Slashdot Mirror
Intel Details Handling Anti-Aliasing On CPUs
MojoKid writes "When AMD launched their Barts GPU that powers the Radeon 6850 and 6870, they added support for a new type of anti-aliasing called Morphological AA (MLAA). However, Intel originally developed MLAA in 2009 and they have released a follow-up paper on the topic--including a discussion of how the technique could be handled by the CPU. Supersampling is much more computationally and bandwidth intensive than multisampling, but both techniques are generally too demanding of more horsepower than modern consoles or mobile devices are able to provide. Morphological Anti-aliasing, in contrast, is performed on an already-rendered image. The technique is embarrassingly parallel and, unlike traditional hardware anti-aliasing, can be effectively handled by the CPU in real time. MLAA is also equally compatible with ray tracing or rasterized graphics."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embarrassingly_parallel
Sex. Sure, you and your SO may be so good at sex it only lasts a few seconds, but you'd never admit it in public.
Embarrassingly Parallel Processing is the same way.
I think you need to do your research before being critical... embarrassingly critical it appears.
If it is "embarrassingly parallel", why not leave it on the GPU? Makes more sense to have it running on dozens to potentially hundreds of stream processors than a couple "free" cores on the CPU.
Well whaddya know, it's in Wikipedia. That makes it officially okay, right?
I still think it's a poorly worded phrase.
If your signal is aliased during sampling, you are toasted.
No voodoo will help you if your spectrum folded on itself.
So super-sample it or shut up.
Everything else is a snake oil for unwashed masses.
And yes, MPLAA still looks like crap in comparison to SS.
They want everything to run on the CPU, and thus for you to need a big beefy Intel CPU. Remember Intel doesn't have a GPU division. They make small integrated chips but they are not very powerful and don't stack up well with the low power nVidia/ATi stuff. What they make is awesome CPUs. So they really want to transition back to an all-CPU world, no GPUs.
They've been pushing this idea slowly with various things, mostly based around ray-tracing (which GPUs aren't all that good at).
Right now it is nothing but wishful thinking. Nobody is going to dump their GPU for CPU only rendering since even a cheap GPU and out do a powerful CPU in many respects. However maybe some day.
While it is for selfish reasons, I don't disagree with Intel's idea over all. It would be nice to have computers where everything is done on the CPU, no special dedicated hardware. That's really the whole idea of a computer, rather than having dedicated devices to do things, you have a powerful device that can do everything in software.
Touche, sir.
If the system is 'embarrassingly parallel' and simple then the GPU would be a better use case. GPU's typically have a lot (200-400) cores that are optimized for embarrassingly simple calculations. Sure you could render everything on a CPU these days, simpler games could even run with an old school SVGA (simple frame buffer) card and let all the graphics be handled by the CPU as used to be the case in the 90's and is evidenced by the 'game emulators in JavaScript' we've been seeing lately but GPU's are usually fairly unused except for the ultramodern 3D shooters which also tax a CPU pretty hard.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Do you have any sort of formal (that is, university-level) training in Computer Science or Computer Engineering? Based on your comment, it really doesn't look like you have any at all.
Like others have already pointed out, "embarrassingly parallel" is a very legitimate and correct term to use in the field of parallel computing. It may sound funny to you, but it's a term used by the experts. In fact, it's such a core concept that even most undergraduates are well aware of it and what it means.
This is the sort of shit I see time and time again from Rails "developers" and JavaScript "programmers". Such people have no real training whatsoever, yet somehow believe themselves to be experts in the field. They go out and make blatantly ignorant and incorrect comments on various social media sites, and then wonder why actual professionals and academics think that these Ruby and JavaScript users are idiots.
So, it basically blurs the image around areas of high contrast? Sounds like thats whats going on. Looks like it, too. I can understand why they are targeting this at mobile and lower powered devices: it kinda looks crappy. I might even say that no antialiasing looks better, but I'd really have to see more samples, especially contrasting this with regular MSAA. I suspect, however, that normal antialiasing will always look considerably better. For instance, normal AA would not blur the edge between two high-contrast textures on a wall (I think, since it is actually aware that it is processing polygon edges), while I suspect MLAA will, since it only sees an area of high contrast. Look at the sample image they post in the article: the white snow on the black rock looks blurred in the MLAA processed picture, while it has no aliasing artifacts at all in the unprocessed image. Its pretty slight, but its definitely there. Like I say, need to see more real world renders to really tell if its a problem at all or simply a minor thing no one will ever notice. I'll stick to my 4X MSAA, TYVM.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
Correct me if I'm wrong, but MSAA is already embarrassingly parallel, and provides for better fidelity than this newfangled MLAA.
