PSMAA (Progressive Subpixel Morphological Anti-Aliasing) is a variation on SMAA 1x which aims to push the technique to the limits of what it can do.
This shader is still in beta. It is
mostly feature complete, but it still needs optimizations, a user-friendly UI and some polishing. It's in a usable state, but it's not yet in its final form.
Compared to SMAA 1x, PSMAA has the following additions and improvements:
- It fixes the issue of SMAA not detecting and eliminating jaggies in low-contrast areas. It also no longer needs access to the depth buffer to improve detection, which makes it usable in a wider variety of games.
- It mitigates or eliminates various aliasing artifacts which SMAA mostly leaves untouched.
- It is slightly less prone to artifacting.
It also has some optional functions:
- It can make the jaggies even smoother than normal SMAA, but at the cost of image clarity.
- A specially integrated sharpening pass, which can sharpen the image without bringing back jaggies and pixelation. It can also sharpen heavily blended pixels more.
These screenshots may give you some idea of how PSMAA performs (at fairly aggressive settings) versus SMAA. Unfortunately the comparison websites blur the screenshots so much that a lot of the details and differences are lost. So keep in mind that they don't fully represent how these AA algorithms really perform.
For more info, and to download the files, check out the
GitHub repo
!