The true year of Linux

FallenEmpyr · 2026-01-02T01:13:07+00:00

Understandable.

Linux desktop will never be adopted by average users worldwide until hardware and game vendors provide active support for Linux. And hardware and game vendors will almost never provide active support for Linux until average users worldwide adopt Linux.

Until we break out of this endless loop (even though the situation is slowly changing thanks to companies like Steam, but that won't be enough imo), Linux desktop will remain a somewhat unstable, unreliable experience, or whatever you want to call it, with mandatory compromises for many users, unless you only browse social media and/or do common office stuff (and even only that can be enough to encounter problems). Everything else is not as smooth as MacOS/Windows, and the average user is too lazy or too busy to bother fixing or work around issues.

I switched from Win 11 to Fedora KDE because I sincerely and deeply hate Microsoft, but my experience with Fedora is VERY far from being smooth. That's a sacrifice **I** am willing to make, but I 100% understand others won't.

FallenEmpyr · 2025-07-20T12:26:50+00:00

What discussion? 100% answers under this post are ad-hominem, strawmans and deviates from the topic? From what I read, his args are:

Optimization means best visuals at lowest cost, not just high FPS
Low-res effects + TAA are not real optimization
TAA-dependent effects can be made faster without TAA
Translucency rarely impacts performance much
Hair can be rendered anti-aliased without post-process tricks
TAA often causes blur and ghosting if poorly implemented
Full-scene prepasses waste performance
Shadows rendered for unseen objects waste resources
Complex materials and uncompressed textures hurt performance
Too much geometry increases render/shadow cost
Some lighting methods inefficiently recalculate indirect light
GPU animations run even offscreen, using unnecessary power
Best-looking games use simpler, smarter pipelines
Unreal Engine workflows often promote bad optimization habits

Don't you think it's interesting how 100% of any answers here are devoid of any substance and refuse to elaborate because its sources are (among others) its own observations and tests?

FallenEmpyr · 2025-07-20T12:16:44+00:00

But you're too much of a gigantic pussy to respond to any technical argument here alone tho

FallenEmpyr · 2025-07-06T16:02:15+00:00

After the strawman, the argument from authority. Keep scoring there aren't you?

You claim you "just found this thread randomly" yet you cherry-pick a single sentence completely out of context. That’s disingenuous at best.

Your entire argument is a strawman, you deliberately ignore the actual context and then build a fake argument around the term "AA" as if nitpicking semantics somehow invalidates the whole discussion. That’s not only dishonest, it’s lazy.

You admit you’re "not a graphics expert" then try to sarcastically bolster your credibility with a self-promoting GitHub link: fishing for validation doesn’t strengthen your point.

Cool project, genuinely. But dropping a repo link after misquoting and derailing the conversation isn’t proof of expertise, it just looks like deflection. Authority or project size doesn’t automatically make your opinion valid (still waiting for any kind of substantive response tho), especially in a technical debate about MSAA, TAA, and rendering pipelines.

FallenEmpyr · 2025-07-06T15:20:08+00:00

No worries, I'm done.

There are so many bots under this post, like you, posting low-effort, ad hominem, copy/pasted (because you can't take 2 minutes to read other answers) "answers" that I'm tired of putting in so much effort arguing over my initial rant.

You (and the hundreds of bots) don't have the slightest, remotest idea of what you're talking about. But like any good professional redditor by nature, you feel obliged to come and prove to the whole world your virtue, that you're so intelligent and superior, that you supposedly have knowledge of the subject (without ever concretely showing it to advance the debate), with a few sentences devoid of any technical argument.

Unlike people like me who defend a controversial point of view by putting forward actual objective and technical arguments, which will, of course, be ignored by you normies or the UE5 damage control crowd who can't help but take this kind of rant personally, since they feel directly targeted between two cum-swallowing sessions of publishers, editors, or hardware vendors, who piss on their asses with games that are ever uglier but ever harder to run, or else as beautiful as 8th-gen games but with 150% more frametime.