Yes, its faster than MSAA, but modern GPUs are already pretty good at handling real-time MSAA.
GCS/MU/P d- s:- a-- C++++$ UL++ P+ L++ E+ W++ N o K- w--- O M+ V- PS+++ PE Y+ PGP t+ 5- X R++ tv+ b++ DI++ D++ G+ e++ h-
This is a phrase I would have reserved for myself after several too many drinks... not so much for this article ;p
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
Glad to see that amateur journalists have created an article in wikipedia whose "sources remain unclear because it lacks inline citations."
Anti-aliasing, by definition, must be performed in object space or, possibly, in picture space. But it cannot be possibly carried out on an already rendered image. They must be trying to market some glorified blur technique under the anti-aliasing moniker. Nothing new here...
"Embarrassingly parallel" refers to a problem made up of many isolated tasks -- such as running a fragment (pixel) shader on millions of different fragments, or a HTTP server handling thousands of clients -- that can all be run concurrently without any communication between them.
It's odd that they use that term here, because the other anti-aliasing techniques are embarrassingly parallel as well.
SSAA (super-sampling) always renders each pixel n times at various locations within the pixel, and blends them together.
MSAA (multi-sampling) is basically the same as SSAA, but only works on polygon edges and is very dependant on proper mipmapping to reduce aliasing introduced when scaling textures.
Thanks for writing an educational reply! Alas I cannot mod it, being the OP.
It's still a weird phrase, though.
Can amateur journalists PLEASE stop using the phrase "embarrassingly parallel" to describe software tasks? Who's embarrassed? Why are they embarrassed about designing something that can be efficiently processed?
No can do. Journalists all read each other, and when one comes up with a catchy term, they all pick up on it. This is especially true if they have no idea what they're writing about, or some editor thinks it's punchier or dramatic.
My pet peeve is "gun-toting." No one "totes" a firearm! If it's a pistol, you holster it. If it's a rifle, you sling it or shoulder it. I guess "armed" is too simple.
Can amateur journalists PLEASE stop using the phrase "embarrassingly parallel" to describe software tasks? Who's embarrassed? Why are they embarrassed about designing something that can be efficiently processed?
But amateur journalism is embarrassingly parallel.
Nope, I studied photography, evangelized multiple distributions of Linux, wrote my own games, work in IT at a place where all the workloads are single-threaded, have my own home recording studio, and other such things. That's my geek cred, not CS/CE.
I don't understand why people need to anonymously criticize an honest mistake by someone not "in the business" to the point where it's the biggest thread. I guess it's the Internet, and that's what's been happening since USENET, so I don't let it get to me. (I also used to participate in USENET, if that counts for anything anymore.)
Uhh, it's not a new term at all. I distinctly remember it from my undergrad days, and those were in the early 1980s. In fact, I think we learned of it during one of our earliest introduction-to-computer-architecture courses. It was pretty basic knowledge that everyone in the program was assumed to know of and understand.
This is Slashdot. Many here would be happy to admit to having an SO with whom they are having regular sex.
So would a lot of the people with SOs...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Anti-aliasing, by definition, must be performed in object space or, possibly, in picture space. But it cannot be possibly carried out on an already rendered image.
Ever heard of hq3x? Or the pixel art vectorizer we talked about two months ago?
I presume the implication is the fact that it is 'embarrassingly parallel' means it can be performed on the shader units of a graphics card. What I don't understand is that IF it is a problem that can be efficiently broken up across the hundreds of cores of a modern GPU, why would you want to? All you're doing is adding a huge volume of data transfer across the PCIe bus, to bog down a CPU that could be better spent running collision detection, netcode, AI routines, or any number of other tasks that cannot be handled easily on a GPU.
[Morphological AA postprocessing] really ruined the readability of my games' GUIs. So, while it may be an effective AA technique, applications may need to be rewritten to take advantage of it.
Just as games and other applications supporting a "10-foot user interface" need to be rewritten with larger text so that the text is not unreadable when a game is played on a standard-definition television. The developers of Dead Rising found this out the hard way.
