Nvidia discusses Adaptive Temporal Anti-Aliasing with Ray Tracing
Nvidia discusses Adaptive Temporal Anti-Aliasing with Ray Tracing
TAA is not without its drawbacks, the most well known of which is a blur effect, reducing the sharpness of final images, creating a visual trade-off between sharpness and anti-aliasing quality.Â
Nvidia has released a report which discusses a new form of Temporal Anti-Aliasing called ATAA, a Temporal Anti-Aliasing technique with real-time ray tracing, hoping to overcome the shortcomings of TAA in scenes with lots of motion and removes both blurring and ghosting artefacts. Nvidia also claims that this technique offers quality levels that approach 8x SSAA (supersampling AA). Â
Below is the abstract of Nvidia’s ATAA paper, which is titled “Adaptive Temporal Antialiasing“;Â
We introduce a pragmatic algorithm for real-time adaptive supersampling in games. It extends temporal antialiasing of rasterized images with adaptive ray tracing, and conforms to the constraints of a commercial game engine and today’s GPU ray tracing APIs. The algorithm removes blurring and ghosting artifacts associated with standard temporal antialiasing and achieves quality approaching 8× supersampling of geometry, shading, and materials while staying within the 33ms frame budget required of most games .
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The only issue with ATAA is its reliance on Microsoft’s DirectX Ray Tracing API (DXR), given today’s lack of supported hardware. Nvidia’s paper states that an ecosystem of drivers, graphics cards and algorithms will be ready within the next few years, leaving us hopeful that we will see ray tracing techniques in video games relatively soon.Â
  We cannot advocate it for immediate wide-spread deployment in games at current performance, but that is not concerning given that mainstream gaming GPUs have not yet appeared that support the DXR API. The real-time ray tracing ecosystem of drivers, GPUs, and algorithms must emerge together over the next few years.
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Nvidia plans to host an event called the “Geforce Gaming Celebration” on August 20th, where the company is likely to launch their first series of consumer graphics hardware with RTX support, Nvidia’s ray tracing acceleration technology.Â
You can join the discussion on Nvidia’s Adaptive Temporal Anti-Aliasing technology on the OC3D Forums.Â