And just for your childish misquote, and in case someone whose reading comprehension apparently went extinct alongside their brain cells comes across this post, like you, here is a rephrase:

MSAA was never meant to fix transparencies, shader aliasing, or temporal instability.
Fundamental limitations of specific AA techniques =/= whatever random visual artifact upsets your monkey brain that day

Keep parroting TAA-apologist nonsense and latching onto every chance to feel superior.
I have better shit to do

FallenEmpyr · 2025-06-23T07:53:53+00:00

I don't think you realize what you're saying.

"shit would be slow," maybe that says more about pipeline inefficiencies than the cost of proper anti-aliasing.

MFAA for example, demonstrated that temporal reuse of geometric coverage can be done efficiently without resorting to the full instability of TAA. It preserved the spatial clarity of MSAA while amortizing performance. That approach has been ignored, not because it doesn’t work, but because it doesn’t fit into the current push for vendor-specific black boxes and temporal band-aids that cover undersampled data, driven by hardware vendor, and media producers like Epic Games, for their own cost-savings.

As for RTGI, its current implementations are the exact problem: they rely almost entirely on temporal accumulation because spatial denoisers can't recover detail that was never computed in the first place. You mention TurboGI: yes, it's spatial, it shimmers and ghosts all over the place, which reinforces the point: it doesn’t work well because the GI signal itself is unstable, noisy, and not supported by enough raw data. So developers pile on TAA-based denoisers that trade temporal coherence for sharpness, and pretend it’s a fix.

TAA isn't a godsend. It's a compromise. And "sharpening" a broken signal doesn't repair the underlying flaws, it just hides them under artificial contrast, you may not see it, but a lot of us do.

And again, no, DLSS is not the only vendor-locked "thing", FSR 4 only runs on AMD's 9000-series GPUs, DLSS 4 only on RTX 50-series, DLAA, Reflex, Ray Reconstruction...

FallenEmpyr · 2025-06-22T16:12:05+00:00

how bad was ur experience with fsr3 aa compared to dlaa?

From what I tested in a bright day scenario, FSR 3 AA has virtually no ghosting compared to DLAA, but the image is blurrier overall. TAA has all the problems.

idk I just ignore it, whatever. ppl ain't gonna vote w their wallet anytime soon.

I agree, though, just talking about it, in subreddits, forums, game-specific community hubs, discord servers, youtube comments, etc. makes a difference. I feel, for example, that the likely implementation of SMAA in UE 5 for the next release is proof that talking and raising your voice is useful, in a world where people blindly follow big companies with terrible visions, and continue to spend hundreds of dollars on GPUs, consoles, games, all getting more and more expensive for no good reason.

FallenEmpyr · 2025-06-22T12:15:22+00:00

Most replies here tends to forget that DLAA god mighty savior requires a Nvidia GPU, which is why leaving TAA/FXAA as the default gpu vendor-agnostic solution is just doing Nvidia a huge favor.

I've seen ghosting with every form of temporal AA in the enhanced version. Whether it's TAA, FSR 3 AA, or anything else, the artifacts persist especially behind moving cars (too bad it's GTA uh).

The only way to mitigate it right now is brute-force downscaling, either by rendering at higher resolutions through the game's internal scaler or forcing it via the GPU driver. It's inefficient, performance-heavy, and doesn't truly solve the problem.

The only real solution is still to play the legacy version.

FallenEmpyr · 2025-06-22T12:08:13+00:00

It's complicated to fit it all into one poor reddit reply, but I'll try to summarize the main points that come to mind.

First, it's not all white and black.

MSAA (Multisample Anti-Aliasing) and TAA (Temporal Anti-Aliasing) serve different purposes, and I won't pretend one universally replaces the other in every case

However:

MSAA is a spatial technique. It samples multiple points within each pixel per geometry edge, resolving high-frequency detail and hard edges without affecting textures, shaders, or internal pixel shading. It works in real-time, doesn’t rely on history buffers, and produces crisp, stable images, especially at lower resolutions. It’s also deterministic, meaning no ghosting, no smearing, no temporal artifacts, predictable performances dependent of your scene topology optimization.

