Quote from: Tangled-Universe on August 23, 2019, 04:24:37 AMQuote from: Dune on August 23, 2019, 02:01:59 AMI use AA6 by default, but I'll experiment a bit with higher AA and PNT. Thanks!
A bit higher AA, yes.
A bit higher PNT, no.
Or did you not mean increasing both?
Quote from: Dune on August 23, 2019, 07:28:49 AMBoth, but separately, just to test both, and see which one serves best.
I'm afraid you don't understand the AA vs PNT relationship/concept.
You do realize that increasing PNT along with AA is counter-productive in terms of quality?
Say, you render with AA4 with its default PNT of 0.075 and are not happy with the amount of noise.
Then you would increase from AA4 to AA8 and the renderer
decreases the PNT to 0.0375.
The reason this happens is that the more AA samples you throw at your render the more noise you can remove. How is that noise defined? The PNT is (an arbitrary(?) or perhaps dimensionless) number which defines the "contrast" between subpixels. The lower the noise the lower the contrast the lower the pixel noise. The threshold simply tells the algorithm to keep shooting AA samples until the noise reaches a certain threshold, the PNT.
The rule then is "shoot more AA samples when adjacent pixel noise value is greater than the PNT value set by user" clamped by AA# squared.
So increasing PNT along with AA actually counteracts the increase of AA. Potentially/very likely.
If you increase AA4 to AA8 and keep PNT at 0.075 you may still end up with a better looking render, simply because AA4 was not supplying enough samples to reach the PNT of 0.075. AA8 offers sufficient samples to reach the PNT and then stops. If the PNT would be its default 0.0375 then it would use more samples to try to reach it with the maximum being 8 squared = 64 samples.
Consequently, if you set AA8 and PNT of 0.01 then you are asking the renderer to try to render a very smooth picture with only 64 samples max. The render will likely take as long as AA8 full sampling, since 64 samples in many cases is not sufficient for such a low PNT. Exception might be smooth areas like empty sky, but the principle generally applies.