FSAA & Image Quality Comparison - 3dfx vs ATI vs NVIDIA

NVIDIA

As we mentioned before, NVIDIA's FSAA method is identical to the way the Radeon's - using "supersampling." The only difference is that NVIDIA has quite a few more settings - 3 under OpenGL and 8 under Direct3D.

We've already described the three OpenGL settings before in older GeForce2 GTS reviews, but just as a refresher, here are the three settings:

·        1.5 screen resolution (2.25 Samples)

·        2x screen resolution, with LOD’s (MIPMaps) at the native game resolution (4 Samples)

·        2x screen resolution with MIPMaps at the 2x resolution. (4 Samples)

So if you’re running a game at 640 x 480, the first FSAA option will render the scene at 960 x 720 (640 * 1.5 x 480 * 1.5) and then scale it back down to 640 x 480 for displaying.

For instructions on how to enable these three settings using the Detonator 5.3x drivers check out our NVIDIA GeForce 2 GTS FSAA Update (Detonator 5.30 Drivers).

The GeForce2 GTS definitely has the fill rate power to be fairly playable at the 4 Sample FSAA setting, but unfortunately the GeForce2 GTS is the victim of a lack of sufficient memory bandwidth, which is where these theoretical numbers don't always represent real world performance.

If you'll notice, there are two 2x2 settings (4 Samples), the only difference between the two being the LOD bias of the MIPMaps. The first 2x2 setting attempts to salvage some performance by using "biased" MIPMaps, basically keeping the LOD bias the same as if we were rendering at the lower resolution.