About anti-aliasing

Firstly, both console versions of Hitman: Absolution render natively in 720p, although we do find that the game looks a little sharper on the 360. Texture detail and especially foliage tends to get blurred a little more on PlayStation 3, reducing the clarity and crispness of the artwork. The cause of the variance here lies with the anti-aliasing techniques used on each format, with different forms of post-process edge-smoothing subtly changing the look of each version of the game.

On the Xbox 360, NVIDIA’s FXAA is utilised, with all the usual benefits and trade-offs we find when using post-process AA: some texture blur is visible and sub-pixel shimmering is very apparent in certain areas of the game, particularly evident when the engine is rendering finely detailed scenery. On the other hand, MLAA appears to be deployed on the PS3, providing slightly better edge coverage but incurring a more obvious blurring effect in the process. Sub-pixel issues are also a problem despite the additional smoothing effect in other areas.

On the PC, edge aliasing issues can be mitigated by using a combination of both multi-sampling AA (for better sub-pixel coverage) and post-process FXAA, which works on the rest of the scene after other rendering passes have been done. After experiencing a few game-stopping crashes when using high-level multi-sampling options (something that was being actively addressed by the developer during our work on this article) we opted to use 2x MSAA in concert with FXAA – although it is possible to select up to 8x MSAA. Compared to the console versions, troublesome edge artifacts are more easily suppressed and there is certainly less in the way of blurring where the artwork is concerned.

Upping the level of MSAA beyond 2x works wonders in cleaning things up further, and at 1080p resolution the overall level of presentation is excellent. The only downside is that multi-sampling incurs a massive performance hit at higher levels – anything more than 2x MSAA requires a decent mid-range enthusiast GPU with a large amount of video RAM and bandwidth. Such are the ballooning requirements of deferred shading when MSAA enters the picture.

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