Transparency supersampling in Crysis Warhead: teh awesome

Anyone who has used anti-aliasing in the Crysis games knows that while it does a fine job of smoothing out edges on solid objects, it doesn't really help with transparent objects like trees and foliage. By default, I set the nVidia drivers to transparency multisampling, but unfortunately its negligible performance impact is paralleled by its negligible visual impact. The only way to really smooth out transparent textures like foliage and fences is to use transparency supersampling (TSAA), which carries a significant performance cost to coincide with its visual upgrade.

The new rig has been performing really well, so I thought hey, why not try TSAA with Crysis Warhead? I had tried it with Mirror's Edge and it worked great (the game has a lot of fences). I figured that, since Crysis uses so many transparent textures, it would kill performance. But guess what? It didn't. In fact, while the frame rate drops in a few situations with very dense foliage, overall the impact is surprisingly negligible. And to the extent that there is a performance impact, I have to say that the visual upgrade in this case is quite dramatic and well worth it.

Alright, so, I'll let a couple pictures do the talking. Here we are with multisampling:
















And here with supersampling:















The difference is obvious, even in still shots. However, it's actually much more noticeable during gameplay, and this is why the performance impact is worth the visuals. With multisampling, there's still a lot of "shimmer" on foliage; as you move around the game world, you'll notice that transparent textures have a sparkly, unnatural look to them. This shimmering is virtually eliminated with TSAA, resulting in a dramatically more lifelike image quality.

I'll finish off with a few more screens. Notice how clean the foliage is, particularly with fine textures such as leaves. If you've got a PC that can handle it, TSAA is amazing, and well worth implementing.

            

p.s. I tried using TSAA in the original Crysis, and it just wasn't worth it. It looked great of course, but the engine isn't as well optimized and TSAA makes for a much bigger performance hit. This is one of those things you really need to test on a game-by-game basis, and use your nVidia profiles.