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As some of you may know, some heavy games like GTA4 has a feature that works like a false-AA It's some kind of "blur" that looks very bad at low-res but is very efficient at high-res and doesn't make any difference on framerate.
I want something similar But i have absolutely no idea on how to do it .
Last edited by Repgahroll on Thu Oct 01, 2009 8:54 pm, edited 1 time in total.
All I remember about GTA4 is it looked like crap, wouldn't run at anything above 640x480 at more than 15 frames per second on my quad core with 8GB of RAM and a reasonably recent graphics card, it needed a driver update for nvidia cards, and it was DRM locked. I seriously regret buying that game, I've had enough of the GTA series.
On topic: I guess you need to be able to describe the effect before figuring out how to make it.
I bought the game but i had to play with crack because i had a pretty new PC and the non-cracked version ran@20fps@800*600(low setts) while the cracked version ran@40fps@1440*900(medium setts). Later the patches corrected a little the problem, but even nowadays with the latest patches the cracked version runs faster than the original .
GTA4 is a shame.. while some games like GOW requires pretty much the same machine as the x360 config to play on PC (at least when talking about processor and VGA, of course you need a whole bunch more ram) some games like GTA4 runs very well on X360 and PS3 but requires a PC 3~4 times more powerful.
I know the PC wasn't made specifically for games, and has a OS running together, etc, etc. but i think should be required a PC up to 2 times faster than a console i think it's enough to do all the other things that run in background... some games requires a PC 5x faster. I just can't understand why.
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The effect is something like an 1.5px gaussian blur.
to me it looks like they're just rendering to a smaller render target, then stretching it to fill the screen. This is the cheapest blur you can get, but looks the worst. (in the screenshots I've seen they're also doing a couple of postprocessing effects before stretching to screen size)
Similarly, the cheapest (or certainly easiest cross-platform) anti-aliasing is to render to a (slightly) larger render target then shrink it to the screen size.
It's some kind of "blur" that looks very bad at low-res but is very efficient at high-res and doesn't make any difference on framerate.
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