When reset to default settings, CS:GO does its best to troll you. It deafens you when you reach the main menu. That’s bad enough right there. But the problems continue when you reach the graphics options. For some STUPID STUPID reason that there’s absolutely no point to, texture filtering is set to trilinear. This is the second worst option available! What this does is, even if your texture detail is set to high, it’ll switch them for low quality ones at a distance or when at a steep angle. If you want it to look like 1.6 then this is GREAT! However, I see no point. The performance impact is minimal- just set it to highest 16X and leave it that. But for some other stupid, stupid reason, it ramps MSAA up to 8X and turns FXAA on as well. Which is STUPID!
But… why is it stupid? A pixel represents that bit of the screen.
But this isn’t good enough. Here you can see a scene from CS:GO, at a low resolutionso the problem is very obvious. It’s full of jaggies! Horrible, abrupt edgeswhere one thing stops and another begins. The wires look like they’ve been drawn in using Paint! The aerials look like random black pixels, some floating in the air. This fence here isn’t a fence, it’s just a bunch of lines that aren’t connected to each other! And these roof tiles here are very unsure of themselves.
That was an example from a proper map, but I made a MAP FROM HELL to show the problem even more clearly! With a high-resolution image, it looks fine. But the moment we switch to low resolution, the problem becomes clear. There aren’t enough pixels to represent every wire and the gaps between them, so detail is lost. In this case, a lot of the lines disappear entirely. This is a worst-case situation, but you get the idea. What can we do about it? What you need is anti-aliasing.
Now this is a fascinating topic. Really, it is! Antialiasing has been with us since the 90’s. It’s been improved generation upon generation. And yet, nobody can agree on which method’s best. They all have pros and cons! Some are really, really complicated.
Fortunately for you, Global Offensive only uses the simple ones. It’s about 10 years behind every other game in this regard. MSAA is the clever kind.
Say these red squares are individual pixels, and this black line is what they need to represent.
Without anti-aliasing, the pixels can only be black, or white.
Let’s take a look at this one here, highlighted in yellow. Without anti-aliasing, because the centre of the pixel is black, the WHOLE of the pixel is black.
BUT, with 2X MSAA, instead of going by what’s in the centre of the pixel, it tests 2 different bits, and gets the average of those colours. So because one is black and the other is white, the pixel becomes grey, the average of the two.
The more of these samples, the better the result.
2x MSAA picks 2 spots within a pixel, 4X picks 4, and 8x chooses …9.
Okay it’s 8. MSAA is full of good stuff. But there are down-sides. It doesn’t work with transparent textures… like this fence here, or the leaves on trees. And there’s a bit of a performance impact, especially with 8x.
But how much MSAA do you need? Obviously, the higher it is, the better the result. 4X was always the go-to amount back in the day, and 8X considered overkill. But as your resolution increases, the importance of each pixel goes down. If you’re at full HD, I think 4X is as much as you’d ever need, but you could probably even get away with 2X unless you’re really into staring at stray pixels. I did a video 4 years ago where I discovered you could see through distant bars better at higher MSAA settings, since it acts like a higher resolution. But in reality, I’d rather have the extra framerate, and so would drop the MSAA to 4X or 2X, depending on what I’ve had to eat that morning.
That’s MSAA. Demanding, but clean and smart. FXAA, on the other hand, doesn’t know what the hell anything is supposed to be so it blurs it all into oblivion.
Seriously- that’s all it does! It’s called ‘Fast, Approximate Anti-Aliasing’ for a reason. And yeah it took me a while to find the X there as well.
It looks at the screen, thinks about contrast and depth a bit… and then BLURS EVERYTHING.
A human could look at this distant aerial and say ‘yeah it’s meant to look like this!’, but FXAA just thinks ‘these are the pixels, I must blur them!' and does THIS. That’s why I don’t like FXAA. I mean, sure, it does a good job in some bits like where the roof meets the sky. But that’s only because it lacks intelligence, so blurs everything extensively for good measure! You wouldn’t give a photographer praise for applying an Instagram filter- especially not if it’s the same one every time. And you wouldn’t praise the military for killing a few bad guys if they also bombed a whole city in the process. For the same reasons, don’t be impressed by FXAA either. But there are uses for it. Firstly, it won’t slow down your PC much, and secondly, because it blurs EVERYTHING, this includes the fences and leaves that MSAA would miss out. And you know what I was saying earlier about antialiasing getting less important as the resolution increases? Once you reach 1440p, or in my case, 4k, I actually find that FXAA is all that I need. YOU STILL NEED SOMETHING! But when the pixels are so small and insignificant, rather than slow my PC down with MSAA, I find FXAA is just enough to take the edge off. But at typical gaming resolutions, I don’t find it’s good enough. I don’t like its unintelligent blur. I find the way it deals with distant lines just as distracting as no AA at all. Here it is in motion, so you can see what I mean. Yes it’s blurred, but what has that achieved?
But this is where I had an idea. What if we keep both of them on? BUT, rather than CS:GO’s default 8X, we lower MSAA to 2x instead? This way, we get much better performance, still have smart anti-aliasing to reduce movement shimmer, and then get the blur applied to that to eliminate any sharp edges that remain. Effectively using each AA method to soften the others’ weaknesses. And you know what? I like it! I would say it’s comparable to 8x MSAA in many ways, but will likely run a lot faster on your setup.
At any resolution, this may be a good option to try.
But at the end of the day it comes down to personal preference. The sadists among you may prefer the raw, pixelated style of no AA at all. Weirdos. Others may want quality no matter what- in which case I suggest turning AA off completely and instead looking into DSR or VSR, depending on which type of graphics card you have. But for the rest of us- which I suspect will be the vast majority- I would suggest giving this combination a go.
In most maps, I’m happy with how this looks. You can still see the problems in a worst-case scenario like this. And when it comes to smoothness while moving, you can never have enough resolution or anti-aliasing. But- one last thing, which possibly undermines everything I’ve said up until now! I ran benchmarks under GPU-limited conditions to see just HOW much of a performance impact anti-aliasing would have. We’re talking 4K, maximum settings and so on. And here’s how my framerates changed when compared with no antialiasing. Yup! I could have FXAA, 4x MSAA OR my suggested 2X with FXAA for no performance hit. Within a frame or two, at most. As in, you might as well enable one of these because they’re free to have! And 2x on its own actually ran 6% faster for some reason. I double-checked and everything! I’m not going to use these results to influence my recommendations in this video since your PC’s results may, and probably will, vary. Benchmark your PC at your settings, see what impact anti-aliasing has, and decide from that. But just remember: you might be able to get anti-aliasing with none of the performance down-sides. It’s worth checking out! As you can probably tell, I love this topic.
Modern games- particularly Rainbow Six Siege- used REALLY clever technology to keep framerates high and your visuals, smooth. PS4 Pro and Xbox One X both require clever techniques to reach 4K resolutions. And Valve themselves use the same cool stuff to make VR run fast on existing hardware. There’s a PDF they made a few years ago about it, which you can check out. Thanks again, Alex. I don’t think it’s even running on Source at the moment, but maybe these kinds of features could benefit CS:GO. Not by adding more detail, but instead by keeping framerates high, frametimes consistent, and jagged edges to a minimum.
Download my evil aliasing map to test for yourself in this video’s description. And check out my ancient video on antialiasing here! And if you want to know what CS:GO and Left 4 Dead 2’s zombies have in common, see this video from last week.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEbAJHd84ug
