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Topic on Talk:Final Fantasy Type-0 HD

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You are completely going off a few interchangeable or common-man terms used often (In a different use case then how it's actually done in game too). And don't seem to grasp what is actually happening here.

Downsampling is a term used in place of OGSSAA (Which in turn is often used instead of FSAA;Full Scene;). OG is the sampling pattern the technique uses to define the sub-pixel sampling point positions per pixel. http://www.x86-secret.com/articles/divers/v5-6000/datasheets/FSAA.pdf

The usage of "Downsampling" it commonly associated with simply using a custom resolution to run the game at a higher resolution in order to get better IQ and less aliasing. This was often done through your GPU driver, with the GPU handling the scaling back to your native resolution. With Nvidia cards it used a linear filter which didn't always look the best. Durante made GeDoSaTo which let you do basically the same thing but with selectable resampling functions in place of the fixed one in place by the GPU drivers (As it was never intended to be used that way) At the end of the day, this is still just OGSSAA, because the sub-pixel sampling pattern is still an ordered grid. You are just essentially brute forcing it by running the game at a higher resolution. Which comes with it's own caveats and benefits.

The difference is,

When developers implement this straight into the game, they have control over every aspect how and when it is rendered and whether they even use an Ordered Grid or not. (SC: Black list for example has a Rotated Grid option. But it isn't very good) HexaDrive in this specific example, in their own words on their blog refers to this as "FSAA" Which they then go on to mention what resolutions the game actually renders at when using a 1080p base resolution. Both of which are placed on a fixed scale from the base resolution. More than likely only certain rendering passes as well (IE: Doing it before the UI pass based on my own comparison http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/140131 as you can see the UI doesn't see any smoothing)

So yes, describing each AA setting as using SSAA is completely and factually 100% correct. Because that is what it is. It's Super Sampling. It's not downsampling. Downsampling is brute force OGSSAA by running the game in a higher resolution and thus rendering *everything* at a higher resolution and not just what needs to be rendered at a higher resolution.


Another problem is there is no standardized naming scheme developers go by when it comes to the actual amount of SSAA used. Some games when they list "2x" in the SSAA option. They might be referring to "2x2=4" or "1x2" or "2x1" or some other odd amount that involves rounding (Like how Nvidia DSR does for a lot of ratios including "2x").