I don't really like the single enum approach. I would prefer to keep the existing MSAA boolean, and then, if needed, add a separate attribute for requesting the number of samples; if desired there could be a read-only attribute that returns the actual number of samples used. Most chipsets give limited (or no) control over the number of samples anyway so an enum doesn't seem like a good fit.

-- Kevin


Gerrit Grunwald wrote:
+1 for the enum approach...will make it easier to enhance for future options...

Gerrit
Am 12.07.2013 um 19:55 schrieb Richard Bair <richard.b...@oracle.com>:

Thor recently pushed an implementation for MSAA for those cases when the feature is 
supported by the card and where a Scene (or SubScene) is created with the antiAliasing 
flag set to true. MSAA is "Multi-sampled Anti Aliasing", which means that the 
graphics card, when configured in this mode, will sample each fragment multiple times. 
The upshot is that 3D doesn't look as jaggy.

However this has an impact on performance (usually an extra buffer copy or at 
the very least you will be sampling each pixel multiple times so if you are 
doing something graphically intense then that might push you over the edge 
where you start to see performance degradation). Now multi-sampling can be 2x, 
4x, etc. The higher the multi-sampling value, the better the quality, and the 
lower the performance.

I'm also bothered but the name "antiAliasing" because there are many forms of 
anti-aliasing in the world and it isn't clear which this is. I think perhaps we should 
instead have an enum. The idea is that we can add to the enum over time with greater 
options for how to perform the scene antialiasing.

public enum SceneAntiAliasing {
   DISABLED,
   DEFAULT,
   MSAA_2X,
   MSAA_4X
}

And then grow it over time to include potentially other techniques. My thought 
here is that the implementation is going to matter to folks. They're going to 
want to be able to make the performance / quality tradeoff, and perhaps even 
the implementation tradeoff (since different implementations may provide 
somewhat different results). DISABLED turns it off, obviously. DEFAULT allows 
us to pick what we think is the best (might be different on different 
platforms. Desktop might go with MSAA_16x or equivalent while iOS might be 
MSAA_2X). Then some standard options.

Thoughts?
Richard

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