nVidia GeForce GT200 Series Anti-Aliasing Investigation
Transparency Anti-Aliasing (TrAA)
As I covered in my image quality comparison article, TrAA is a method of anti-aliasing alpha (transparent) textures (e.g. vegetation, wire fences, etc), something regular MSAA cannot do. It works by resubmitting the texture multiple times into the pipeline, shifting the location of the sample each time, later blending the samples into one.
nVidia’s TrAA has two modes: super-sampling and multi-sampling. Super-sampling takes regular super-samples and anti-aliases the entire texture, while multi-sampling only anti-aliases the edges of the texture that intersect with transparent areas. TrMS doesn’t work in all games and its effects tend to be very subtle, so it’s best used for noisy soft edges rather than ordered hard edges.
When TrAA is in operation, it operates at the same precision as the base multi-sampling level, so it’ll function just fine alongside CSAA, and its effects actually stack with the super-sampling component of the combined modes.
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.