Gif comparison of FXAA on/off at 1680 x 1050p (sorry, I don't have a 1080p monitor). Click (view original) to see gif animated.
You'll notice that the screen jaggies on things like the starting gate and trees are already smoothed out more simply from the increase in screen resolution. But, going from 720p to almost 1080p (1050p in this case), we've almost doubled the amount of pixels we're processing each frame as well...
1280 x 720 = 921,600 pixels
1680 x 1050 = 1,764,000 pixels
That means potentially double the pixel shader processing, especially with post-processing shaders working every pixel of every frame.. including the FXAA anti-aliasing.
The FXAA does help smooth out the jaggies that much more, though. The trees blend together, the lines on the starting gate blur and blend a bit more.
When sitting 3-4' from a PC monitor, this blurring can be annoying, hence why folks turn it off. But, when playing on a couch & TV setup, the anti-aliasing makes the image that much smoother since it's not in-your-face.
A lot of the times when playing the game at high resolution you won't notice screen jaggies simply because the game provides a lot of "blinds" that distract you ("blinds" as in "duck blind" .. a thing that hides something from view). A lot of games will put foliage or horizon fog in the way to hide LOD transitions and distant screen jaggies. FUEL does similar things. The motion blur as you move blends the scene some in AA fashion. The grass and dust effects hide things. Screen dirt and water help distract. Vignetting around the edges adds movie-like quality to also distract.
But, I wanted to work AA into the game just to see if I could. I initially had a very hack formula that was just multi-sampling the screen 3 or 4 times at slightly larger sizes and averaging them together to blend. But, I found a much better FXAA formula online, and have worked it into the game shaders. It's useful, but don't expect magic. It's not a per-object anti-aliasing, just a cheaper screen-wide anti-aliasing. (to do a more robust per-object anti-aliasing would require having access to the game engine for major overhauls.)
Gif comparison of FXAA on/off at 1680 x 1050p (sorry, I don't have a 1080p monitor). Click (view original) to see gif animated.
You'll notice that the screen jaggies on things like the starting gate and trees are already smoothed out more simply from the increase in screen resolution. But, going from 720p to almost 1080p (1050p in this case), we've almost doubled the amount of pixels we're processing each frame as well...
1280 x 720 = 921,600 pixels
1680 x 1050 = 1,764,000 pixels
That means potentially double the pixel shader processing, especially with post-processing shaders working every pixel of every frame.. including the FXAA anti-aliasing.
The FXAA does help smooth out the jaggies that much more, though. The trees blend together, the lines on the starting gate blur and blend a bit more.
When sitting 3-4' from a PC monitor, this blurring can be annoying, hence why folks turn it off. But, when playing on a couch & TV setup, the anti-aliasing makes the image that much smoother since it's not in-your-face.
A lot of the times when playing the game at high resolution you won't notice screen jaggies simply because the game provides a lot of "blinds" that distract you ("blinds" as in "duck blind" .. a thing that hides something from view). A lot of games will put foliage or horizon fog in the way to hide LOD transitions and distant screen jaggies. FUEL does similar things. The motion blur as you move blends the scene some in AA fashion. The grass and dust effects hide things. Screen dirt and water help distract. Vignetting around the edges adds movie-like quality to also distract.
But, I wanted to work AA into the game just to see if I could. I initially had a very hack formula that was just multi-sampling the screen 3 or 4 times at slightly larger sizes and averaging them together to blend. But, I found a much better FXAA formula online, and have worked it into the game shaders. It's useful, but don't expect magic. It's not a per-object anti-aliasing, just a cheaper screen-wide anti-aliasing. (to do a more robust per-object anti-aliasing would require having access to the game engine for major overhauls.)