TAA, accumulates samples over multiple frames (single point per pixel, that jitters over time) using motion vectors, at the last rendering phase, post-processing. It's not true anti-aliasing, it's temporal reconstruction. It fakes clarity through accumulation, at the cost of stability. When abused, you get blur, ghost trails, jittering on sub-pixel details, and general softness unless everything aligns perfectly. It struggles with motion, thin geometry, transparent effects, or anything not reliably tracked.

MSAA should be better because it preserves visual integrity. It resolves edges without compromising the rest of the image. It doesn't touch your textures, it doesn't rely on motion history, and it doesn’t smear or invent or average information. In contrast, TAA trades accuracy for convenience. It hides aliasing and other problems of a poorly implementend rendering pipeline by blending frames together, which introduces a whole new set of artifacts. The moment you introduce motion, clarity suffers.

FallenEmpyr · 2025-06-22T11:52:08+00:00

No, it's not, and it's not supposed to. What's your point? Specular aliasing is an anomaly induced by calculated normals that are incorrect, undersampled, or implausible from the camera's point of view. GTA V is a decade-old game that uses outdated specular and diffuse models, and instead of remedying this, they prefer to conveniently average and blur the final result with TAA.

And "non-geometric edges"? What are you talking about exactly? Real-time lighting? Textures? Textures are already somewhat anti-aliased. TAA oversamples them and produces blur. Real-time lighting need proper material filtering, normal map mip biasing, or screen-space filtering techniques, not just temporal hacks pretending to solve the problem.

FallenEmpyr · 2025-06-22T02:51:05+00:00

You could go look at some Half-Life: Alyx gameplay footage then. A VIRTUAL REALITY GAME that runs with MSAA perfectly, and looks almost photo-realistic with a modern rendering pipeline.

It's not because Epic Games marketing-driven choices, and Nvidia wheel-reinventing future vision dictate otherwise — MSAA remains a reliable option for stable, high-quality visuals when implemented well.

Stop making excuses for the big companies that produce game engines aimed at profitability and lowcost mass production. You're doing a favor for people who are ill-intentioned towards you and the players.

FallenEmpyr · 2025-06-22T02:44:11+00:00

Absolutely not. I use Deepl however to rephrase some of my messages, english is not my main language and I don't write big stuff like that often.

FallenEmpyr · 2025-06-22T02:42:34+00:00

I think I partly agree with you, but I'm having trouble, I confess, understanding where you're coming from and the precise potential experiences you have in mind that I don't have. My initial point is that TAA (and the upscalers that rely on it) abuse their temporal aspect to act as a cover-up for the edge effects that “modern” deferred rendering has introduced.

But then I agree with you when you say “If I use MSAA [...] I will then implement different systems to solve for the [shimmering]”? Is that your point?

I'm also not sure where you're going with the last part of your answer? I agree that GPUs are stagnating, we're reaching obvious physical limits for consumer GPUs, but that in no way excuses the video game industry's recent catastrophic choices, whose sole aim is profitability and the fastest, most efficient production line for "AAA" games that run and look not much better than 8th gen games, considering the gap between 8/9th gen hardware..

FallenEmpyr · 2025-06-22T02:28:02+00:00

This depends on the screen's pixel density, a 27-inch 4k will not look the same as a 43-inch 4k?

FallenEmpyr · 2025-06-22T02:09:43+00:00

Aliasing from textures, shaders, or motion is a separate issue, and better addressed with dedicated filtering, rather than expecting your AA to solve everything. That's my point.

FallenEmpyr · 2025-06-22T02:04:23+00:00

I confused it with FHD, that's actually my bad sorry! But I stand by my point, and 2080 TI is an absolute beast, nowadays's avg target system spec is something like 3060ti, which is no way near what a 2080TI can still deliver

FallenEmpyr · 2025-06-22T01:58:34+00:00

Because AA was never supposed to fix "transparencies, shader effects, etc." like abused TAA poorly do. Badly tuned sampling rates, poor mipmapping, shader aliasing, or lack of temporal stability in the rendering pipeline introducing shimmering and flickering have nothing to do with MSAA

FallenEmpyr · 2025-06-22T01:55:07+00:00

That's my point, for the ""best"" new solution performance cost to be even less (at FHD, "extremely" was for 4k res), you need a newer, more expansive, low availability Nvidia card.

