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Quality: Antialisasing With v5.08 AA in OpenGL 3dfx prays the feature of Anti Aliasing with its new Voodoo4 and Voodoo5 cards. The cards can do AA in hardware - pretendedly without any performance loss. Pretendedly because there are no cards available yet to check this out - Never trust the marketing hypes, independent from which manufacturer they may come! The drivers v5.08 offered FSAA (Full Screen Anti Aliasing) in OpenGL the first time. In v5.08 you had to change the registry entry "EnableFSAA" that can be found in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Class\Display\xxxx\NVIDIA\OpenGL from 0 to 1 to enable AA. The new v5.13 drivers now offer an option in the OpenGL menu.
On the right image you can see that the edges are a lot smoother with AA enabled. But this effect doesnīt look very impressive on still images. You have to see it in motion to recognize the reduce of the flicker effect on edges:
At all I have to say that the quality is not as good than the Voodoo5 AA quality Iīve seen on CeBIT:
The images were made in the 3dfx CeBIT booth. They were taken with a digicam from the monitor so donīt wonder about the bad quality of the images. Nevertheless they show the much smoother edges of the Voodoo5. But itīs too early to damn the new NVIDIA drivers. NVIDIA never advertised AA in GeForce. It may be possible that its successor NV15 contains optimizations that offer better AA quality and performance. And I think NVIDIA will primarily optimize the driver for NV15. But if it costs performance, 3dfx will score here! So we have to wait what NVIDIA will present us (later this month?). This will be the card Voodoo4/5 has to compete with... donīt forget: GeForce came in september last year! With v5.13 AA is now available in Direct 3D
v5.13 drivers offer AA in D3D. The settings for this can be found in a special menu in the advanced D3D settings of the drivers. You can also use the cool bits entry to get the special overclock and V-Sync settings: [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\NVIDIA Corporation\Global\NVTweak] There you have to make a new DWord called "CoolBits" with the value "3". But itīs easier to download the registry setting for this from our fileserver: v3.xx V-Sync-Overclock Settings
The quality of AA in D3D is really nice. I made two screenshots in Need For Speed 5 Porsche Unleashed:
You can see the advantage of AA on the body of the car. The edges are almost gone with AA enabled. But you can also see the disadvantage of AA on the screenshots. The image is more unsharp at all. I also noticed this effect of AA during the 3dfx CeBIT demonstration. AA is not a win in image quality at all. It offers a smoother but also mory blury image. But the feature is optional and can be disabled - but on the other hand absolutely nice to have! You can decide on your own in future if you want to have it or not. A sharp AA image seems not to be possible today.... AA Performance The quality of AA in the drivers is nice but the performance on a GeForce DDR is far away.... AA eats very much performance:
3DMark 2000 800x600-16 in Detail:
You can see much lower results with AA in the game performance and the CPU tests. But the fillrate is still the same! But not very impressive results at all with AA. Conclusion The performance gains of the new 5.xx drivers in D3D and OpenGL are very nice to see! But AA canīt really be used with GeForce DDR at this time, although 50fps in Q3 is still playable - Thatīs almost the performance of a TNT card. But incoming shows really bad 32Bit performance.... and I really donīt want to get back to 16Bit color depth for AA at all! So weīll have to see how NV15/11 alias GeForce2 can handle Anti Aliasing. On the other hand: AA is not a good choice in all cases. The image is more blurry than without AA. I wondered a bit about the higher CPU test results in 3DMark 2000. Did NVIDIA optimize slow code or it this a special "optimization" for 3D Mark 2000 only? I remember on tweaked drivers when Final Reality was actual.... But the new driver shows increases in many areas so I think itīs really faster. It may also be a use of more CPU power instead of the T&L Engine. So which driver should you use? All the drivers Iīve tested here are inofficial releases. Official is v3.68 that can be downloaded from the NVIDIA driverspage. So you use those inofficial drivers on your own risk!! Downloads: 3DMark2000 testresults
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| Copyright: RIVA Station 2000 - Lars Weinand URL of this Article: www.rivastation.com/detonators_e.htm - If you want to link to it, please use this URL! :-) |
