X-bit labs

ATI RADEON X1000: Brand-New Graphics Architecture from ATI Explored (page 18)

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin , Yaroslav Lyssenko, Anton Shilov

[ 10/05/2005 | 12:05 PM ]

Full-Screen Anti-Aliasing Quality

Besides the enhanced AF quality, ATI also announced that the new RADEON X1000 family would boast enhanced full-screen anti-aliasing algorithm for alpha textures.

Unfortunately, just like in case of Transparent AA by GeForce 7800, Adaptive FSAA of the new RADEON X1000 cannot bring any image quality improvement to Far Cry game. At least, we didn’t notice any visible differences.

Now let’s take a look at Half-Life 2 game.

As we can see from the screenshots, adaptive anti-aliasing of transparent textures works fine on RADEON X1000, however, the actual image quality improvement is not that significant, just like in case of alpha-textures multi-sampling by NVIDIA GeForce 7 (TMS, transparent multi-sampling). I have to stress that the Adaptive FSAA of the new RADEON X1000 is of much better quality than the similar mode by GeForce 7800 GTX, however it is still much lower than what the competitor’s TSS (transparent textures super-sampling) would provide.

I would also like to say that adaptive anti-aliasing of alpha textures by RADEON C1800 XT may sometimes lead to their complete removal. In fact, it could be a drive issue, because the anti-aliasing masks can be set on the software level for ATI RADEON solutions.

So, the laurels for the best FSAA quality, in at least certain cases, will remain with NVIDIA for now.