Antialiasing Quality

32x Antialiasing

To cater to our readers’ requests, we performed an express test of the quality of antialiasing. An additional reason for us to do it was the introduction of 32x FSAA in the new drivers from ATI and Nvidia.

The drivers were configured as follows:

As usual, we captured the screenshots in Fallout 3 and Half-Life: Episode Two because these games have no problems with turning antialiasing on and abound in such graphics as fences, hanging wires and other micro-geometry that help evaluate the quality of FSAA.

Let’s first check out the new 32x FSAA mode in its ATI’s implementation:

The difference is insignificant although the 32x mode does provide a somewhat higher quality of antialiasing of small details such as ropes, struts and barbed wire thanks to the larger amount of color samples. These improvements are inconspicuous when you are actually playing the game unless you are looking for them deliberately.

The Episode Two screenshots speak for themselves, yet the image quality improvements are not as large as to justify such resource-consuming FSAA algorithms. The effect is really negligible if you compare it to the effect from switching from no FSAA to 4x FSAA.

Now let’s see how Nvidia’s solutions behave:

The difference is even less conspicuous in Fallout 3 than with ATI’s products and is definitely not worth the performance hit provoked by such resource-consuming antialiasing methods.

Like in Fallout 3, the effect from FSAA 32xQ is not worth the performance hit. This serves to confirm our point that 4x FSAA is the satisfactory level of antialiasing for most users and applications. The most fastidious gamers can try 8x FSAA (8xQ FSAA in Nvidia’s terminology) that ensures a nearly ideal quality of antialiasing at an acceptable performance hit, especially on top-class graphics cards.