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| Page 10 of 18 |
Features Overview: High-Resolution Anti-Aliasing
It is only recently that NVIDIA has played up the importance of anti-aliasing or removing "jaggies" from our everyday 3D objects. However, the entire implementation is not half-baked, nor was it added for credence to its list of new features.
The topic of anti-aliasing and the various methods of achieving the anti-aliased results would be far too difficult to discuss in good enough detail. Instead, we will jump straight into what is implemented by the GeForce 3 to avoid the tedium of comparison against the other methods.
Quincunx Multisampling for High-Resolution Anti-Aliasing
As a first step, the GeForce 3 is of robust enough a design to carry out multisampling operations and its related overheads without an unbearable slow down in gaming performance. Then NVIDIA's hardware anti-aliasing technology uses a new Quincunx sampling pattern said to provide comparable quality to 4X Full Scene Anti-Aliasing (FSAA) with the overheads of 2X FSAA.
The Quincunx sampling pattern is illustrated below:
The Quincunx pattern of multisampling does not provide anti-aliasing for 'free' without any performance penalty, of course. It does however ensure that the tradeoff is minimum and game playability is maintained. By obtaining data samples from neighbouring pixels of the input data that is already captured in memory instead of creating additional samples, it reduces the performance degredation brought about by writing more samples out into the frame buffer.
As a result of the ingenuinity Quincunx anti-aliasing provides, what is currently issued, is probably the best blend of quality and performance.
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