Where does anti-aliasing stand with P3D as of 2024?

[JonP01]

Hi Ronda,

Screenshots often don't tell the whole story unfortunately. With the runway markings for example in Version 4.x and the taxiway lights in Version 5.x, they would all look fine in a single screenshot capture. The problems start when you have successive frames resulting in motion, in which case the textures either swim or sparkle. 

Sometimes they will show up in a screenshot though - if you look at the shot you have just added you can see the aliasing on the rear of the wings (e.g at the hinge where the ailerons abut the trailing edge). You can also see it on the step up area at the left wing root - the black lines are aliased.

One thing I will give P3D credit for though - transparency AA works better than it does in FSX - at least in my experience. And straight out terrain also looks a whole lot better. Somehow the AA and anisotropic filtering work exceptionally well compared to what I used to see in FSX.

Edited June 20, 2024 by JonP01

[vjeanmarc]

21 hours ago, JonP01 said:

Unfortunately I don't see myself going to version 6 due to a lack of support for the enormous amount of payware content I have amassed over the years.

I totally agree with Sparkrite, are we talking about third-party support for V6 or about evolution regarding anti-aliasing in 2024?
I think we should only consider the evolution of V6 rather than asking ourselves if this version interests third-party developers, right?

[Ronda_sim]

15 hours ago, JonP01 said:

Sometimes they will show up in a screenshot though - if you look at the shot you have just added you can see the aliasing on the rear of the wings (e.g at the hinge where the ailerons abut the trailing edge). You can also see it on the step up area at the left wing root - the black lines are aliased.

I am surprised of how good your eyesight is.   I had amplified the supersampling to the maximum level. I will share a video to show my latest touchdown. I wanna know what you think about it and what I can do to make it better. 

Spoiler

 

 

[JonP01]

12 minutes ago, Ronda_sim said:

I am surprised of how good your eyesight is.   I had amplified the supersampling to the maximum level. I will share a video to show my latest touchdown. I wanna know what you think about it and what I can do to make it better. 

  Hide contents

 

 

Ha! I just had my spectacle prescription renewed! But it isn't so much eyesight as knowing what to look for and once you do it is hard to ever "un-see" it. Flight sims make it all the worse because what we see tends to move relatively slowly compared to anything else we might see moving on our screens. More time to pick out the flaws.

But I have read many other posts regarding the AA and there just seems to be a limit beyond which further AA doesn't even seem to apply itself. I wonder myself whether this is more a Windows thing since one older generation race sim I have could have a tonne of AA thrown at it and I could totally get rid of every flaw with 32xS plus 8x sparse grid AA. But now I am running Windows 11, no matter what I try, it refuses to "accept" any AA beyond 4x.

I think it actually might have been Rogen who quipped some time back that we could throw 64xAA if such a thing existed at P3D and it wouldn't make any difference.

The only improvement I can ever see with version 4 AA beyond what I have already written above is that assuming sufficient GPU horsepower, you can enable the DSR modes - at which point you have a smoothness slider. That slider in effect determines how you wish to compromise - smoother equals less artefacts but less detail and more blur (relatively speaking).

[JonP01]

13 hours ago, vjeanmarc said:

I totally agree with Sparkrite, are we talking about third-party support for V6 or about evolution regarding anti-aliasing in 2024?
I think we should only consider the evolution of V6 rather than asking ourselves if this version interests third-party developers, right?

It's a democracy here and I do not own the thread. I am just as interested as anyone in what AA can bring to the table with any version of P3D that LM currently support and is currently in use by members here. And that would mainly be versions 4 to 6 inclusive. I simply have not tried version 6 partly because of third party support and partly because of an unreliable, poor internet connection and the unwillingness to fork out over $500 AUD for the professional version. If people have anything to add for versions I have not tried, they should add them rather than sitting on the sidelines and just hoping information will appear here by magic.

[Ronda_sim]

I am not the best still with the 737. Do you find it fine? I wanna know what I can improve when it comes to AA?

[Patco Lch]

On 6/20/2024 at 3:41 PM, JonP01 said:

$500 AUD for the professional version.

$90.24 AUD for a personal license.

Edited June 23, 2024 by Patco Lch

[JonP01]

Just an update. I decided to treat myself to my first "premium" graphics card since my Voodoo 5500 back in 1999. I've just bought an ASUS Tuff Gaming 4080 Super, for absolutely no other reason than to allow me to max out the anti-aliasing possibilities on the applications I run including of course P3D. All the 3D applications have benefitted enormously from this upgrade in terms of image quality.

I am now incredibly pleased with the image quality from P3D. I have gone from quite disappointed two weeks ago to it now looking a whole lot better than FSX ever did. And the card has the power to go to town on the anti-aliasing without becoming a bottleneck in P3D (the CPU is of course). The previous RTX3070 was a massive bottleneck and completely unusable at the settings I am now using on the 4080 Super.

