Eric wrote a post back in July about a paper called Morphological Antialiasing which had been presented at HPG 2009 (source code for the paper is available here).  The paper described a post-processing algorithm which could smooth out edges as if by magic.  Although the screenshots were impressive, the technique seemed too expensive to be practical for games on current hardware; also there were reportedly bad artifacts when applied to moving images.  For these reasons I didn’t pay too much attention to the technique.  It was reported (including by us) that the game The Saboteur was using this technique on the PS3 but this turned out to be a false alarm.

However, God of War III is actually using Morphological Antialiasing.  I’ve looked closely at the game and the technique they use appears not to exhibit significant motion artifacts; it definitely looks better than the MSAA2X technique it replaced (which was used in the E3 2009 demo).  According to the game’s art director, the technique used “goes beyond” the original paper; this may mean that they improved it in ways that reduce the motion artifacts.

My initial impression that the technique is too expensive did not take into account the impressive horsepower of the PS3’s Cell chip.  After optimization, the technique runs in 20 milliseconds on a single SPU; running it on 5 SPUs in parallel enables it to complete execution in 4 milliseconds.  Most importantly, turning off MSAA saved them 5 milliseconds of GPU time, which on the PS3 is a significant gain (the GPU is most often the bottleneck on PS3 games).