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.
Note: This shader is still in beta. It is mostly feature complete, but it still needs optimisations, 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:
- Make the jaggies even smoother than normal SMAA, but at the cost of image sharpness.
- 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.
- Fine details: Diffchecker | ImgSlider
- Low-contrast environment: Diffchecker | ImgSlider
- Foliage: Diffchecker | ImgSlider
The recommended way to install this shader is to download the latest release for this repo. Then make sure you have a (preferably dedicated) folder for my shaders in the reshade-shaders\Shaders\ directory, and dump the release's contents into it. Also make sure you have ReShade's standard SMAA implementation installed, as PSMAA needs its AreaTex.png and SearchTex.png textures.
If you decide to download the PSMAA files directly from the repo, make sure to also download the contents of the reshade-shared repo and put it into a folder with the name name, in the same folder which contains the PSMAA files. It should look something like:
reshade-shared/
PSMAA.fx
PSMAA.fxh
// etc...
The UI has explanations on how to configure and use the effect.
PSMAA should be applied before any sharpening, blur, and other effects which affect pixel morphology and clarity. I don't recommend combining it with any other forms of AA.
If the game you're using it on has sharpening, make sure to turn it off. Use the built-in sharpening instead, or just use a ReShade sharpening effect that you like. Same with in-game blur effects. Bloom probably won't cause issues, but if you see weird artifacts you can try turning that off too.
Runs on ReShade by Crosire.
Special thanks to Lordbean for his Smoothing algorithm.