nVidia GeForce GT200 Series Anti-Aliasing Investigation
1680×1050
Now it’s time to see how these AA modes perform on nVidia’s current flagship single card. After seeing the 16xS figures below, you’ll quickly see why I didn’t bother testing 32xS.
Also I’m not going to benchmark TrAA for the simple reason that it depends entirely on the scene as to what kind of performance hit you’ll experience. The odd fence or grating won’t impact performance much, but large amounts of vegetation will incur a steep performance hit. For this reason, you’ll quickly know if your TrAA setting is playable or not just by playing your game.
To make it easier to digest the information, I’ve color coded the results into groups based on AA type. MS = multi-sampling, CS = coverage sampling, while SS represents the combined modes (super-sampling).
In Call of Duty 4, 16xAA is almost the same speed as 8xAA, and neither of them is much slower than 4xAA.
In Far Cry 2 we see the same thing with 16xAA and 8xAA that we saw in Call of Duty 4. We also see 8xS being about the same speed as 16xQ.
I run 2560×1600 with 2 gtx280’s and something very noticable was how much smoother all games run with AA (all in game no need for Nvidia control panel) when I upgraded from Vista 64 to Win 7 64. Games like Crysis and COH at 2560×1600 everything maxed with 8xcsa wouldnt even render a frame with Vista, after upgrade to WIN 7 64, COH and Crysis run 16x NP, (Cryis with low FPS obviously) SLI 285’s and 280’s Win7 is the way to go.
Yes, Windows 7 handles SLI/CF better than Vista.