SMAA and LumaSharpen

Hello! Can someone advise the optimal settings of the SMAA between medium and high? And I also wonder how much LumaSharpen reduces fps? I play in the Arma 2 Dyz mod and internal smoothing seems to me eating too much fps. I hope for your help, guys.

lumasharpen shouldn't have any appreciable performance loss.

SMAA, on the other hand, can have a very noticeable FPS hit at high resolutions. at 4K and 60fps, SMAA on default settings will eat about 9 fps, dropping you to 51 fps all by itself.

if you are running at high resolutions, and performance is a concern, i'd suggest dropping SMAA entirely.

SMAA is one of the lightest performance hits of any AA solutions because it's only using single pass. Unless you're using depth buffer dependent effects such as DoF and MXAO you can just use one of the games built-in AA options or FXAA.

SMAA is actually a 3-pass effect, not 1-pass. It does two detection passes before rendering the anti-aliasing filler pixels. It's definitly not the fastest solution, but produces great results, because it's much more sophisticated than just blurring edges.

Ahhh. What he said.

The default settings for SMAA are a bit heavy-handed -- search steps 98 I believe when 32 or 64 will do? 33-66% performance saving right there.

In fact there's a number of shaders where the defaults are unusable or poorly chosen, and since a majority of people probably don't alter them if they don't understand them, this reflects badly on the shaders and Reshade. I've often wondered if one of us on the boards, who has enough knowledge of the shaders, could do a sanity check pass of the shaders on Github, and set sensible defaults for any shaders that don't have them. I would do this, but I'm out of my depth with understanding how to configure most shaders.

Yeah search steps is maxed out with the default settings (112) though from my own testing there's little overall difference in anti-aliasing quality as long as it has any value above 0 where it's disabled unless you use depth view which isn't any indication of how the effect will look for the regular game.

Predication also came back with the latest update allowing for drawing from both luma (brightness?) or color depending on how that is set and then also depth together with this. Though again from my own testing while depth alone allows for very fine lines it has little (none?) impact on aliasing in the game itself so predication might have little impact as well depending on how that works though luma and color both work well although the default settings will look very noisy in the preview modes SMAA has. (Though it has no real effect on the game outside of this besides removing aliasing.)

Can't say much on the performance of the shader effect, initialization is less than a second and whether it's enabled or not doesn't impact framerate in any noticeable way, there is a compute cost of course and it is very likely this can be reduced by a third or even halved if the settings are reduced so with a weaker GPU tuning these defaults might give a little boost to framerate.


EDIT: There's corner rounding as well which is disabled as it has a more pronounced effect on text and such UI or HUD elements, a small amount can help remove a bit more aliasing though but the user has to fine tune the trade-off between that and text clarity from said rounding.


EDIT: Far as testing I prefer to use a indoor or otherwise bright area in a game with depth buffer access and then position the camera (Free camera if possible.) on a lower poly object with visible aliasing and then use the SMAA settings to get a more visible preview of how it impacts these "jaggies" which while subtle it does work though personally I see it as a very subtle effect though some games suffer more from aliasing than others and then there's the in-motion shimmering and such too but that needs downsampling or temporal AA to deal with that in a effective way.

But as long as you have some object to preview with it's not too hard to open the ReShade settings and drag the SMAA slider around a bit, use the preview modes to view depth and the traces and such it does for edges and see the noise pattern that comes up at higher settings. (And how clean the depth mode is but again I've never had it working in the game itself, still jaggy though predication works but I don't know if it uses the depth data or if all that gets cleaned up is the depth buffer itself.)

Thank you all for your posts with answers. Can you throw off your optimal settings with SMAA in this thread?

Groovex wrote: Thank you all for your posts with answers. Can you throw off your optimal settings with SMAA in this thread?

In games with lots of foliage like The Witcher 3 I'm using a threshold at 0.12 and rest maxxed. Corner rounding at 20-40.
In other games I'm using 0.08 and rest maxxed. Corner rounding at 100 unless there's a lot of text.

I don't enable predication, as it makes none to little difference and it's useful to treat the image as a 2D object, because some of the aliasing is independent from the depth.

My edge threshold is like 0.110-0.120, normally I would go as low as possible to defect every corner but it creates heavy shimmering where texture aliasing is present. I use corner rounding at 50, if there are lots of subpixel problems. 35 otherwise .it ruins the menus but that's the only way to ensure it caches some jagges.

BTW, I don't recommend lumasharpen with SMAA. Lumasharpen undoes what SMAA does. So lumasharpen should be a better option where SMAA and FXAA used together. The ideal order should be SMAA, FXAA, Lumasharpen.