What was promised to be the most powerful console gaming system in the world, was putting out these games that had graphical flaws that weren't even apparent in less powerful next generation systems, like Sega's Dreamcast. And people that put down the big bucks to import the expensive system wanted to know exactly what was causing this problem.

Most cynics blamed the system and claims were made that the Sony forgot to include any anti-aliasing support in the system's hardware and that was seen as the root of problem. In fact, several Japanese developers were quoted in interviews saying that while anti-aliasing could be used in the games that it would cause too much of a performance hit to justify its use.

However, the truth to the problem proved to be much deeper than just whether or not anti-aliasing was being used in the games. You see, if it was a simply a matter of using anti-aliasing or not, we would see the exact same problems on most Dreamcast games, because very few of them actually use anti-aliasing. There was obviously a lot more to this issue than just anti-aliasing.

The Real Problem
If you take a look at the complaints that people were making about games like Ridge Racer V or Tekken Tag Tournament, which have been jokingly labeled Ridged Racer V and Tekken Jag Tournament, it wasn't really about the jagged edges of the polygonal models. The real complaint was about the shimmering effect in the games that were producing a crude and crawly look to the 3D backgrounds and character models when the game was in motion. The problem wasn't an issue of jagged lines that you could see in the different games' screenshots, because the still shots of games like Tekken Tag Tournament or Ridge Racer V didn't really look any jaggier than the shots of the top of the line Dreamcast or PC titles.

If we take a moment to go back in time and remember when we first saw the high-resolution screenshots of Tekken Tag Tournament, there weren't any complaints at all about the characters or backgrounds being too jaggy. However, if you take a look at those same shots today, most people will notice that there are in fact jagged edges all over the characters. This is NOT what the people have played the games have been complaining about. The shimmering, which only can be seen on a TV screen and not in screenshots, was what people were complaining about.

In a chat with the co-founders of Naughty Dog, the company that developed some of PlayStation's most technically advanced games, the issue of PlayStation 2's aliasing problem was brought up to both Jason Rubin and Andy Gavin. Here's what Jason Rubin, the company's president, had to say about the issue:

The PS2 gives you a raw frame buffer. It does not blend past frames with the current frame to create the blurry effect the Dreamcast gets. For a bad TV, the Dreamcast method is great. But on a good monitor, or with an RGB cable, the Dreamcast method is limiting because it tends to take away from your ability to get small details.

The texture capabilities of the PS2 are very complicated. We have spent over two months simply looking at our options in regards to texture usage, and have found a good solution to the mip-mapping and filtering issues of the system.

The early PS2 games did not have time to do this. That is why these games flicker horribly. With time, and effort, you can overcome the flickering issues to a great extent.

I think that you see this with MGS2. There were not as many issues in this game as there were in the early release titles. Time will improve them all.

The PS2, like all the machines of this generation, is an interlaced machine. This raises a lot of issues. Interlace is how TV's work. Essentially, they display about 640 x 240 pixels every 60 MHz field (at peak this is about 700x300).

Interlace means that every other field is jittered up and down by half a pixel. One way to deal with this is to have a 640x480-frame buffer and just draw half the lines every field. However, this consumes a lot of VRAM.

So most machines tend to allow you to draw a squashed half screen at 640x240 and every other line into each. However, either way, small horizontal features (particularly alternating dark and light horizontal lines) jitter because a one-pixel high line only exists every other field. This is inherent in interlaced signals. So interlace has a sort of crawly look that has to be combated by using various filtering techniques.

Fast moving objects also tend to tear, because they are moving at 60mhz but their lines tear by odds and evens. These are just the usual technical problems that us game programmers have to slog through.

Before we get some answers to that, let's first define some technical terms that many of you probably don't really understand (and I honestly didn't really know a lot about until I searched for information on them on the good old Internet).

First, let's describe aliasing. According to Webopedia, an online encyclopedia dedicated to computer technology, aliasing is described as "the process by which smooth curves and other lines become jagged because the resolution of the graphics device or file is not high enough to represent a smooth curve." Here's an example of aliasing in an image:

Now, let's define anti-aliasing. Webopedia defines anti-aliasing as "a software technique for diminishing jaggies - stairstep-like lines that should be smooth. Jaggies occur because the output device, the monitor or printer, doesn't have a high enough resolution to represent a smooth line. Anti-aliasing reduces the prominence of jaggies by surrounding the stairsteps with intermediate shades of gray (for gray-scaling devices) or color (for color devices). Although this reduces the jagged appearance of the lines, it also makes them fuzzier." Here's an example of image that is anti-aliased.

That's not all; there are also two major types of anti-aliasing techniques -- edge anti-aliasing and Full Scene anti-aliasing.

Edge anti-aliasing only works on the edges of polygons and doesn't remove artifacts that are not situated on the edges, so it will not solve the moir¿ patters. It's a post operation, which means that it's applied to an already finished image. The available detail is used and blurred to avoid the staircase effect. This is the method that is typically used in most games on the Nintendo 64.

Full Scene anti-aliasing (FSAA) typically uses something called supersampling, which means that the image is rendered internally at a higher resolution than the screen resolution and then downsampled to the actual screen resolution. This is done on a per tile base, which means that a 32x16 microtile will be downsampled using bicubic filters to a 16x8 tile before it's written to the screen buffer.

While these are textbook definitions of the different types of anti-aliasing, the truth of the matter is that there are actually numerous different ways to actually anti-alias games.

Volition Implements Anti-aliasing
Now that you know a little more about aliasing and anti-aliasing, let's see what can be done about PlayStation 2's problem with the jaggies and shimmering.

