4 ms·

But would adding antialiasing kill the performance? It’s a small thing, but it’s kind of like a movie where you can totally suspend disbelief and one bad actor

• Sharlin 9y ago
  Well, sure, but so would rendering at a more reasonable resolution, or a more realistic scene than five spheres on a plane. And it's not like 10fps is a useful frame rate in the first place. But it's the relative, not absolute, performance figures that are interesting here.
  • bartread 9y ago
    > And it's not like 10fps is a useful frame rate in the first place. How times have changed. I remember running flight sims back in the 16-bit era (Amiga 500, for example) when 10fps would have been considered pretty good, especially if there was a lot going on. But yes, I think nowadays you're right: 60fps or bust. And this is really why ray-tracing isn't used that much in games - it's just so computationally expensive.
• benjamin-fl 9y ago
  For ray tracing like this, going the supersampled antialiasing route is pretty much equivalent to rendering the scene at higher resolutions. For example, to get 4 samples per pixel, you need to render at double the resolution in both directions, or 4 times the number of pixels. Of course, techniques like FXAA which are commonly used in rasterization based realtime rendering are possible as well, and would have much lower performance impact. Another thing to think about is that in any monte carlo based rendering algorithm, such as what would be used to render modern movie graphics, antialiasing is basically free. These algorithms already work by running thousands upon thousands of samples per pixel, so distributing these samples inside each pixel has almost no performance impact.