It's a term of art commonly used in the field for a very long time. That you don't like it really doesn't matter at all to anyone but you.
While I understand AA, and why we do it; but I always experience a moment's rush of absurdity when I consider it.
Up until quite recently, with high-speed digital interfaces nowhere near what video of any real resolution required, and high-bandwidth analog components very expensive, AA was just something that happened naturally, whether you liked it or not: your not-at-all-AAed digital frame went to the RAMDAC(which, unless you had really shelled out, could likely have been a bit lax about accuracy in exchange for speed), and was then shoved through a VGA cable of undistinguished parentage, a whole pile of analog widgetry that controlled the yokes on the CRT, and was finally smeared onto the nice, soft, phosphor blobs on your CRT. For things involving video gear, rather than computers, this went double: a trip through a composite->RF modulator pretty much eliminated the ability to even display jagged pixels, whether you wanted them or not.
It's always a little strange to think of how much computer power we now burn so that our all-digital video signal paths don't shove the jaggies in our faces.
It can work on any DX9 GPU without dedicated support. http://hardocp.com/article/2011/07/18/nvidias_new_fxaa_antialiasing_technology/1
Your definition of anti-aliasing is off by a long shot.
Both this edge blending technique and pixel art upscalers work by guessing underlying shapes based on the corners within high-contrast edges in the image. Pixel art upscalers aren't the same as hand-drawing the image at a higher pixel density, but they still produce a picture with some of the same desirable qualities. Likewise, even if this sort of edge blending isn't the same as proper anti-aliasing, it still produces a picture with some of the same desirable qualities.
I only said one thing, for which I accepted correction, but apparently the quality of discussion on Slashdot has degraded to the point of the mud-slinging on Digg and Youtube... I am mildly intrigued by one thing, though. Why do you feel the need to rip me to shreds so thoroughly? Are you trying to accomplish something? And, why are you doing it anonymously?
I have, but I didn't come upon the term "embarrassingly parallel" until much later. Possibly because I'm embarrassingly old; the first use I can find of the term is in 1989, and it doesn't seem to have become mainstream even within computer science until a few years later.
"I still think it's a poorly worded phrase."
Yeah. Embarrassingly poorly worded.
Need Mercedes parts ?
I think you've done a good job of pointing out what's wrong with the phrase actually... those in a technical field, or those who took a moment to read the Wikipedia article (and yes, usual caveats about believing everything you read in Wikipedia, just ask Steven Colbert about elephants...), the phrase Embarrassingly Parallel has a specific meaning. A journalist or non-technical reader, however, will probably assume that it is an exclamation that doesn't actually add anything to the meaning, as though they're describing something as ridiculously easy.
That's the main problem with tech reporting though... wording something in a way that will be understood by your reader without insulting the intelligence of the people actually in the field.
Translation: Damn, I was revealed as an ignoramus. How can I swing this back in my favor?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
My pet peeve is "gun-toting." No one "totes" a firearm! If it's a pistol, you holster it. If it's a rifle, you sling it or shoulder it. I guess "armed" is too simple.
Seriously? Lots of people tote firearms. Tote means to carry or to have on one's person.
Depends how lazy the guy writing the dictionary is. I've never hear someone say, "tote that rifle to the ready line." You can't get a "tote concealed weapons" permit. No one talks about the "right to keep and tote arms."
The only other expression I'm familiar with is "tote-bag." All I want to know: are we about to go shooting or shopping?
Many of the commercial ray tracing packages have written GPU-based versions that work remarkably well.
V-Ray and mental ray, in particular, have very exciting GPU implementations. A presentation by mental images showed some very high-quality global illumination calculations done on the GPU. Once you get good sampling algorithms, the challenge is dealing with memory latency. It's very slow to do random access into memory on a GPU. mental images solved that problem by running a lot of threads, as GPU's context switch very quickly. When I said "a lot of threads", I wasn't kidding -- the demo I saw was running 100,000 threads over 10 graphics cards. The huge majority of those threads are stalled waiting for memory, but it doesn't cost anything to wait for those accesses to be satisfied if you have other threads to run.
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
I agree and I think a much better phrase would be something like simplistically parallel or cakewalk parallel even.
