One interesting thing in becoming a graphics expert and discussing graphics with non-graphicsprogrammers, is that many don’t care about aliasing.
Aliasing in sound is usually painfully untolerable. It does not seem to be like that in graphics.
Based on this, I dont’t think aliasing is a technical critical fault - it should be considered a specific aesthetic IMHO. As long as people can perceive the shape of the geometry information displayed, it’s ‘fit for purpose’.
If one is rendering in constrained environments I’m fairly sure they’ve made peace with the platform limitations.
(I’m not arguing for aliasing, just that in many practical cases it does not actually matter)
> it should be considered a specific aesthetic IMHO
Case in point, in a 3D platform/adventure game i made back in 2020 for an MSDOS game jam[0], the rasterizer has intentional "flaws" - like lack of subpixel and subtexel accuracy, no zbuffering and no perspective correction (and perhaps unintuitively, the last two actually made the whole renderer more complex) because i had in my mind a specific "glitchy" look. Adding those would be trivial (and probably speed up the rendering a bit on 90s hardware), but things like the wavy lines (as seen in the first shot) and "trembling" vertices are intentional.
Similarly when i ported the game to use 3D hardware APIs, i went for full bilinear filtering because i wanted that 90s "just ported our SW 3D game to use 3dfx" style that a lot of 90s 3D games had (and FWIW the game also runs on an actual Voodoo 1 too[1] :-P). Though i do know some people dislike it so i added an option to disable it.
Right now i tessellate the world quads dynamically based on the distance from the camera, which not only has an overhead of its own but it also adds additional geometric overhead (more transformations, more sorting), so perspective correct texture mapping would let me get rid of that tessellation.
Also 3D meshes (which are static, no dynamic tessellation) need to have enough tessellation to avoid getting too distorted when the camera is close even if the extra geometry isn't really necessary (e.g. IIRC the top sides of the desks are 9 quads/18 triangles when with perspective correct mapping they'd be just 1 quad/2 triangles).
> Aliasing in sound is usually painfully untolerable. It does not seem to be like that in graphics.
It's tolerable in graphics in many cases, but becomes painfully obvious when the spatial frequency of some model approaches the pixel grid's frequency, and you get very distracting Moiré patterns.
edit:
But I guess in 3D rendering you deal with this differently, probably. You probably don't want to spend resources on painting model details that are half a pixel in size, so they get entirely culled, instead of causing any Moiré problems.
One interesting thing in becoming a graphics expert and discussing graphics with non-graphicsprogrammers, is that many don’t care about aliasing.
Aliasing in sound is usually painfully untolerable. It does not seem to be like that in graphics.
Based on this, I dont’t think aliasing is a technical critical fault - it should be considered a specific aesthetic IMHO. As long as people can perceive the shape of the geometry information displayed, it’s ‘fit for purpose’.
If one is rendering in constrained environments I’m fairly sure they’ve made peace with the platform limitations.
(I’m not arguing for aliasing, just that in many practical cases it does not actually matter)