nVidia GeForce GT200 Series Anti-Aliasing Investigation

Conclusion

Some interesting findings have been made in this investigation. Firstly, 16xAA is a viable mode that improves 4xAA if you can’t reach 8xQ. It provides a visible benefit over 4xAA while not being much slower. It’s also basically the same speed as 8xAA so if you have enough performance, skip 8xAA and go straight to 16xAA; there’s really no reason to use 8xAA. CSAA can very rarely exhibit much poorer image quality than theory would suggest, but don’t let this put you off using 16xAA because it’s really quite good overall.

Secondly, 16xQ is hard to swallow. Its edge quality isn’t much better than 8xS, but the benefits of full scene super-sampling from 8xS are much more apparent than marginally increased edge AA at such levels. Also based on other tests I’ve run in the past, 8xS is much faster than 16xQ in the majority of situations, especially in older games. 8xS is also especially important in OpenGL games because nVidia’s TrAA doesn’t function in that API.

And lastly, 32xS is quite a fringe mode. It’s really too slow to use except in rare cases of very old games that are restricted to low resolutions. I would have also liked nVidia to increase the super-sampling component over 16xS to really make it stand out. Detectable edge improvements tend to rapidly diminish after 4xAA, but extra super-sampling is always useful.

This concludes the current trilogy of image quality articles focusing on AA, but hopefully the next round of DX11 cards from ATi and nVidia will give me something more to write about. I hope you’ve found the results of this investigation as interesting as I have.

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