Well some preliminary stuff on my Parhelia

[ben6]

1. FAA works well. It seems to eliminate swimming (shimmering) textures. If you've ever played Jedi Knight 2 without any antialiasing , you'll know what I'm talking about . There's sometimes a distracting shimmer on the buildings or on the horizon in Sacrifice , for example. Turning on FAA virtually eliminates the effect. Also fixes the same issue in Flight Simulator 2002 screenshots to come
2. Only a couple small annoyances, nothing really major. Gamma in Jedi Knight II seems to need to be reinitialized when video settings are changed.
3. Been playing a lot of Morrowind and Neverwinter Nights with this card. 1024x768 32bit 16x FAA and aniso seems to be comfortable in Morrowind. Average 15-20 fps in town and higher indoors.

More to come

 

[Dolemite]

Its curious that FAA would reduce texture aliasing, since avoiding wasting fillrate and bandwidth on mid-polygon pixels is supposedly the main advantage of this method. I know texture shimmering/aliasing is something that's difficult to notice except in motion, but I'd be interested to see screenshots that demonstrate this.

 

[Geeforcer]

That's what I'd like to know as well. If I understand what Ben is saying correctly, he observed that FAA reduces texture aliasing, while according to Matrox themselves it only works on the edges.

 

[tEd]

maybe what ben mean is polygon popping.

 

[Dave Baumann]

I'd heard somewhere (I don't know if this was in the official presentations or not) that FAA doesn't work on edges, per-se, but areas of high contrast. Now, I don't know the validity of this information but if it were the case then it could explain why there could be a reduction in texture shimmering.

 

[OpenGL guy]

I'd heard somewhere (I don't know if this was in the official presentations or not) that FAA doesn't work on edges, per-se, but areas of high contrast. Now, I don't know the validity of this information but if it were the case then it could explain why there could be a reduction in texture shimmering.

That doesn't make much sense compared to the descriptions of the algorithm. I mean, how can you tell areas of high contrast without checking every pixel? The point of FAA was to do AA on the edges only as those are easy to compute.

 

[ben6]

I've sent Matrox a few questions on what's going on. This is the same effect as what I described at my E3 meeting with them.

 

[3dcgi]

Are the shimmering textures in a highly tessellated area of the screen? If so then it could appear that the textures are being antialiased. I remember some dials in one of the 3dlabs articles that got better with antialiasing despite the fact 3dlabs wasn't supersampling. This could be a similar situation.

 

[mboeller]

I'd heard somewhere (I don't know if this was in the official presentations or not) that FAA doesn't work on edges, per-se, but areas of high contrast. Now, I don't know the validity of this information but if it were the case then it could explain why there could be a reduction in texture shimmering.

No;

3DCenter, a german website made tests with FAA and this tests clearly show that the FAA only works at polygon-edges.
They used two intersecting polygons for the tests and FAA only worked on the polygon-edges, but not at the intersection.

Link : http://www.3dcenter.de/artikel/parhelia_aatest/

 

[Guest]

1. FAA works well. It seems to eliminate swimming (shimmering) textures. If you've ever played Jedi Knight 2 without any antialiasing , you'll know what I'm talking about . There's sometimes a distracting shimmer on the buildings or on the horizon in Sacrifice , for example. Turning on FAA virtually eliminates the effect. Also fixes the same issue in Flight Simulator 2002 screenshots to come
2. Only a couple small annoyances, nothing really major. Gamma in Jedi Knight II seems to need to be reinitialized when video settings are changed.
3. Been playing a lot of Morrowind and Neverwinter Nights with this card. 1024x768 32bit 16x FAA and aniso seems to be comfortable in Morrowind. Average 15-20 fps in town and higher indoors.

More to come

Did you get a copy of sharkmark ? Can you distribute it ? Or can you rip out the vertex shader used using a tool like dll detective ? I wonder why Parhelia only scores better than GF4 4600 in that vertex shader test...

G~

 

[ben6]

Yes it came with SharkMark. But until Matrox releases the benchmark officially, it's not my place to post it online.