And frankly I don't care if Intel calls it Shaka Zulu parallel as the whole point of the new AMD APU arch (which is more than just a CPU+GPU because at the same time they are switching from a VLIW GPU design to a vector based which will allow tighter integration and shared caching) is that there are many jobs the GPU does better than a CPU. It isn't that a CPU can't do those jobs, hell with a fast enough CPU you could probably render Crysis on nothing but a CPU, it is just it would suck down power and crank the heat worse than a Pentium 4.
I'm just glad Intel got caught with their bribing of OEMs (which got so bad an official from Dell said during the price wars there were quarters where the ONLY profit dell saw was Intel kickbacks) and rigging of their compilers so that no WE the customers can actually have choices in the market. walking into the local Walmart the other day i noticed more than half of the laptops and three quarters of the desktops were AMD based now.
Hopefully this will mean AMD will gain some of the share they should have gotten but were denied during the P4, aka "space heater o' suck" era and frankly they deserve as they have really great prices ATM and we are seeing for the first time since AMD64 something completely new in the X86 arena with the AMD APU, which has some really wicked features like letting the integrated do physics while the discrete takes care of textures and by having such tight integration from the looks of it for FP the AMD chips are gonna rock.
Intel seems to be missing the point with TFA, in that we have long since reached "good enough" when it comes to CPUs and more and more of the jobs we have, such as having fast transcoding to our mobile devices like phones and pads, HDMI HD video, gaming, video and picture editing, all these things are done better and with lower heat and power on the GPU.
My only worry is that Intel will yet again be rewarded for their douchebaggery, in this case slowly strangling Nvidia before simply buying them out if the AMD design turns out to be the way to go. Frankly Intel should have been busted for antitrust when the bribery came out, instead of being allowed to kill the Nvidia chipset business. I figure there next move will be when using CPU alone doesn't cut it and facing the fact their GPU division stinks on ice they just buy out Nvidia which we be really sorry as Nvidia would be doing quite well right now if Intel wouldn't have cut them off at the knees.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
It's embarrassing because it's almost *too* efficient. The term first came about when CPU manufacturers and the industry in general were embarrassed at how much faster the GPU was for certain algorithms (i.e. the embarrassingly parallel ones). Programmers also were generally embarrassed at not using the technology sooner, and they often spent YEARS writing efficient code for the CPU, only to have a 5 minute knock-up code job on the GPU beat it when they finally experimented with the GPU.
The definition was then further reinforced by programmers who were expected to write long convoluted code to show their managers. They were then embarrassed because the stuff was good yet very quick to write (parallel algorithms are by their nature more short and elegant), so it looked like they were being lazy.
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
In Wikipedia's defense, it's at the least more authoritative than The Bible, even though the latter is [i]embarrassingly trusted[/i] by more people.
http://www.google.com/search?q=tote&tbs=dfn:1
I agree and I think a much better phrase would be something like simplistically parallel or cakewalk parallel even.
Thank you! Simplistically parallel works a lot better.
And frankly I don't care if Intel calls it Shaka Zulu parallel
I'd buy that. TAKE MY MONEY
all these things are done better and with lower heat and power on the GPU
Indeed, for most applications and users we have reached that "good enough" point, at least until someone develops more complex software. Someone else in the comments here mentioned bus overutilization as a potential future scenario. It all depends on how much you offload, I suppose.
Regardless of the antitrust issues which we both agree are terrible... you have to give Intel some credit for producing a killer combo with the i7-2*** series and *67 chipsets.
MLAA is also crap, compared to "proper" antialiasing (supersampling) or even "draft" antialiasing (multisampling). Any detail smaller than 1 pixel simply isn't rendered with MLAA (and that also means no sub-pixel motion). Essentially, MLAA is just a blur filter, which actually reduces the amount of detail in the image (unlike supersampling, which increases the detail).
Edge detect + supersampling (or edge detect + high multisampling) is by far the best solution.
Oh, and technically blurring is antialiasing. It's just a very primitive flavor of.
Aliasing is when signals become indistinguishable. The common symptom of jaggies occurs when of the ray that is chosen to sample hides the signal of the nearby rays.
But blurring is aliasing! In physical blurring signals from in focus rays are overwhelmed by signals from out of focus rays. Similarly, with a blur filter you're definitely losing data by blurring it with neighboring signals.
And you're right: this technology is nothing but an elaborate blur filter. So this looks like anti-aliasing because it masks one well known symptom, but it's clearly obscuring signal and thus aliasing.
