New Anti-Aliasing technique for Xbox 360
So far the PS3 and Xbox 360 could use up to x4 MSAA (Multisampling Anti-Aliasing) games, which consumed a large part of the memory systems. That is why sometimes the developers chose not to use any Anti-Aliasing technique.
On the PS3, just because of lack of eDRAM in the GPU, it is difficult to use MSAA. So many multiplatform releases do not use any Anti-Aliasing technique except in the versions of the Xbox 360 using x2 MSAA. This is inappropriate to some degree for the potential of Cell, because most often 360 is chosen as the base development platform for multiplatform games. Moreover, the latter constitutes a substantial victory for Microsoft in this generation against Sony, by choosing to throw the Xbox 360 a year earlier on the market. However, in the Xbox 360 there were limitations. The 10 MB eDRAM proved little for HD image on 720p.
This situation, therefore, is a classic example of the lack of disposal, time and resources of 3rd party developers, preventing them to exploit the peculiarities of each system (the situation is much better to first party) and many times have to be satisfied with a simple ports between the two systems. Something similar could be said for the PC games, if there is no optimization in-much higher current consoles and graphics cards.
Sony has managed to solve this problem and created its own version of MLAA (Morphological Anti-Aliasing) For the Cell, a technique that goes far beyond The x4 MSAA’s 360 (it is said that the result may be a corresponding x16 MSAA). The first game that made use of MLAA be the God of War 3. The MLAA is post-process anti-aliasing technique, which until now could be used only in the PS3 and the Cell, which made the 1rst party PS3 games to look better than the Xbox 360.
Other games using the technique developed for the Sony system are: Little Big Planet 2, Killzone 3, The Saboteur, Infamous 2, Gran Turismo 5, while the latest will be Uncharted 3. These games have been so impressive in visual field due to the use of anti-aliasing technique and due to MLAA.
The important case of the PS3 is that post-processing processes (such as MLAA) can be shared between the SPU’s Cell, reducing the delay of processing. For example, In God of War 3, if x2 MSAA needs 5ms of the GPU, the MLAA needs 20ms of CPU, which eventually turns out to be 4ms after the process is divided in five SPUs in the system.
Learn more about New Anti-Aliasing technique for Xbox 360 :
- http://psvitagamer.net/topic/190-xbox-360-to-get-ps3-style-mlaa-anti-aliasing-%E2%80%9Cquality-bar-raised%E2%80%9D/
- http://www.isodownload.org/xbox360/news-center/xbox-360-to-get-ps3-style-mlaa-anti-aliasing-%E2%80%9Cquality-bar-raised%E2%80%9D.html
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