Sparse Grid SSAA with the GTX470/GX480

The amazing discovery of super-sampling on nVidia’s cards was originally documented here.

Essentially it’s possible to get full scene super-sampling in DX10/DX11 games (but not DX9 or earlier) on the GTX470/GTX480 through the use of TrAA (using the super-sampling setting). Instead of super-sampling only transparent textures, the entire scene appears to be anti-aliased. Now rotated and sparse grid super-sampling is possible with nVidia like it is on ATi’s 5xxx parts, but ATi is still restricted to DX9 and OpenGL.

After some quick tinkering, I’ve confirmed this also works with OpenGL games, and you don’t even need Vista or Windows 7!

Here are some screenshots from a Doom 3 floor taken on Windows XP on my GTX470. They were taken at 8xQ with TrAA (super-sampling) set to off, 2x, 4x and 8x:

TrAA 0x

TrAA 2x

TrAA 4x

TrAA 8x

Clearly the floor is being smoothed because the shader/lighting aliasing is being reduced. Such a gain in image quality is only possible with full-scene super-sampling.

I’ve tested about half a dozen OpenGL games (including older titles like Call of Duty 1, Medal of Honor Allied Assault, and Jedi Academy), and I can confirm super-sampling is being applied to them.

I actually noticed some bizarre behavior in OpenGL performance when I first started benchmarking my GTX470, but I assumed it was simply because TrAA was working in OpenGL. Well not only was it working, it was anti-aliasing the whole scene, not just alpha textures. But I didn’t make the connection until now.

I’ll cover image quality on my GTX470 in-depth in a future article, but for now this news is quite extraordinary.

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