the slightly worse than the others but is the cheapest and fastest to compute
taa temporal looks decent but causes blurring during movement

GOW III MLAA > FXAA. It's just that since MLAA is a screen space effect, it doesn't work as well with certain games, resulting in the dot crawl effect.

[faraany3k]

And where the hell they will implement it. On Seaseme Street??? lolz Where are the first party exclusives??

[Necrokiller]

Not at all. I'll just reiterate what a well-informed neogaf user said on the matter:
GOW III MLAA > FXAA. It's just that since MLAA is a screen space effect, it doesn't work as well with certain games, resulting in the dot crawl effect

I guess that also depends on the implementation then. FXAA handles sub-pixel aliasing better than MLAA (dot crawl effect, both distracting in GOWIII as well as KZ3), doesn't suffer from blurriness at higher resolutions and is more efficient to boot on all platforms. Battlefield 3 on PC will support FXAA as well.

DigitalFoundry seems quite impressed with it.

Playing with FXAA anti-aliasing filter. Quality is excellent (in motion too).

PC and console iterations of the technology exist, where the strengths of the respective GPUs provide two settings: performance (console) and quality (PC).

The console version of FXAA can process a 720p image in around 1ms, providing quite remarkable quality with only a very small performance hit.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/di...ace-off?page=2

With these results on the GPU, it frees up the SPUs for other things. Highly effective for the consoles imo.

[CerebralTiger]

doesn't suffer from blurriness at higher resolutions

That's the thing, it deteriorates texture quality at 720p. Granted it is very efficient, but it isn't a viable option for consoles, at least for now.

The same article also says this:

The smoothing effect on PC is perhaps not best suited to lower resolutions like 720p, though, and the FXAA seems to take away a little too much detail.

Having said that, if you ignore the texture degradation, FXAA would probably be better suited to the 360, considering how GPU resources are typically more plentiful on the platform than they are on PlayStation 3 (also mentioned in the DF article).

[Wolfy]

oh crap.... the title scared the hell out of me, I thought some first party exclusive going multi plat... btw who really cares about this geek things, do we really consider such things while playing games. really one should have a Mega HD TV to pick eye and say hey watch the ps3 or Xbox GPU power!! isnt it?