Morphological Anti-Aliasing

[matthew]

Interesting post here about how Intel wants to move Anti-Aliasing from the GPU to the CPU. It features a few images from Battlefield: Bad Company 2 showcasing how the new techniques can improve the look of a game.

[Petr Schreiber]

Hi Matthew,

I am reading through the article for some days, and still not sure what to think about it.
The performance chart in the end looks promising, but I see one problem in whole comparison.
As page 11 says, measurements are performed on:

• Intel® Core™ i7-2820QM Processor (Intel® microarchitecture code name Sandy Bridge, 4 cores 8 threads @2.30 GHz) with GT2 processor graphics, 4 GB of RAM, Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit Service Pack 1
• Intel® Core™ i5-660 Processor (codename “Clarkdale”, 2 cores 4 threads @ 3.33 Ghz), with GMA HD Graphics (codename “Ironlake”), 2 GB of RAM, Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit Service Pack 1

So they compare performance of very fast CPUs with very slow GPUs. As we are speaking antialiasing, I doubt any gamer or graphic designer will stay with (processor) integrated GPU. I guess with solid PCI-E card from AMD or NVIDIA the results would be different. Did you find anywhere Windows binaries of their solution? I would be very much interested on trying it on various PC and see the real performance.

On the other side, I must say I am really pleasantly surprised how many new approaches to antialiasing appeared lately, it seems this area of graphics has its new gold era again!


Petr

[matthew]

I think technology such as this isn't being aimed at the PC gamers with expensive machines. If there was a way to get games like Battlefield 3 or Crysis to run & look good on Integrated Cards (other than using systems like OnLive or Gaikai) it would transform the fortunes of the PC gaming industry as a lot more people would consider buying games for their PC rather than a Console.