The Witcher 3 Will Use Temporal AA On Consoles; CDPR Will Think About DX12
New and enlightening The Witcher 3 interviews are appearing every day, or so it seems. Today it’s all about tech details, with CD Projekt RED’s Lead Engine Programmer Balázs Török who had a chat with his fellow countrymen at The Witcher Hungary.
Török disclosed that the PlayStation 4 & Xbox One versions of The Witcher 3 will be using a a “proprietary” temporal antialiasing technology of which the team is proud of, though they’ll demonstrated it at a later date.
A proprietary Temporal Anti-Aliasing technique is used that we are proud of, but we’ll talk about it more when everyone can see the results.
In case you don’t know what temporal antialiasing is, it should be similar to NVIDIA’s TXAA. Its primary purpose is to remove temporal aliasing in a scene, which is particularly important when dealing with moving objects and characters; traditional antialiasing techniques such as FXAA are good with fairly static scenes but break in motion.
Overall, this should mean that even console users will be able to get a nice picture quality in the game. Török also mentioned that while The Witcher 3 won’t support DirectX 12 at launch, the team will think about it for the future:
Unfortunately the DX12 support is not possible, because players wouldn’t be able to use it right now. As will be available to the general public, I’m sure that we’ll think about it.
Obviously, he is referring to the simple fact that Windows 10 is not officially out yet until later this year. Since The Witcher 3 is coming out on May 19, that’s well before any reasonable amount of gamers will be able to use DirectX 12; it’s worth noting that CD Projekt RED never got around to update The Witcher 2 from its original DX9 API to DX11, however the adoption rate for DX12 is estimated to be significantly faster by Microsoft, with Windows 10 being a free upgrade (within the first year of its release) for all Windows 7 & 8 users.
The incredible DX12 performance gains demonstrated at GDC 2015 could be a godsend for those looking to play The Witcher 3 in all of its glory without having a massively powerful PC.
Stay tuned for more on this highly anticipated title as we approach the launch, scheduled in less than two months now.