Intel is making some feature changes for its next-gen Xe3 “Celestial” GPUs, focusing on MSAA, or Multisample anti-aliasing. Specifically, some Xe3 variants will no longer support MSAA x16 – the most performance-intensive option – as the chipmaker claimed that the feature is largely obsolete for a couple of reasons.
Intel Drops MSAA x16 Support
In a recent Mesa driver commit, Intel enginner Kenneth Graunke said: “16x MSAA isn’t supported at all on certain Xe3 variants, and on its way out on the rest. Most vendors choose not to support it, and many apps offer more modern multisampling and upscaling techniques these days. Only 2/4/8x are supported going forward.”
In case you aren’t aware, MSAA is one of the many ways game developers approach the “staircase effect” problem. In general, anti-aliasing is designed to smooth out the jagged edges in diagonal lines, which becomes more pronounced when displayed in shallow angles; MSAA works by rendering a scene at a multiplied resolution (which goes up to 16x), then downscaled back to the native resolution, to reduce the staircase effect.
However, MSAA is the most brute-forced way of solving this problem, as high multipliers like x8 or even x16 can be especially taxing on GPUs (and impractical enough that games rarely support them). Since then, more efficient methods like FXAA and TAA has been developed, and beyond those, the next-generation of upscaling technologies like NVIDIA DLSS, AMD FSR, and Intel XeSS has largely took over this role with the help of machine learning.
That said, MSAA is here to stay, just without the x16 option. Moving forward, Xe3 – which will first debut as the onboard graphics for Panther Lake (Core Ultra 300) processors – will support x2, x4, and x8 presets for traditional anti-aliasing; as usual, XeSS will be supported to give these tiny onboard GPUs a leg up in anti-aliasing, along with a healthy boost in performance with the help of upscaling.
Pokdepinion: I’ve seen some people argued that ML/AI-based anti-aliasing isn’t perfect (as temporal solutions have their own problems), and I personally prefer a non-temporal way of anti-aliasing or upscaling is that is technically feasible.
