Techniques for Scene Antialiasing

Aliasing is the bane of the digital domain. In the early days of the personal computer, jagged edges and blocky graphics were accepted by the user simply because not much could be done to correct them. Now with faster hardware and higher-resolution displays, there are several antialiasing techniques that can smooth edges to achieve a more realistic scene.

OpenGL supports antialiasing that operates at the level of lines and polygons as well as at the level of the full scene. This chapter discusses techniques for full scene antialiasing (FSAA). If your application needs point or line antialiasing instead of full scene antialiasing, use the built in OpenGL point and line antialiasing functions. These are described in Section 3.4.2 in the OpenGL Specification.

The three antialiasing techniques in use today are multisampling, supersampling, and alpha channel blending:

The ARB_multisample extension defines a specification for full scene antialiasing. It describes multisampling and alpha channel sampling. The specification does not specifically mention supersampling but its wording doesn't preclude supersampling. The antialiasing methods that are available depend on the hardware and the actual implementation depends on the vendor. Some graphics cards support antialiasing using a mixture of multisampling and supersampling. The methodology used to select the samples can vary as well. Your best approach is to query the renderer to find out exactly what is supported. OpenGL lets you provide a hint to the renderer as to which antialiasing technique you prefer. Hints are available as renderer attributes that you supply when you create a pixel format object.

A smaller subset of renderers support the EXT_framebuffer_blit and EXT_framebuffer_multisample extensions. These extensions allow your application to create multisampled offscreen frame buffer objects, render detailed scenes to them, with precise control over when the multisampled renderbuffer is resolved to a single displayable color per pixel.

Guidelines

Keep the following in mind when you set up full scene antialiasing:

General Approach

The general approach to setting up full scene antialiasing is as follows:

  1. Check to see what's supported. Not all renderers support the ARB multisample extension, so you need to check for this functionality (see Detecting Functionality).

    To find out what type of antialiasing a specific renderer supports, call the function CGLDescribeRenderer. Supply the renderer property kCGLRPSampleModes to find out whether the renderer supports multisampling and supersampling. Supply kCGLRPSampleAlpha to see whether the renderer supports alpha sampling.

    You can choose to exclude unsupported hardware from the pixel format search by specifying only the hardware that supports multisample antialiasing. Keep in mind that if you exclude unsupported hardware, the unsupported displays will not render anything. If you include unsupported hardware, OpenGL uses normal aliased rendering to the unsupported displays and multisampled rendering to supported displays.

  2. Include these buffer attributes in the attributes array:

    • The appropriate sample buffer attribute constant (NSOpenGLPFASampleBuffers or kCGLPFASampleBuffers) along with the number of multisample buffers. At this time the specification allows only one multisample buffer.

    • The appropriate samples constant (NSOpenGLPFASamples or kCGLPFASamples) along with the number of samples per pixel. You can supply 2, 4, 6, or more depending on what the renderer supports and the amount of VRAM available. The value that you supply affects the quality, memory use, and speed of the multisampling operation. For fastest performance, and to use the least amount of video memory, specify 2 samples. When you need more quality, specify 4 or more.

    • The no recovery attribute ( NSOpenGLPFANoRecovery or kCGLPFANoRecovery). Although enabling this attribute is not mandatory, it's recommended to prevent OpenGL from using software fallback as a renderer. Multisampled antialiasing performance is slow in the software renderer.

  3. Optionally provide a hint for the type of antialiasing you want—multisampling, supersampling, or alpha sampling. See Hinting for a Specific Antialiasing Technique.

  4. Enable multisampling with the following command:

    glEnable(GL_MULTISAMPLE);

    Regardless of the enabled state, OpenGL always uses the multisample buffer if you supply the appropriate buffer attributes when you set up the pixel format object. If you haven't supplied the appropriate attributes, enabling multisampling has no effect.

    When multisampling is disabled, all coverage values are set to 1, which gives the appearance of rendering without multisampling.

    Some graphics hardware leaves multisampling enabled all the time. However, don't rely on hardware to have multisampling enabled; use glEnable to programmatically turn on this feature.

  5. Optionally provide hints for the rendering algorithm. You perform this optional step only if you want OpenGL to compute coverage values by a method other than uniformly weighting samples and averaging them.

    Some hardware supports a multisample filter hint through an OpenGL extension—GL_NV_multisample_filter_hint. This hint allows an OpenGL implementation to use an alternative method of resolving the color of multisampled pixels.

    You can specify that OpenGL uses faster or nicer rendering by calling the OpenGL function glHint, passing the constant GL_MULTISAMPLE_FILTER_HINT_NV as the target parameter and GL_FASTEST or GL_NICEST as the mode parameter. Hints allow the hardware to optimize the output if it can. There is no performance penalty or returned error for issuing a hint that's not supported.

    For more information, see the OpenGL extension registry for NV_multisample_filter_hint.

Hinting for a Specific Antialiasing Technique

When you set up your renderer and buffer attributes for full scene antialiasing, you can specify a hint to prefer one antialiasing technique over the others. If the underlying renderer does not have sufficient resources to support what you request, OpenGL ignores the hint. If you do not supply the appropriate buffer attributes when you create a pixel format object, then the hint does nothing. Table 13-1 lists the hinting constants available for the NSOpenGLPixelFormat class and CGL.

Table 13-1  Antialiasing hints

Multisampling

Supersampling

Alpha blending

NSOpenGLPFAMultisample

NSOpenGLPFASupersample

NSOpenGLPFASampleAlpha

kCGLPFAMultisample

kCGLPFASupersample

kCGLPFASampleAlpha