Yeah, and we can actually afford to do it nowadays. I'm currently making a game with very retro graphics (think Minecraft-level pixelated stuff)

Sure, the textures themselves aren't too high fidelity, but since the pixel shader is so simple, it's quite feasible to do tricks which would be impossible even ten years ago. I can run the game even with 8x SSAA (that means 8x8=64 samples per pixel) and almost ground truth, 128x anisotropic filtering.

There's practically zero temporal aliasing and zero spatial aliasing.[0] Now of course, some people don't like the lack of aliasing too much - probably conditioning because of all the badly running, soulless releases - but I think that this direction is the future of gaming. Less photorealism, more intentional graphics design and crisp rendering.

(edit: swapped the URL because imgur was compressing the image to shit)

[0] https://files.catbox.moe/46ih7b.png

It can't be 4x increase because the additional information will be correlated and predictable.

if i render a linear gradient at increasingly higher resolutions, I certainly am not creating infinite information in the continuum limit obviously

Aren't some forms of aliasing specifically temporal in nature? For example, high detail density induced flicker on movement.

I appreciate people standing up for classical stuff, but I don't want the pendulum swung too far back the other way either.

I have always heard that MSAA doesn't work well with deferred rendering which is why it is not longer used[0] which is a shame. Unreal TAA can be good in certain cases but breaks down if both the character and background are in motion, at least from my testing. I wish there was a way to remove certain objects from TAA. I assume this could be done by rendering the frame both with the object and without it there but that seems wasteful. Rendering at a higher resolution seems like a good idea only when you already have a high end card.

[0] eg https://docs.nvidia.com/gameworks/content/gameworkslibrary/g...

I'm a huge fan too, but my understanding is that traditional intra-frame anti-aliasing (SSAA, MSAA, FXAA/SMAA, etc.) does not increase the information capacity of the final image, even though it may appear to do that. For more information per frame, you need one or more of: Higher resolution, higher dynamic range, sampling across time, or multi-sampled shading (i.e. MSAA, but you also run the shader per subsample).

Out of the modern non-console 3D APIs (Metal, D3D12, Vulkan), Vulkan is arguably the worst because it simply continued the Khronos tradition of letting GPU vendors contribute random extensions which then may or may not be promoted to the core API, lacking any sort of design vision or focus beyond the Mantle starting point.

Competition for 3D APIs is more important than ever (e.g. Vulkan has already started 'borrowing' a couple of ideas from other APIs - for instance VK_KHR_dynamic_rendering (e.g. the 'render-pass-object-removal') looks a lot like Metal's transient render pass system, just adapter to a non-OOP C API).

Vulkan only exists because DICE and AMD were nice enough to contribute their Mantle work to Khronos, otherwise they would still be wondering what OpenGL vNext should look like.

Dx12 was release 2 years before Vulkan… And there are plenty of advantages to having control over an API instead of putting it in some slow external organization without focus

I think Vulkan adoption was hurt by how much more complicated it was to use efficiently early on.

Considering that DX12 made it out earlier, and it took some time for Vulkan to finally relax some of its rules enough to be relatively easy to use efficiently, I think it just lost momentum.