Multisampling in pipeline

Question

First you have to realize how multisampling works and why it was created.

I am going to approach this from the perspective of anti-aliasing, because that was the primary use-case for multisampling up until multisample textures were introduced in GL3.

When something is multisampled, this means that each sample point contains multiple samples. These samples may be identical to one another if a primitive has relatively uniform characteristics (e.g. has the same depth everywhere) and smart GL/hardware implementations are capable of identifying such situations and reducing memory bandwidth by reading/writing shared samples intelligently (similar to color/depth buffer compression). However, the cost in terms of required storage for a 4x MSAA framebuffer is the same as 4x SSAA because GL has to accommodate the worst-case scenario, where each of the 4 samples is unique.

Which attributes are same for each sample in a pixel?

Each fragment may cover multiple sample points for attributes such as color, texture coordinates, etc. Rather than invoking the fragment shader 4x as frequently to achieve 4x anti-aliasing, a trick was devised where each attribute would be sampled at the fragment center (this is the default) and then a single output written to each of the covered sample locations. The default behavior is somewhat lacking in the situation where the center of a fragment is not part of the actual coverage area - for this, centroid sampling was introduced... vertex attributes will be interpolated at the center of a primitive's coverage area within a fragment rather than the center of the fragment itself.

Later, when it comes time to write a color to the framebuffer, all of these samples need to be averaged to produce a single pixel; we call this multisample resolve. This works well for some things, but it does not address issues of aliasing that occurs during fragment shading itself.

Texturing occurs during the execution of a fragment shader, and this means that the sample frequency for texturing remains the same, so MSAA generally does not help with texture aliasing. Thus, while supersample anti-aliasing improves both aliasing at geometric edges and texture / shader aliasing (things like specular highlights), multisampling generally only reduces "jaggies."

I read somewhere that color and texture values are same but depth and stensil values for samples in a pixel are different.

In short, anything that is computed in the fragment shader will be the same for all covered samples. Anything that can be determined before fragment shading (e.g. depth) may vary.

Fragment tests such as depth/stencil are evaluated for each sub-sample. But multisampled depth buffers carry some restrictions. Up until D3D 10.1, hardware was not required to support multisampled depth textures so you could not sample multisampled depth buffers in a fragment shader.

But as fragment shader is executed for each sample points then they should be different.

There is a feature called sample shading, which can force an implementation of MSAA to work more like SSAA by improving the ratio between fragments shaded and samples generated during rasterization. But by default, the behavior you are describing is not multisampling.

When does the multiple samples are resolved in pipeline, after fragment shader? And do they linearly average out?

Multisample resolution occurs after fragment shading, anytime you have to write the contents of a multisampled buffer into a singlesampled buffer. This includes things like glBlitFramebuffer (...). You can also manually implement multisample resolution yourself in the fragment shader, if you use multisampled textures.

Finally, regarding the process used for multisample resolution, that is implementation-specific as is the sample layout. If you ever open your display driver's control panel and look at the myriad of anti-aliasing options available you will see multiple options for sample layout and MSAA resolve algorithm.

I would highly suggest you take a look at this article. While it is related to D3D10+ and not OpenGL, the general rules apply to both APIs (D3D9 has slightly different rules) and the quality of the diagrams is phenomenal.

In particular, pay special attention to the section on MSAA rasterization rules for triangles, which states:

For a triangle, a coverage test is performed for each sample location (not for a pixel center). If more than one sample location is covered, a pixel shader runs once with attributes interpolated at the pixel center. The result is stored (replicated) for each covered sample location in the pixel that passes the depth/stencil test.