Unity 4.2 supports anti-aliasing on render targets

Definitely potentially great news and would love to do some experiments on whether 1280x800 @ 4xMSAA can rival a downscaled 1920x1080, both in performance and visual quality.

However... (and this is speculation based on digging around, so please correct me if I'm wrong), I don't think this will make any difference for existing demos, and not even for demos built with Unity 4.2 if they are still using the Oculus Unity integration for SDK 0.2.3 (the current SDK version as of this post). The logic in the Unity integration that takes advantage of MSAA on render targets seems to be disabled unless you uncomment a #define, and even then it doesn't appear to be complete. Understandably so, since it's hard to code for a feature that isn't even out yet!

Would love to hear an official update from someone at Oculus, or maybe we'll just have to wait for the next SDK release. :)

"drash" wrote:
Definitely potentially great news and would love to do some experiments on whether 1280x800 @ 4xMSAA can rival a downscaled 1920x1080, both in performance and visual quality.

Yeah.. I have a feeling its going help all around the board.. and also make lower powered portable solutions more viable.

"drash" wrote:
However... (and this is speculation based on digging around, so please correct me if I'm wrong), I don't think this will make any difference for existing demos,

yep, you'd have to make a new build from 4.2.. and probably a new oculus integration.

"drash" wrote:

and not even for demos built with Unity 4.2 if they are still using the Oculus Unity integration for SDK 0.2.3 (the current SDK version as of this post). The logic in the Unity integration that takes advantage of MSAA on render targets seems to be disabled unless you uncomment a #define, and even then it doesn't appear to be complete. Understandably so, since it's hard to code for a feature that isn't even out yet!

Would love to hear an official update from someone at Oculus, or maybe we'll just have to wait for the next SDK release. :)

Man, can't wait for the updated SDK! =) =)

We are looking into this now to see if it will allow us to increase the quality of the Unity integration.

I tried some quick tests in First Law and ran into a bug with a multiple camera setup. Haven't had a chance to investigate further but I'll let you know if I make headway.

I want to point out a potential issue when using MSAA on RenderTargets.

Both dynamic lighting and shadow buffers are tightly coupled with the Camera itself. I have noticed that when I use a RenderTarget of a larger size then the final output (which is 1/2 the size of the final screen size, say 640 x 800), the buffers used to accumulate lighting and shadow stay the same size. This has the effect of dynamic lights and shadows 'clipping' against a plane smaller then the final buffer.

The engineers at Unity are aware of this, but please keep this in mind when using larger Render Targets to get a better resolution output. In Tuscany demo in the SDK as well as in Unreal, the output looks better because of the fact that we can MSAA into a larger render texture and then down-sample into the final target (which is the intention of this new render target feature). If you do not use dynamic lights / shadows, you will achieve the same results as this.

We will include MSAA support with the above caveat in the next Unity integration release.

Sweet.

"petergiokaris" wrote:
We will include MSAA support with the above caveat in the next Unity integration release.

Awesome!! Thanks for the heads up Peter!

Great news! Can't wait.

Hi,
i'm reading in the release note of the new sdk (Version 0.2.4) that Anti-aliasing (MSAA) of render targets is now available.
My question is :
There is something specific that i have to do in my development for take advantage of this feature or it is an automatic feature that increase the overall graphic quality ?

Thanks

"marcaurelio74" wrote:
Hi,
i'm reading in the release note of the new sdk (Version 0.2.4) that Anti-aliasing (MSAA) of render targets is now available.
My question is :
There is something specific that i have to do in my development for take advantage of this feature or it is an automatic feature that increase the overall graphic quality ?

Thanks

It looks like you have to adjust CameraTextureScale in OVRCamera.cs - Then you get access to MSAA + supersampling

I haven't tried yet but can't wait to run some tests tonight! ..

AG