Ali Brown · Director of Graphics Engineering

Ah, that's a thorny one. Yeah, so temporal AA, anti-aliasing, is one form of what we call a temporal accumulation system. It uses data from a previous frame to basically just make things cheaper. It opens the door to a whole host of new technologies. Anti-aliasing is one of them and the most obvious, but it actually is a major way we can reduce noise in all of our rendering. And also, it can help you introduce blending effects. You can blend between two things. For example, currently our planet terrain uses the temporal blending to blend between all the different ground textures. In terms of turning off temporal AA, if you turn it off, then you don't just turn off anti-aliasing. You turn off all the temporal blending system. So you'll get noisy shadows, noisy occlusion, no blending on the terrain. So yeah, it's not quite as simple as turning it off. This is an important reality of modern rendering, and you'll find that in many engines, like 70%, 80% of them, that is the case, because it gives you so much performance. It lets you spend it on everything else. And usually it's only quite bespoke, quite narrowly focused games that can afford to not use it and can blow the bandwidth on a different form of AA that is usually more expensive, like MSAA or something like that. So unfortunately, a hard off at the moment is probably not possible. We could potentially expose the option, but if we did that, it would probably have to come with a massive warning that what you're about to do is going to break the visuals. And what I don't want to see is pictures of our game looking awful and broken, and people posting, look how bad this game looks. But maybe there's a halfway house. Maybe we decrease the strength of it, but with a warning that some effects will become more noisy as a result of that. So you'd think that it's just going to make the image crisper or sharper, but actually, you'll be degrading it in other ways. So maybe not a hard off, but there might be some flexibility in there. We can have a look at that when we look at the graphics options to see if there's something that makes sense. It's a tricky one, though. It's an unfortunate reality. Nobody likes temporal AA in the company. Especially UI people hate it because of the potential [unclear: 'messaging laws']. You'll find everyone from VFX hates it because it smudges out their particle effects. It's not a nice thing. Nobody appreciates the alternative, but it's amazing what it can do. It is vastly superior to the alternative, so it's tricky. But maybe some people just want the image sharp, so having sharpening controls or tweaking that is OK. But the ghosting specifically, which this person mentioned, is tricky, because that is a product of using the data from the previous frame in an area of the screen where you don't have data from the previous frame. So if you turn the camera quickly or somebody runs in front of you, you don't know what was there previously, so you have to make it up. And basically what you're seeing when there's ghosting is sometimes actually the lack of temporal data. So that's a clue as to what you might get if you didn't have temporal data. We'll see what we can do, see if there's something that can help with that.