The word is "touché", not "touche".
Too fucking shay, senor!
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
A barn (symbol b) is a unit of area. Originally used in nuclear physics for expressing the cross sectional area of nuclei and nuclear reactions, today it is used in all fields of high energy physics to express the cross sections of any scattering process. A barn is defined as 1028 m2 (100 fm2) and is approximately the cross sectional area of a uranium nucleus.
Two related units are the outhouse (1034 m2, or 1 b) and the shed (1052 m2, or 1 yb),[3] although these are rarely used in practice.
You'd never make it in physics either. Think you could hit the broad side of a barn? It's not as big as you'd think. "Embarrassingly parallel" is a technical term, the same way a "barn", "outhouse" or "shed" is perfectly technical. Your humor breaker needs to get reset.
AA is a crutch to get around a lack of DPI. Take the iphone 4 at 326 DPI, it is 3 to 4x the DPI of the average craptasic "HD" computer monitor. I have a laptop with a 15" 1920x1200 screen. At that DPI Seeing the "jaggies" is pretty difficult compared with the same resolution on my 24". On the 15" can turn AA on/off and its pretty difficult to discern the difference. That monitor is only ~150DPI. I challenge you to see the affects of anti-aliasing on a screen with a DPI equivalent to the iphone 4.
The playstation/xbox on the other-hand are often used on TV's with DPI's approaching 30. If you get within a couple feet of those things the current generation of game machines look like total crap. Of course the game machines have AC power, so there really isn't an excuse. I've often wondered why sony/MS haven't added AA to one of the respun versions of their consoles.
This is image reconstruction, where additional information (not necessarily correct) is derived from a limited image.
Close equivalents are the "font smoothing" done by the earliest versions of Macintosh for printing their bitmap graphics on a PostScript printer to draw 72 dpi 1-bit images at 300 dpi. Also I believe Microsoft's earliest subpixel font rendering, smoothtype, was done this way (not cleartype or any other modern font rendering).
Much more complicated examples are algorithms for scaling up images, including ones for converting video to HDTV or even IMAX resolution. These create images that replace the pixels, based on analysis of sometimes very large areas around the pixel. And by far the most complicated example are the programs that recover shapes from very low-resolution bitmaps, such as the Microsoft one posted earlier on slashdot.
Lets be fair, "embarrassingly parallel" is an embarrassingly stupid phrase. It takes a word out of it's normal context.
You'd think they would chose something less silly sounding and less prone to confusing those who encounter it for the first time. Say, "independently parallel" - seems to sum it up nicely while not confusing the hell out of those unfamiliar with the jargon.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
So perhaps you can explain this:
Why would someone use such a stupid term for it, when something much more intuitive like "independently parallel" might suffice?
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
MSAA looks awful - and Intel's CEO famously knocked antialiasing as being a stupid blurring technique not long ago. So, he goes with the only form of AA that literally adds no value. Cutting off their nose to spite their face?
I think you mean sources remain "embarrassingly unclear"
>>And frankly I don't care if Intel calls it Shaka Zulu parallel
Well.... I'd think it was awesome.
Hell, my Master's is even in parallel processing.
-ShakaUVM
Thanks to the race for the almight 'insightful' mod, we get precious little owning up to a mistake. With that understood, you'll pardon me for saying: Shut up.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
MSAA isn't quite what you describe. Instead, several samples are taken, and which primitive they're in is tested. But, only one fragment per primitive is generate – i.e. with supersampling, if all the fragments land on the same primitive, the fragment shader is run multiple times. With multi-sampling, the fragment shader is run only once. The reason that people cite that it "only works on polygon edges" is because that's where you get pixels with more than one primitive in them. Don't be fooled though, where for example supersampling might take 16 samples and run the fragment shader on all of them, multi-sampling might take the 16 but run the fragment shader on only 2 of them.
Who's embarrassed?
*Cough* You? *Cough*
Kinda hard to take you seriously, though, when you seem to confuse Ruby on Rails with the Ruby language it's built upon. Or just ignorantly generalize from one to the other.
Then again, as someone with formal training in Software Engineering, I hold a much lower opinion on Anonymous Cowards of all kinds than I do of people proficient in Ruby, Rails or Javascript ;)
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.
