God of War III utilizes new Cell Anti-Aliasing

A couple of days ago, we published an article with statements from Ken Feldman that detailed some of the changes God of War III has gone through since its demo debut at E3 2009. One of the key comments made by Feldman was in regards to the anti-aliasing being changed from your standard 2xAA in the E3 demo to a new AA format running through the PS3’s CPU.

As some of you may recall, Electronic Arts’ The Saboteur utilized the PS3’s Cell Processor for its anti-aliasing. The interesting thing about this technique is that it allows for a console to possibly create the effect of up to 16xAA, which is generally unheard of on consoles.

Today, on the Official God of War forums, Feldman has confirmed that the anti-aliasing being used through the Cell Processor is indeed the same as used by the team at Pandemic Studios for The Saboteur. This technique is referred to as MLAA (Morphological Anti-aliasing):

“AA on the cpu is MLAA Morphological Antialising. We saved 5-6 miliseconds by moving it off the cpu’s. Many props to our coder Cedric for making this happen and it looks way better!”

Considering how well The Saboteur looked on the PlayStation 3, it’s almost safe to say that God of War III is going to be the smoothest looking title to date for any console game. Of course, that’s completely up to opinion.

Readers Comments (26)

  1. A lot of PS3 games suffer from Aliasing . Glad to see a solution is being found .

  2. Yeah god of war is going to be epic

  3. 16 x Anti-aliasing
    wow, the pc can go hide in a corner

  4. What? Plenty of PC games have 16xAA, get over yourself.

  5. Lazy developers don’t deserve to develop for the PS3 (bayonetta). Thanks for putting the effort into making GOW3 as good as it could possible be. I already pre-ordered it along with FF13. March is going to be a busy month for me. I better finish Heavy Rain before FF13 drops. It’s a good time to be a PS3 owner!

  6. Jinkinator, my friend’s 2000 dollar PC ran Crysis seamlessly on 4x AA

  7. as i have heard that PC have difficulty in running 16xAA, and CELL is making it possible on PS3, this shows the poor knowledge that most of the developers have in regards to PS3, But even with 2xAA GoW3 demo rocked

  8. Awesome man. I can’t wait to see what GOW III looks like.

  9. AA makes games look so much better and consoles have struggled with that, thank god GoW III has it and it uses the PS3’s super cell to do it. 🙂

  10. damn, you can tell these developers have been working their butts off, can we just give this GOTY already, so far from what im hearing, it looks like its a shoe in to win

  11. Patrick Steen March 3, 2010 @ 11:38

    It’s not 16XAA guys, MLAA can have results (is some areas) that rival 16xFSAA. There are some draw backs to MLAA…

  12. Paddy, in all seriousness, what are the drawbacks? I think a lot of readers here would love the information. Break it down!

    I find it exciting that devs are able to use tools to help them get around some of the less-than-stellar pieces to the PS3 architecture. But if it decreases perfomance in another area……

  13. VofEscaflowne March 3, 2010 @ 12:56

    You just spoiled anti-aliasing in the article title!

    I already thought the E3 demo looked fantastic, definitely not something I’d notice jaggies over. I’m not sure if this is something I’ll notice very much unless I actually sit there and insect every possible moment in the game but hey, as long as the game runs smoothly, that’s really all I care about.

    Oh no I posted on a God of War article! (13 more days!)

  14. All work and no GoW3 make Wons… something something.

    Is it March 16th yet?

  15. Lack of anti-aliasing REALLY bugs me, so I’m glad to see that devs can now really do wonders using the Cell.

  16. this is something gta really needed. hopefully agent will use this. God of war is looking amazing and very smooth and that must be due to the anti-aliasing. All games should have good anti-aliasing or at least all exclusives

  17. wait, so what does this anti aliasing do?

  18. i played the demo, the game looks amzing, it has a great level of detail and gore omg i have never seen a game like that

  19. VofEscaflowne March 3, 2010 @ 16:13

    @Dr. Moogle

    It eliminates jaggies, giving off a smoother image. I’m sure there’s probably a more “tech” way of explaining what exactly it does but that’s as simple as I can put it (and pretty much the only way I can put it and actually understand what I’m saying :p)

  20. i did play crysis on wery high on my brothers 1800 euro gaming pc
    and the maximum AA that the game alowed me was 8x

    if anyone knows a pc game that has 16xAA enabled
    please send me a mesage on
    slatnican@yahoo.com

  21. Patrick Steen March 3, 2010 @ 16:35

    Yes, it gets rid of jaggies.

    It’s interesting, because the GOWIII team has already made comment that MLAA is not what was used in The Sabotuer (360 version had no AA)…we were wondering why SSM would make such a comment, but now it’s clear – they were working on MLAA. You can read about this here: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-saboteur-aa-blog-entry

    An MLAA negative is that it doesn’t really work for objects one pixel or less thick (such as pylons in the distance)…whether this is a problem for GOWIII we will have to wait and see. Exciting.

  22. Awesome. Developing exclusives for PS3 is surely paying off.

    BTW, why do I have over 300 points?. Is there some new point just for logging in or what?, lol. I don’t think I’ve made that many comments yet, so I find it really strange=/

  23. Moocows111111 March 3, 2010 @ 20:01

    “a console to possibly create the effect of up to 16xAA”

    Wow just wow, God of War is worthy of a launch day buy. This game is going to be pretty sweet interns of Graphics and as well as game play.

    “BTW, why do I have over 300 points?. Is there some new point just for logging in or what?, lol. I don’t think I’ve made that many comments yet, so I find it really strange=/”

    I think you get bonus points for logging on then posting 1 comment, I was at 75 then when I posted once, I got 115 after the page refreshed.

  24. XxTYxCRAZYxX March 3, 2010 @ 20:05

    haha now the 360 will suffer with AA. Now dev teams should utilize shuc a feature in future games 4 ps3 i agree wit scottspeed GTA4 NEEDED AA did it even have it??

  25. For PC, it is not just a matter of quality, in fact our DirectX implementation runs at 11.8x faster than 8x MSAA, with similar quality. It is also possible to run it in the Xbox GPU, where it runs at 3.79ms, which is is fairly less than the 20ms required to run it in a single PS3 SPU (4ms using 5 SPUs). More information:

    http://www.iryokufx.com/mlaa/

  26. Right up your... November 27, 2010 @ 16:25

    MLAA should be used more often in the gaming world as it might shut those little dick’s complaining how 360 has no jagged edgs and PS3 does.

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