VR AA / Geometric Specular Aliasing (Valves approach?)

Unity Engine
1

Hi,
Im still trying to figure out the best VR setup in Unity. My scenes use pretty high poly meshes exported from CAD and heavy optimizing them (like you would do it with game assets) is no option. For me, the biggest problem is still the poor AA in Unity in VR (compared to Unreal for example). Im not thinking about performance right now, I just want to get a smooth image without flickering,

What I learned so far (correct me if Im wrong on any point):

  • Forward Rendering with at least 4x MSAA and blow up render scale to something between 1.4 and 2.0 is a good starting point to get a smooth image
  • High density meshes with roundings and straight horizontal lines are a aliasing nightmare when camera is in a certain distance
  • Specular and reflection highlights make things much worse and there is no VR AA method in Unity right now which can handle the specular flickering in VR (like Temporal AA)

Valve did something in their custom shaders to fix the problem of geometric specular aliasing (see attached file) and I wonder if its possible to integrate something similiar in the Unity Standard Shader (or maybe someone already did a test in this direction?) Unfortunately my knowledge in shaders is very basic - but Im really interested what you think about this approach.

Also, any VR AA solution you can recommend is highly appreciated :slight_smile:

regards,
Mario

3101798--234176--GEOAA.jpg
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2

I’d say, look in the VR specific forum. There are some topics on this there.

For VR, I still recommend TAA, because a high frame rate is required for both TAA and VR. The constant motion of a VR camera also removes the need for camera jitter for TAA.

3

ok but Unitiys Built-in TAA is not working in VR right now and the only external solution I found is CTAA by livenda.com - and people complain about the publisher that there is no support etc.

4

Yes, well, I said I recommended it. I didn’t say there is any out of the box solution available. I’ve adjusted an existing TAA solution to work with VR.

5

Ah ok, nice! Can you tell anything about this? Which TAA solution did you use ? :slight_smile:

6

I modified the playdead TAA. I wrote some things about it here:
https://forum.unity3d.com/threads/temporal-anti-aliasing.412482/page-3

7

be careful i got scammed by them, upgrade quite a while ago, never received a download link