InjectSMAA - Anti-Aliasing

[WaeV 5,049]

Halo does not support anti-aliasing. Even with graphics driver overrides, nothing seems to work. However, over the years many different types of "post-process" anti-aliasing have emerged. Post-process AA takes a fully rendered frame from the game engine and applies anti-aliasing then, instead of being part of the engine. SMAA (Subpixel Morphological Antialiasing) is one such example of post-process AA.

Note: this does tend to clash with programs which add overlays, such as Xfire, Steam, and perhaps the fps counter from Fraps as well.

No AntiAliasing (click to see in greater detail)


With InjectSMAA (click to see in greater detail)


Sources / Links
http://superuser.com/a/766727/171607
http://mrhaandi.blogspot.com/p/injectsmaa.html
 
Download

[Skeezix the Cat 3,089]

Awesome!  This will probably work for more people than my Gedosato tutorial did.

[WaeV 5,049]

In a discussion with Btcc22, I learned more about why Halo cannot currently use anti-aliasing.

 

When you create a Direct3D rendering environment, you give it initialization parameters. One of these parameters is what level of MSAA ("real" AA) to use. Halo initialized its D3D environment without MSAA. In theory it would be simple enough to change the parameters to use MSAA, but if you do this Halo just renders a black screen.

 

The trouble is with something called a "backbuffer" -- where the next frame is rendered before being displayed on screen. Halo writes directly to the backbuffer, which isn't allowed when you're using MSAA. In order to turn MSAA on, Halo needs to be edited to use some other location as a buffer, then copy into the backbuffer... or something. I'm not exactly proficient in graphics programming, but I thought this was interesting and hopefully useful in the future.

[Skeezix the Cat 3,089]

I've read an explanation about it somewhere, and while I don't really remember the terms used before I mostly get what you're saying

[Sceny 3,138]

It took a while to figure out why it wasn't working for me - turns out I hadn't put the files in the correct folder.

Halo at 5K with AA.

E: Uploaded new image with anisotropic filtering.

Edited December 17, 2014 by Sceny

[WaeV 5,049]

Halo at 5K with SMAA and anisotropic filtering.

 

 

You're artificially raising your resolution, right? I don't think you have a 5K monitor.

[Sceny 3,138]

You're artificially raising your resolution, right? I don't think you have a 5K monitor.

http://www.geforce.co.uk/hardware/technology/dsr/technology

[Skeezix the Cat 3,089]

I've been using Gedosato on Halo for a while.  You can literally set Halo to render at any resolution you want, preferably with the same aspect ratio of your display, and it will downscale it.  Your screenshots will still be at your monitor's resolution, but you get supersampling AA and it looks pretty nice.

[Btcc22 691]

Since we're sharing high-res screenshots, here's one I took a while back.

 

56k ( * 10) WARNING!

 

Edited December 17, 2014 by Btcc22

[Skeezix the Cat 3,089]

Since we're sharing high-res screenshots, here's one I took a while back.

 

56k ( * 10) WARNING!

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