In a recent interview with Daily Radar, James Hague of Volition claimed that they had licked the whole aliasing problem, as they were able to get Full Scene Anti-aliasing running on Summoner, the company's upcoming PS2 RPG, with a negligible hit on the game's performance. This was seen as a titanic revelation because based on previous reports, people were claiming that while anti-aliasing could be done on PS2 that it could only be done with a serious hit to the game's performance. However, according to Mr. Hague, there's not a drop in framerate when the aliasing is being used.

Today, we talked to Hague about this revelation and asked him some questions as to exactly what was done to get anti-aliasing working on PS2 and why hasn't any of the Japanese developers used it in any of their games.

With regard to the questions, Hague first explained that early on in the game's development, they didn't even think about the whole aliasing issue. It wasn't until they got the game running in high-resolution that they even began to think about it. Around that time, Sony came up with a document that explained how various forms of anti-aliasing could be implemented on the PS2 developers' forum.

And since they were far enough into the development of Summoner that they could start trying to work on anti-aliasing, they started to test out some of these suggestions. The method that Volition got working is a type of FSAA that is a process that is performed in the display hardware to the entire screen after the frame is rendered while it is being sent to the TV. And while you will still see jaggies, it will be a lot less apparent. The most noticeable affect is the substantial reduction of the shimmering in the game's background.

Furthermore, because this is something that's being dumped to the actual TV screen, screenshots won't really show the effect of the anti-aliasing. The only way to see it in action is to see the game running on a television set.

Why Haven't Others Done This?
Now that it seems apparent that the entire anti-aliasing issue has been put to rest, it brings up a very big question: If it's so easy, then why hasn't it been used by the Japanese developers, such as Namco?

Well, according to Hague, it has to do with the way things were noted in the PlayStation 2 documentation. The only method of anti-aliasing listed in the documentation is Edge anti-aliasing, which is defined above. However, the problem with this form of anti-aliasing, is that since it smoothes the edges of the polygons as they're drawn and the polygons have to be drawn from back to front, it is a tremendous load on the processor. Hague believes that because of the extra load on the processor, most developers decided to bypass the use of Edge anti-aliasing in their games.

However, there were actually other methods of anti-aliasing explained in the documents; they just weren't labeled as anti-aliasing. The only reason that Volition was able to figure this out was because it was mentioned in the document posted by Sony in the PS2 developers' forums. According to the document, developers could use the display hardware to perform the anti-aliasing. It just wasn't explained fully in the hardware documentation as it simply said that there's a display hardware and it let's you do some stuff. Hague went on to say that until you actually get into the display hardware and figure out what's going on you won't be able to discover that you can do this. Most developers probably missed this until Sony said that if you setup the display hardware in a particular way that you can actually get this form of anti-aliasing.

Hague believes that the only reason they were the first to tackle this is that Volition was probably the only US developer that's as far along as they are on Summoner, so they were likely the only ones far enough into the game to implement it. Others are likely still trying to work with and learn other parts of the system. The Summoner team has had their development kits since the summer of 1999.

Other Developers Speak Out
After hearing the news of the end of the anti-aliasing problem, IGNPS2 decided to contact a few other developers who've had time with the system and get their thoughts on the recent revelation.

The only developer that was able to speak on the record was Jason Rubin of Naughty Dog. His general response was of that he didn't think that it was really that big of a deal and that he has always felt that the anti-aliasing matter had been blown out of proportion from the get go. He went on to say that there are numerous ways to implement anti-aliasing on PlayStation 2 games, most of which can be done with an insignificant hit on performance.

Rubin also stated that he's not even sure if Naughty Dog will use anti-aliasing in its game because it generally means that there will be a drop in detail because of the blurring effect. At the point and time when the game's far enough in development, they'll look at the game and determine whether or not they'll even use the effect.

Another interesting thing that Rubin stated was that he thinks that the PS2 is a tremendously powerful system and that it can pretty much do anything that you want it to. You just need to figure out how to do it.

The general consensus of the other developers that we were able to speak to, but weren't able to go on the record, was that they felt that the whole anti-aliasing problem has always been a non-issue and has been blown overboard by the gaming media. And with regard to the implementation of the techniques explained in the recent documents posted by Sony on the developers' board, most weren't far enough into development of their titles to try and implement any of the suggestions.

What Should Gamers Expect?
The first thing that gamers should expect is that it seems highly likely that the launch lineup that we'll see in North America should be substantially better than what we saw on March 4, 2000 in Japan. However, that was probably a given. Just given the fact that developers have had an extra seven months to work on their games would suggest that the games released on October 26, 2000 and afterward would generally look improved.

If we're lucky, we might even see the games that have already been released in Japan, fixed up for their release in the States. And it's quite feasible that some of the titles might even have FSAA implemented in them to clear up the jaggies and shimmering problems that has plagued many of them.

And while there will be games with some graphical downfalls, nothing can really be done to avoid that. Just look at any console that's ever been released and you'll see games that look like crap when compared to other titles released on them even in the fourth or fifth year of that system's life cycle. There will always be games that don't take advantage of the system because of piss poor developers or projects that get rushed to stores because some companies are run by their sales team rather than their development teams.

On the other hand, we should expect some great looking games from the upper tier developers and while we won't necessarily see any revolutionary games that'll blow you away at the system's launch, the likelihood that we'll see mind-blowing stuff down the road is quite good.

The future of PlayStation 2 has never looked as bright, and the chances are reasonably good that things will even get better once developers put more time into developing for the system. I personally can't wait until we start seeing the second and third generation games for the system. Let the PS2 revolution begin!

--Dave Zdyrko