who has implemented FSAA first on 3D graphics card?

kyronet

Newcomer
I was wondering who has invented/implemented FSAA first on 3D card.
I remembered 3dfx claimed they have FSAA first.
But isn't PowerVR PVRSGL (e.g. Neon 250) has FSAA first?
Or is it because of the PowerVR Neon250's release for PC was later than 3Dfx because PowerVR were working with Dreamcast at that time.

And if PVRSGL has FSAA working on PC games, how come Dreamcast doesn't have FSAA? (or am I wrong, Dreamcast does have FSAA?)



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KyroNet
http://kyro-net.paraknowya.net
 
Well unless 3dfx had it on the V3 then it wasn't them.

My creative Geforce256 had Full Scene anti-aliasing as one of the features and even had a slider in the drivers. At that point however it only worked in D3D and required the game to support it. Full AA support didnt arrive till the det2(or 3)s when the v5 was luanched. Yet another show of nvidia keeping back features/performance so they can release a driver on a competitors product release date.
 
nvidia Riva128 had it for a while, until it was removed from the drivers.
That was back in 98-99, but it wasn't the proper ffsa.
 
Hehe, that was a fun time. 3dfx announced FSAA as a major strength of the V5 line quite some time before it hit market, Nvidia's "driver" FSAA was kind of a reaction to that I think. But true, by definition Nvidia was first to market between the two. AA was already existent in earlier products though, I have no clue which was the very first though, or rather the first working one, probably some workstation card. I have no clue! ;)

Some old pre-detonator drivers for my TNT that actually had an AA Tab in them though, I remember I was not impressed by it at all (probably because I can't even recall it working in even just one game)... :LOL:

EDIT: Not that it really matters, the concept of AA is nothing new, its decades old, so even those who were first to market with it in 3D hardware hardly have anything to do with "inventing" AA...

EDIT 2: after reading ste's post, possible that unfunctional AA was on Riva128 and not TNT as I stated, its too long ago and I didn't spend much time with the feature at all.
 
I would think the first FSAA to appear in a 3D card was in proffesional level cards for CAD and such stuff, I would presume that 3DFX produced the first consumer level board with FSAA.
 
All the S3/4, Tnt/2, V2/3 generation proclaimed edge AA as a feature IIRC. Expendable by Rage had AA as a graphics option. I remember being bamboozled by it because it recomended you only turned it on if your card had TV-out (correlation between TV-Out and ability to do AA please).

I do recall someone at savage daily news posting pictures of expendable on a S4 with edge AA working in one driver set.
 
Didn't Rendition have also edge AA for the V2x00? I remember it appearing in the drivers around the same time as the TNT was out.
 
Can anyone explain properly what the abreviations "FSAA" mean before we continue with this discussion? I believe there is a fair bit of difference in opinion and beliefs in the abreviations.
 
Verge said:
Reverend said:
Can anyone explain properly what the abreviations "FSAA"

full scene anti aliasing ¿¿

i'm not certain, but that sounds right

You're right, that's what the acronym FSAA stands for. However, I think Rev meant for people to agree on a common ground as to which implementations meet the full scene definition. For example, is the GF4's multipsampling a full scene solution or is it only AAing the edges? Or does the 8500's supersampling qualify as full scene since it handles both edges and textures? How 'bout Quincunx (does a post filter blur count as an AA solution)?
 
Rendition Vérité

Vquake was the first title with FSAA. It came bundled with Creative Labs - 3D Blaster, based on Renditions chipset - Vérité 1000.
 
First AA I saw in hardware, Edge AA on the Rendition 1000 in Vquake and VQuake II. Very nice, especially since you had to run a 400x300 or 512x384 :)

Next: My old TNT 1 did it, but only in games that supported it through D3D. This game was one I was writing :) It did FSAA through SuperSampling, and was VERY slow at it (well worse than 4x slower with 4x SSAA). You couldn't force it in the drivers or anything, and when the "Detonator" drivers came out, it was gone. Only pre-detonator drivers on Win 9x using DirectX 6 can do it.

Then, the first that I know of that had forced FSAA in drivers, the Neon 250. GeForce and Voodoo 5 cards soon followed, then Radeon, etc etc.
 
Savage3D, the Intel/Real3D integrated solution (the name of which right now escapes me) and the TNT had the ability to do supersampling buffers.

Remember all the arguments about whether there was 'real' AA going on or not back then - there were some cards that were just rendering the last frame of the WinBench AA test with AA on.

It wasn't used in games because the performance was too slow. Frankly, that has only really changed in the last year or so.

There were some other cards that never made the market (like the Oak chipset) which would have had FSAA using the same method that PVR used later (it's much easier for tile-based deferred renderers).

By the way, Tomb Raider for 3Dfx had the edge antialiasing implemented by a quite hacky algorithm - drawing AA lines down the edge of every polygon. Quite nasty, which is why it wasn't carried over the S3 or ATI ports.
 
The Verite' 1000 edge AA support. It was the first to offer such a feature. It was even "programable" ;) ... heh..

I owned a Verite 1000 card and used to toy around with AA settings in Vquake. In Fact they still have the coolest implimentation, or AA control even to this day. You could enable AA for Models, world, or both.. there was another setting to.. i cant remember now..

At any rate this is the kind of control we need to see today. I would much rather have AA on for just the world. At 1280x1024 the models generally look good already.. at least in FPS games.. Or the models in Racing games etc...

ohhh... if only Rendition had not been bought out by Micron and turned into EDram jockies. Their 3500 board was going to be awesome. Would have crushed everything in its path at the time. Embedded ram, external Geometry accelerator, FSAA... literally YEARS ahead of 3Dfx and Nvidia.
 
Teasy said:
Neon 250 was the first PC graphics card with proper FSAA support.

Define "proper". It was available in Direct3d but not in the Quake driver.

Looked nice though. Was a very cool feature, I used to brag about it back when I ran my Neon250 and most people had TNT2s 8)
 
Full scene is correct. The matter, however, is how to define what is meant by "full scene".

3dfx, for example, never really agreed with the term unless it included "spatial" (i.e. Full Scene Spatial Anti-Aliasing).

So, what's "Full Scene AA" and what's "Full Scene Spatial AA"?
 
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