Goodbye FSAA

[dZeus]

nVidia does supersampling, 3Dfx multi-sampling.

I've heard that there will be other cards out in the future that will do multi-sampling, so not all is lost

[Six Of One]

Thanks for the correction. Me slaps myself with dead trout. *swat*swat*

I have read that actually both are using supersampling but 3Dfx did "Rotated Grid Supersampling" (RGSS), commonly called "spatial" or "multisampling" and nVidia does "Ordered Grid Supersampling" (OGSS) or simply "supersampling". RGSS renders a scene multiple times with slightly shifted coordinates and calculates an average while OGSS blows the scene to a multiple of the resolution, renders and then shrinks it back to display size. learned somthing here, hehe

Anyway, this still sucks

[DuRaNgO]

That's it, I'll never buy an nviDireah card again!
Oh wait, I wasn't going to anyways....
no loss for me

[Six Of One]

Goodbye FSAA

The last issue of the german CT magazine printed a short note about FSAA problems of the GeForce3 and was contacted by nVidia, who wanted to correct this statement. The current issue shows another short note about this (for those who have a copy: p.44) where nVidia explained that the low display quality during 4xFSAA is actually normal and a result of the, drumroll, 4xFSAA principle. That's probably the reason why the 3Dfx cards looked so good in FSAA, but wait.. The Voodoo5 created it's superior image quality during FSAA by using the supersampling technique. Shame that nVidia only uses multisampling (same is true for the Kyro II). But it goes on: with the release of driver version 11 the nVidia cards no longer offer full scene antialiasing (FSAA) - instead they only antialiase edges of objects. nVidia's recommendation for better quality? Don't use AA, use higher resolutions! Yes, that's what i always wanted on my 15" monitor

What i find most interesting out of this snippet is: now that 3Dfx is gone, nVidia drops FSAA. Why this is so, is painfully obvious (at least for me). nVidia's solution's strength is elsewhere. GeForces aren't that good in FSAA and since the picture quality of their solutions is already bad, they don't need a mode that underlines this "feature". Instead increase resolution where the mtexel monster can shine and you won't notice bad picture quality because everything is sooo tiny.

Grrrrrr....