Morphological Antialiasing (MLAA)

Features / Description

MLAA is an image-based, post-process filtering technique which identifies discontinuity patterns and blends colors in the neighborhood of these patterns to perform effective anti-aliasing. It is the precursor of a new generation of real-time antialiasing techniques that rival MSAA. This sample is based on the original, CPU-based MLAA implementation provided by Reshetov in 2009, with improvements to greatly increase performance. The improvements are:

• Integration of a new, efficient, easy-to-use tasking system implemented on top of Intel® Threading Building Blocks (Intel® TBB).
• Integration of a new, efficient, easy to use pipelining system for CPU onloading of graphics tasks.
• Improvement of data access patterns through a new transposing pass.
• Increased use of Intel® SSE instructions to optimize discontinuities detection and color blending.

This sample also contains MLAA implementation for Intel HD graphics, called separable antialiasing (SAA). It runs 2.5x faster than previous state-of-the-art GPU implementations of MLAA, achieving about 1000 fps for a 1 Mpixel image resolution on Intel’s latest graphics hardware.

System Requirements

Hardware:

• CPU: Dual core or better (Intel® Core™ i5 or better suggested)
• GFX: Microsoft DirectX* 9c capable graphics card
• OS: Microsoft Windows Vista* (x64 editions) or Microsoft Windows* 7 (x64 editions)
• MEM: 2 GB of RAM or better

Software:

• Microsoft DirectX* SDK (June 2010 release or later)
• Microsoft Windows* SDK May 2010

• Microsoft Visual Studio* 2008 w/SP1, Microsoft Visual Studio* 2010, or Intel® C++ Compiler version 11

• Intel® Threading Building Blocks
• Microsoft* C Run-Time Libraries (CRT) 2008/2010