Thanks, the first time I heard the phrase I thought "Why not just call it simplistically parallel? Even the lay person would understand what you meant simply by reading it" but I'm just a humble repair guy, nobody listens to us...
And while I'm more than happy to give Intel credit where credit is due in a way it reminds me of MSFT and OS/2. How much farther would OS/2 have come along if MSFT hadn't bribed OEMs? I think we can both agree that in 2004 and right up to the Core series AMD had the clearly better product yet you never saw a single OEM machine except for the lowest end crappy Sempron. Now we know why. If there would have been fair market competition how far would AMD be right now design wise? i think it is pretty obvious that Intel douchebaggery cost AMD their fabs.
But while I will give Intel credit for a performance beast in the i series I would counter with how many people actually need it for the tasks they have? If you are doing major compiles, or heavy CAD work? Yes then I can see why you would need it. But since switching I've been using Windows performance counters in Windows 7 during my follow ups to see how hard my builds are being slammed. Now we aren't even talking the top AMD chips mind you, strictly MOR Athlons and Phenoms, mostly triples and quads. What did I find? That most of the time the chips were idle or running at the lowest C&Q setting simply because the work the average person has really isn't that CPU intensive.
Even games which are traditionally CPU hogs simply don't slam the modern CPUs that hard. Hell I went to see about building new boxes for my nephews and they said "Why bother? These dual core machines you gave us work just fine uncle, no need to put yourself out. Thanks anyway" and with those PCs we are talking the lowest Pentium Ds ( I had a couple of LGA775 boards lying around) with an HD4650 for the casual gamer and an HD4830 for the hardcore FPS player!
So I really think AMD is onto something here. I have been arguing since the first duals came out that for most folks PCs had surpassed "good enough" and were quickly getting into overkill. The one place where I've noticed a big difference in performance is with GPU tech. You run a PC with an Intel IGP for awhile and then run one with an ATI or Nvidia IGP and the difference, especially with Win 7, is like night and day. And more and more people are doing tasks that work well on GPUs like converting videos to play on their portable devices.
So I really think this may be the start of the "next big thing" in personal computing, if only Intel doesn't find a way to derail it like they did with the bribery and like they are STILL doing with the compilers. And sorry about the length but this is something I feel strongly about, I think Intel should have at LEAST gotten nailed as bad as MSFT, who I still think should have been broken up. But at least now when my customers want a netbook to go with their desktop I can sell them a nice AMD machine instead of some bargain basement Sempron junker or even worse an Atom....shudder.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
How is anti-aliasing performed on the rendered image comparable to supersampling? When you supersample, you produce more pixel data which you then use to produce a reduced resolution image. When you post-process you don't get more pixel data, you just filter what you already have. Wouldn't supersampling always give better results for the same final resolution?
I am reminded of this :
"Text Rendering in the QML Scene Graph"
http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2011/07/15/text-rendering-in-the-qml-scene-graph/
"Some time ago, Gunnar presented to you what the new QML Scene Graph is all about. As mentioned in that article, one of the new features is a new technique for text rendering based on distance field alpha testing. This technique allows us to leverage all the power of OpenGL and have text like we never had before in Qt: scalable, sub-pixel positioned and sub-pixel antialiased and at almost no cost."
Max.
I believe they mean "embarassingly parallel" to mean easy to implement a simple parallel implementation on an Intel CPU. SSAA and MSAA are both problems that require texture sampling hardware to implement quickly and there is a lot of information for MSAA that requires knowledge of the geometry (edges). Since MLAA can be done on the finished bitmap without requiring geometry information or texture sampling hardware, it is easy to parallelize on a CPU while the other techniques work much better on GPU's than CPU's.
Depends on the audience. If I were writing a Slashdot post, then I'd expect the reader to know what embarrassingly parallel meant. If I were writing an article for a more general audience, then I'd write something like: Their algorithm is embarrassingly parallel, meaning that it can trivially be split into a large number of components that can run concurrently. Or I'd link to the wikipedia article on the subject (or, more likely, my editor would - she's very good at that sort of thing). I'd then be free to use the term for the rest of the article, and hopefully readers would know what it meant if they encountered it in the future.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
This isn't really anti-aliasing but more like the 'font smoothing' included with early Windows 95, which took the existing low-res image and smudged it a bit. It's debatable whether this technique makes the image more lifelike or text easier to read, but it is a good way to fake up a 'quality' look: at a first glance the smoothed display looks very similar to the high-quality anti-aliased image. Certainly for big, cartoonish images without sub-pixel-level detail the two produce similar results. Perhaps the best comparison is the hqx series of image scaling algorithms which scale by a factor of 2 or 3 or 4 by guessing the intermediate pixels. You could see this technique as roughly equivalent to scaling up with h2x and then scaling back down again. For a few dollars worth of custom hardware, your monitor could have a switch to turn on this smoothing effect for the whole display.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
what you want with antialiasing is to use it to show more actual data of the scene - the vectorizer and eagle etc etc.. they all just make up data.
