New AA options in Detonator

[Demirug]

The way I read it. Its Nvidia's hybrid AA modes. 4xS, 6xS, 16xS ect.

No it isn't. You can activate this and your normal AA at the same time.

May I ask what beta drivers leaked around you can find these in? Not the 77.13 anyway.

Sure, the 77.13 is the right place to look for this. But it is deep inside. I need nearly one hour to find it.

 

[Demirug]

Any word about MSAA on FP render tagets?

This is nothing you can control easy with the panel or registry. If something like this is inside the driver it will be hard to find in the case you don't know much about the hardware.

 

[nAo]

This is nothing you can control easy with the panel or registry. If something like this is inside the driver it will be hard to find in the case you don't know much about the hardware.

I suspected that..thank you anyway

 

[Blazkowicz]

Any word about MSAA on FP render tagets?

This is nothing you can control easy with the panel or registry. If something like this is inside the driver it will be hard to find in the case you don't know much about the hardware.

maybe it will be nothing more than enabling AA
enable/disable AA and it works or not on your games, regardless of if the game uses FP render targets or not. (just a guess of mine)

 

[Acert93]

when weren't they in it? 8)

I switched from a Radeon 9700 to a GF 6800GT and I noticed not only a difference in the AA, but also in filtering in some games (yes, this was a fresh reinstall for the new GPU). e.g. BF1942 has some very aggressive filtering that was not present with the 9700.

I love the 6800GT's performance, but there is a difference, even if usually slight, in IQ. I am sure the GT comes out ahead in some areas, but the AA is not as clean imo and the filtering issue looks REALLY bad in BF. Most of the time it is an issue, but I notice more IQ negatives with the NV card than I did with the ATI card. YMMV of course as these are just some things I noticed.

 

[no-X]

Couldn't be this the "FSAA SLI 16x" solution?

it has higher (+50%) EER than traditional 4xOGSS/4xRGMS combination...

http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=23637

 

[Xmas]

maybe it will be nothing more than enabling AA
enable/disable AA and it works or not on your games, regardless of if the game uses FP render targets or not. (just a guess of mine)

Enabling AA in the driver only forces multisampling on the backbuffer, not on other render targtets. And since the backbuffer is not allowed to be FP in DX9...

I guess alpha to coverage is the "multisampling" method, and "supersampling" does selective supersampling when alpha test is enabled and alpha blend disabled at the same time.

a2c is available since GeForce3. But maybe they added some circuitry in G70 to adjust for different alpha reference values, so it's not always a [0, 1] -> [0, N] mapping.

Selective supersampling is also possible since GeForce3, with the use of coverage mask and multiple passes. However, it's a very inefficient way and I hope they added hw support for it in G70. It's certainly worth it!

I don't think there are other robust possibilities, because if you're not using multiple samples to mix the final color, you need blending, and blending needs sorting.

 

[Kombatant]

I think you mean "only with the FX".

I was comparing GTA:SA on a 6800 vs X800 today as well as a 5950 vs 9600, I stand by my post as I wrote it.

And rightfully so.. AA was(is) my only gripe with the 6xxx series under real world usage.

 

[martrox]

There are still texture ailising problems with the 6800 series.

 

[trinibwoy]

Haha, I was waiting for martrox to show up. Not to sound too cynical but you guys aren't exactly neutral parties. The general consensus is that NV40 and R420 AA is on par. There may be a slight nod to the R420 but nothing like you guys make it out to be. I guess I'll just have to make do with my inferior vision

 

[digitalwanderer]

There are still texture ailising problems with the 6800 series.

That could be what I'm seeing too, but bottom-line for me is on my ATi cards it looks a lot better.

My son's 5950 fan/cooler fell off yesterday so I pulled it and put my wife's old 9600 pro in and he noticed the difference.....and he's eight. (I gotta put a tie-tie on his 5950, superglue ain't enough to hold a full athlon cooler on a GPU apparently. )

I hope nVidia's solution is good, I'm really hoping both IHVs start concentrating on quality over speed since speed will be a bit of a moot point with these next gen cards.

 

[digitalwanderer]

The general consensus is that NV40 and R420 AA is on par.

I disagree and recomend you check it out for yourself, screenshots just don't do AA comparisons justice...IMHO.

