MGE XE Anti-Aliasing: shimmer and general AA questions

[hal900x]

I get some pretty dramatic temporal aliasing (shimmer) in Morrowind using 8x AA in MGE XE. It's only noticable on certain textures in certain light, such as the Balmora and Suran street tiles. The only way I've been able to get rid of it so far is to force SSAA in my driver, and of course it destroys my frame rate so not a solution per se. I use an Radeon 7870. I've tried most of the other combinations of AA in my driver, like adding post-processing AA, changing AA filter and so forth. Where does the AA come from in this case? GPU driver, part of the game itself, injected by MGE, etc? I know with Bethesda games I've always had some issues with shimmer, HDR glare and such, and I remember that with Fallout 3 I had to use a very specific ENB that had SMAA that didn't shimmer, so I'm thinking maybe a similar approach here. I may sound knowledgable but really, just starting to grasp it all.

[Dragon32]

Are you using texture replacers? Maybe those textures don't have mip maps (Not all the texturers out there add them).

[ZZZ02]

if minimaps are what you need, the mod Optimizer Textures on the skyrim nexus generates them for you.

[hal900x]

Are you using texture replacers? Maybe those textures don't have mip maps (Not all the texturers out there add them).

Hrrrm ok. So would SSAA deal with the lack of mipmaps somehow? That seems to be the case.

[Dragon32]

I have no idea about the different types of AA :shrug:

[hollaajith]

Which version of mgexe are you using? IIRC, one of the beta update improved the AA. So you can try the latest beta.

[Daemonjax]

I use an FXAA shader in mge xe without regular AA and it looks fine.

 

The only way to absolutely remove all shimmering in any game is to use SSAA. That's it.

 

A lot of it can come from using compressed normal/bump maps, or normal/bump maps that are too extreme/bumpy. Mipmaps (specifically the lack of them) has nothing to do with it -- any 3D game engine will create them on the fly if they're not included in the texture file... they'll actually look blurrier than usual, further reducing shimmering. Pre-generated mipmaps can cause shimmering if bad settings/techniques (over-sharpening, bad gamma correction, etc.) are used when creating them, but I've never seen that actually happen by accident. A moire pattern effect is far more likely (fences).

 

Try not to notice. Otherwise, you can do things to hide it, like use an always-on DOF distance/fog based blur shader (probably why that ENB you mentioned helped).

 

EDIT: I just remembered that MGE has a mipmap bias setting, and that MGSO (hilariously) sets it to -1.0 by default -- that would cause shimmering.

Edited August 12, 2015 by Daemonjax