This edge-blending technique also makes up data, and it makes up the blending amounts in almost the exact same way that the extrapolators make it up. MLAA just presents the made-up data in a way that looks like AA.
Build identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:5.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/5.0
It showed up fine, but then I copied and pasted it, and it showd like above. Too bad you're so fucking smart, though.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
How about "superbly parallel" task?
- Raynet --> .
What is ridiculous about something being easy? Do you always ridicule easy problems?
There is no problem with "embarrassingly parallel", at least no bigger problem than with anything else in English.
Wikipedia is the new urbandictionary.com now I guess.
The problem is that you didn't just make a mistake, but you criticised others for using the correct term. Nobody likes to be criticised, and especially not for wrong reasons.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
More data, white paper, video, source code, etc. located here: http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/mlaa/
How can anyone look at this and call it anti-aliasing?
The point of anti-aliasing isn't to just remove contrast at edges, even if that's what it often does. It's to give more information to the viewer about where that edge really is. And to do that, you've got to add samples. The information that you're trying to send, needs to exist.
What we have here, instead, is a clever algorithm that tries to approximate the blurred-edge "look" of anti-aliasing without really containing the information; the information that it implies to the viewer is fake. WTF is the point of that? My own brain can look at a jaggy line and fake things and deceive my own perceptions, way better than your damn computer. And let's remember brains are the target, here.
This is just blurring. If you want to call it some kind of cool fancy blur, go ahead. But please don't call it anti-aliasing.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Can I get a vote in for "Cromulently Parallel?"
And now, on this thread... embarrassingly controversial.
This really better not turn into a meme.
I shall swing it embarrassingly, of course.
Awwww, somebody needs a hug! C'mere, you!
Okay everyone, my communication skills haven't been up to par, so I took extra care in writing this message. Most of you have moved on by now, but in case you haven't, please continue...
Today I learned about a term. I have been corrected. This is a valid and legitimate term. I had been unaware of its validity, but had seen it used in several articles in such a way that it appeared to be marketing fluff to show how a processor can perform a task quickly. Apparently, it is more than that, and some of you were insulted by the multiple layers of slight in my postings. I apologize for upsetting those of you who are experts in related fields by not recognizing your terminology, which apparently has a long and storied history into the 1980s. I also apologize for arguing with those of you who didn't read my mind and understand exactly what I was trying to convey. Furthermore, I apologize for willingly feeding the trolls for my own entertainment, and regret having brought the discussion down to this level. My sarcasm and attempts at humor were feeble at best, and have gone largely unnoticed.
Whether or not I agree with your methods, I can appreciate those of you who have not posted AC.
I will try to double-check my posts in the future.
Thanks for reading, and I wish you well. I hope this clears up any misconceptions. To the undying, publicly searchable archives with this thread...
"There is NO hard and fast rule which can be used to answer the question of "Is this an embarrassingly parallel problem?""
If a problem is "embarrassingly" parallel and you don't notice it, you should feel embarrassed.
AMD APU, which has some really wicked features like letting the integrated do physics while the discrete takes care of textures and by having such tight integration from the looks of it for FP the AMD chips are gonna rock..
While the APU idea is great, current implementations are neither here nor here :
1. GPU portion too slow for gamers, overkill for non-gamers. Sandy Bridge integrated graphics is enough for non-gamers, gamers have to get a dedicated graphics card still.
2. Non-gamer might still get it to be "future proof", but then CPU portion is too slow for "future proof". It is great for most tasks, but not really future proof material.
3. APU works with a dedicated AMD graphics card, but a huge variety of 4 current graphics cards and none to come in the future are supported by APU. So not exactly ideal for an aspiring gamer hoping to upgrade later either.
Hope next series from AMD strikes a better balance.
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.