 

[trinibwoy]

The general consensus is that NV40 and R420 AA is on par.

I disagree and recomend you check it out for yourself, screenshots just don't do AA comparisons justice...IMHO.

I thought it was the other way around, that it's much easier to notice AA differences in screenshots? I also owned a 9800pro for a longer time and played more games on it than on my GT. I haven't experienced this monumental degradation in AA and I have a pretty damn good monitor!

Even the most extreme ATi fanb0ys haven't been playing the IQ card this generation so I take that as a sign. If there was such a large difference it would surely have been a hot topic this time around, but it's not.

 

[swaaye]

KOTOR has issues with my 6800's brilinear nonsense. I had extremely annoying texture shimmering with AF enabled within the game. I fixed KOTOR by setting image quality to High Quality instead of the default Quality, as I read on a forum. I'm sure there are other games that have problems with brilinear too. I find it a bit sad that they have to resort to such 'optimizations' with, in my laptop's case, a 12 pipeline design. It gets really depressing when you consider that the 6800 scales far higher in endowment than this mobile GPU.

My "old" 9600 (notebook) and 9700 have superior AA and I've never noticed texture shimmering like the 6800 has. Most people never notice this stuff for whatever reason. I can only assume it's inferior eyesight... I have a friend who's had a 6800GT for months and he's never complained about it compared to his 9700's. He never bothers with AA or AF either. On that note, it's amazing how EQ2 gains little in performance (probably loses visual quality) from a move to a 6800GT from a 9700 NP. Heh.

I can't wait to see what next-gen has in store for AA and AF. And the console AA will be especially interesting. I've been playing a lot of RE4 on Gamecube and that game, while looking friggin amazing for the hardware, sure could use some AA! It sure is something how a 4 year old console can challenge modern PC games....

 

[digitalwanderer]

I thought it was the other way around, that it's much easier to notice AA differences in screenshots? I also owned a 9800pro for a longer time and played more games on it than on my GT. I haven't experienced this monumental degradation in AA and I have a pretty damn good monitor!

Even the most extreme ATi fanb0ys haven't been playing the IQ card this generation so I take that as a sign. If there was such a large difference it would surely have been a hot topic this time around, but it's not.

nVidia is better this time, but it's still an issue IMHO. You can see how the edging is done better in screenshots, but you can see jaggies/shimmering a lot better in game....and that's what the problem is this time around.

You can't show it in screenshots, I've tried....I think that's why you're not hearing about it, it's too hard to "prove".

 

[AlNom]

fraps record?

 

[Randell]

Even the most extreme ATi fanb0ys haven't been playing the IQ card this generation so I take that as a sign. If there was such a large difference it would surely have been a hot topic this time around, but it's not.

Disagree coz you really need to know what you've been missing. ATI fanbois wouldn't have bought an Nvidia card. I like my 6800GT for a lot of reasons, but 4xAA isn't as good without GC IMO, and texture shimmering is far worse on my 6800GT than my 9700Pro, almost as bad as my 8500 without SS. ATI fans when they mention it, get shouted down and I'm not 100% convinced that X800 brilinear doesn't shimmer as much because I haven't seen it to compare.

 

[KimB]

I don't think the shimmer has to do with the "brilinear," but rather with the new LOD selection method. Anyway, I always play with all the optimizations turned to off, and haven't noticed many shimmering issues (pretty much the only times I've noticed it were where you'd expect it: on surfaces that aren't handled properly by texture filtering, like bump mapping in Doom 3).

 

[cho]

how to show these options in fw's cp ?

 

[swaaye]

The 4X AA on 6800 is definitely not quite up to the same level as the 9700s. I also believe that it is because of the lack of gamma correction. You can see the 'steps' more clearly than on the ATI cards.

It's also extremely disappointing that the chip can't do 6X AA. The 8X mode is a joke for the most part as it results in like a 70% performance drop. 8X looks to have been added just as a way to counter ATI's 6X. The 8X mode is just a goofy combination of SSAA and MSAA. It's almost completely useless for modern games, unless you own a 6800 Ultra perhaps because the performance drain is insane. Not at all unlike reliving the Radeon 8500 AA experience, lol.