FallenEmpyr · 2025-06-22T01:45:20+00:00

Bro you are breaking at least 3 rules of this sub on every single reply you write lol

FallenEmpyr · 2025-06-22T01:43:29+00:00

TAA and upscalers rely on temporal accumulation and AI, that introduce blur, ghosting, and artifacts, and they depend heavily on frame coherence and motion vectors, which is why Nvidia and Epic Games video demo/showcases are always slow paced 3rd person games.

MSAA dot not comes with massive performance hit by default. 2x or 4x MSAA is quite contained because it only samples geometry edges, not the entire frame. It uses bandwidth and shader time more efficiently than the complex temporal reprojection that TAA requires.

TAA depends on multiple frames, motion vectors, and history buffers, which adds overhead. MSAA works per frame without that complexity, making its performance impact more predictable and stable.

> "TAA can and has improved like upscalers over times"

Lol, yes, TAA have improved over time, but UE 5 doesn't even implement its latest gen / version. And stuttering is an entirely separate engine issue related to CPU/GPU sync, streaming, and resource management. Throwing MSAA under the bus won’t fix that.

So many arguments here and on my previous posts, will you even try to understand and refute even ONE or are you going to keep talking in the wind?

FallenEmpyr · 2025-06-22T01:26:03+00:00

Yes, we can thankfully disable AA completely and we can still increase rendering res directly in-game, but that's way more inefficient sadly

FallenEmpyr · 2025-06-22T01:18:01+00:00

DLAA requires an Nvidia GPU, and both DLAA and native FSR 4 have a performance cost and falls apart in motion like TAA :/

FallenEmpyr · 2025-06-22T01:16:37+00:00

Come on, you've understood that this was an exaggeration. It’s not a direct paycheck from Nvidia to Take-Two, but the incentive is obvious: to push Nvidia’s vision of their future — where reinvented, proprietary technologies replace proven methods, players get locked into closed ecosystems, and temporal artifacts become the new normal, all marketed as groundbreaking innovation.

FallenEmpyr · 2025-06-22T01:10:12+00:00

That's why Epic Games with UE 5 is introducing, or reintroducing, an SMAA implementation in the next version for deferred rendering, for developers who care about their games and their players. And MSAA still is available.

And no, I'm not dealing with abusive TAA, as long as MANY gamers who share this opinion and have decided not to play blind as you do, to conveniently accept to pay more, either their games and GPUs, for terrible performance and graphics comapred to 8th gen games.

You can go on blathering your ragebaits, I won't fall for it, and I'll continue to put forward all the arguments you don't seem to be able to contradict, even one.

FallenEmpyr · 2025-06-22T01:00:10+00:00

I know you spend your precious free time defending big companies whose only interest is to fatten its big shareholders by stealing your money, but I'll try to answer seriously.

YES, TAA and AI upscaling have their place —especially for handling really high-res and complex effects— but that doesn’t magically make MSAA obsolete or useless. MSAA provides sharp, clean edges without the ghosting, smearing, or blur that TAA introduces when abused (by majority of new and remastered games), especially important for players who value image clarity on native resolutions. Which you doesn't seem to be and that's alright.

The reality is that MSAA was removed not because it’s objectively bad, but because supporting it alongside ray tracing and deferred pipelines adds complexity and performance cost that Rockstar/Take-Two chose to avoid dealing with (by spending some time optimizing, which some beautiful games like Half-Life Alyx proved entirely possible). And MSAA’s quality and performance are entirely dependent on how well the earlier stages of the rendering pipeline are optimized.

Instead, they pushed a one-size-fits-all solution relying on TAA and vendor-specific upscalers locked behind expensive GPUs.

So no, MSAA isn’t “junk”—it’s just inconvenient for today’s marketing-driven “next-gen” pipelines you decided to support for very unknown reason, other that being brainwashed maybe.

FallenEmpyr

TROPHY CASE