FXAA support for PS3 and Xbox 360 Games (2011/07/28)

A clever gamer, who goes by Durante, has devised a way to improve the picture quality of PlayStation 3 titles by utilizing some ingenious methods. The process requires a HD video capture card, a decent PC, and some free software. The process works by filtering the PlayStation 3 games through the attached PC (which is connected through the HD video capture card) and processed through the custom software. Durante's software utilizes recently released code from nVidia's post processing method, FXAA (Fast Approximate Anti-aliasing). Most gamers should already be familiar with anti-aliasing, but for those of you who are not, it is a process which reduces the jagged edges seen in images and video games. NVidia's FXAA works better than most post-processing methods and works well at anti-aliasing long edges.

Some PC gamers (myself included) like to go on about the huge image quality advantages of playing on PCs. Now, your PC can actually improve the visual quality of console-exclusive games! (outside of emulation) I’ve previously posted about the small program PtBi that I use to display 360 and PS3 games. Today I added the ability to use NVidia’s FXAA — thanks to them for releasing the code to the public domain and making it easy to integrate. For those that are unaware, FXAA is a post-processing method that tries to reduce the amount of aliasing artifacts (think pixel staircase) in an image. It’s similar to MLAA in that aspect. Like all post-processing methods that act purely on image data, it has some drawbacks: - It can’t handle subpixel aliasing well. (Unlike most similar methods, it at least tries to reduce it though) - Sometimes aliasing may be detected incorrectly, resulting in an overblurring of the image. PtBi can mitigate this by adaptive sharpening after the FXAA pass. - Particularly when used as a post-filter external to a game, it’s impossible to distinguish between UI and rendered 3D elements. This results in some UI distortion. Advantages are that it can be used on any image data, it is really good at smoothing the edges it detects and it’s very fast. On my system, with YUV decoding, FXAA and adaptive scaling on, it still only takes less than 5 ms for a frame to be completely processed. Another nice point is that it can be used on top of images generated with eg. 2xMSAA (like many modern console games) and still achieve an improvement in edge quality.

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