It appears that one of the PlayStation 3′s biggest advantages, MLAA, will be heading to the Xbox 360 and PC. A team of two developers have the effect working by using the GPU on both aforementioned systems.
Multi-sample anti-aliasing (MSAA) has been available to both the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 since each system’s launch, however, bandwitdh and RAM limitations would often mean that early multi-platform games would only feature this anti-aliasing technique on the 360 version.
Sony fought back by creating a new effect called MLAA. This technique, first utilized in Sony’s incredible God of War III, used five of the PlayStation 3 SPUs to produce far superior results to the traditional MSAA by minimising jaggie visuals and creating an overall smoother looking image. MLAA is now a regular feature of both first and third party PS3 games. Today beefjack is reporting via gamesindustry.biz…
“It was, seemingly, an effect the Xbox 360′s CPU couldn’t match – but now a team of two developers have got it working on not only the 360 but also PC by using the GPU to achieve the MLAA – and they believe their implementation is superior.”
MLAA is considered highly demanding, taking 3-4ms to render on the PS3 while using five SPUS, but Jorge Jimenez and Jose I. Echevarria say their 360 version is faster: “On the Xbox 360 we run at 2.47ms, with still a lot of optimisations to try,” Jimenez said.
“We can’t speak for all the MLAA(-like) implementations out there, but we think our current version 1.6 (the one used for these comparisons) has raised the quality bar considerably,” Jimenez told gamesindustry.biz. “In our tests, it produces results on par (when not superior) to CPU MLAA.”
