A quick primer on FSAA please?

[ninjazed]

Does FSAA really improve image quality? Does the software have to be written to handle it? I engaged FSAA for kicks and giggles in the Serious Sam Test (which has awesome graphics) and noticed that not only did image quality NOT improve but all the neat lens flares disappeared. What's up with FSAA?

 

[Goi]

FSAA basically gets rid of the jaggies and stair step effects that you see on screen when images can't be perfectly displayed on screen by discrete pixels. It is achieved by various methods, but the basic idea is to obtain various samples of the same image and perform some simple averaging of the pixels, thereby blurring them so that the edges look softer and more natural. It is a transparent process, so software need not be specially programmed to take advantage of it.

 

[TravisBickle]

PC-gamers.net has a good primer about fsaa. "FSAA what is it, what does it do for us" anandtech has a screenshot comparison of the major video cards too in their fsaa comparison. the GTS actually manages to preserve more detail and color than the voodoo but I don't know which is really better yet. give me GTS and i'll write you an article.

 

[ddiccico]

I tried 4x FSAA on my radeon in UT - the edges do look a lot better, but there was a huge performance hit.