These are the graphics card settings I have finally settled upon. I am remaining with version 4.5 however, since in all my testing of Version 5, I was unable to resolve some grating aliasing issues despite spending many hours on a "fix". And partly because I have a very poor, unreliable internet connection and partly because not everything I wish to run is version 6 "ready" yet, I am not running Version 6 so cannot test it. I will probably go to version 6 when both of those roadblocks are resolved. What I can say about version 5, however is that there is quite simply no anti-aliasing setting available whatsoever that will get rid of the incredibly annoying and distracting taxiway signs at night - for me this completely destroys the immersion and it was the reason I am sticking with version 4.5, especially since I do so much night flying. As for the runway aliasing in version 4, my settings make it comparable to version 5.

Nvidia Control Panel: DSR (legacy) 4 x = 3840 x 2160 at 0% smoothness. I did try the new deep learning 2.25x (there is no deep learning 4x) however the results were inferior for P3D. As an aside, however, the deep learning options were a noticeably better choice for a first person shooter I have so it wouldn't surprise me if Nvidia have optimised it for games outside of the simulation genre. 

PSD in sim: FXAA enabled, 8xMSAA enabled, 16x anisotropic filtering enabled.

Nvidia Inspector: enhance application setting, 32xS plus 8 x sparse grid supersampling. 

[Christopher Low]

I used 4x SSAA and 16x AF with P3Dv4.5HF2 @ 1920x1080 resolution on a 24" monitor, and I thought that was a pretty good setting. However, it was not as good as 4x SGSS AA and 16x AF that I used via NCP in FSX. For some reason, that SGSS option (Sparse Grid Supersampling) never seemed to work properly in P3D when I tried it.

Edited June 29, 2024 by Christopher Low

[JonP01]

On 6/29/2024 at 11:23 PM, Christopher Low said:

I used 4x SSAA and 16x AF with P3Dv4.5HF2 @ 1920x1080 resolution on a 24" monitor, and I thought that was a pretty good setting. However, it was not as good as 4x SGSS AA and 16x AF that I used via NCP in FSX. For some reason, that SGSS option (Sparse Grid Supersampling) never seemed to work properly in P3D when I tried it.

I found it very problematic in Windows 11 but not Windows 7 (I never had Windows 8 - 10) though I never had P3D under anything but Windows 11 so I can't speak for its behaviour.

But for P3D versions 4 and 5 from my testing, just so long as you use the Game menus within Windows 11 itself to tell Windows 11 not to use the full screen optimisations (and also right click on the P3D executable file and check the checkbox that says the same thing), then it is possible to use the SGSS as well as any of the other modes such as 16xS or 32xS, but only so long as the multi-sampled component of the latter equals the amount of multisampling selected within P3D.

So asuming you have added the P3D executable to the Windows 11 game / graphics menus to ignore the full screen optimisations, then you can have, for example:

8xMSAA within P3D (v4 or v5) and then any of the anti-aliasing options available within Inspector, just so long as if you pick one of the anti-aliasing methods that has a multisampling component, it needs to be the same magnitude as that in P3D. Therefore if you had 4xMSAA within P3D then you'd be picking 16xS and perhaps something like 2xSGSS or 4x SGSS and if you had 8xMSAA then you could have 32xS and your pick of the SGSS (any of them work). Of course it gets pretty expensive GPU-wise once you get into those high AA settings, especially when you have the clouds around.

Of course the monitor has quite a lot of bearing on the amount of AA needed. I suspect the image quality sweet spot for P3D would be something like a smaller 27 inch QHD monitor or a 32 inch 4K monitor since you could probably then go a bit easier on the AA and the pixel densities would be quite good at the sort of viewing distances simmers tend to use.

I would love a 4K monitor but I dislike large ones and I have physical problems that make a larger monitor in front of me problematic. A curved 27 inch one is absolutely perfect for me at 68 cm viewing distance, however no one makes a 4K monitor of that size that can manage anything higher than 60 hz (at least sold here in Australia). I need more than 60 Hz not for the flight simming but for the race simming and my FPS games where lower frame rates just don't cut it. So I will probably be looking to get a QHD 27 inch curved monitor some time down the track knowing that for P3D, I can probably go from the existing legacy DSR 4x Nvidia setting to the deep learning 2.25x setting. It is precisely the same number of pixels but I think deep learning 2.25x on a QHD 27 inch monitor might look better than DSR 4x on a 1080p monitor of the same size. But I think the difference would merely be one of more detail rather than less jaggies since the jaggies in P3D (and many games) just seem to be larger than the pixel densities. Or as someone else put it, going from 1K to 4K and all other things being equal would be like seeing 100 tiny knives sticking out along the edge of an object versus seeing 50 much thicker tiny knives sticking out along the edge of an object...