IQ settings???

[TheRyuu]

I pulled this off HardOCP's site:

HardOCP

TR MSAA = Transparency Multisampling Anti-aliasing ? Indicates the use of NVIDIA?s Transparency Multisampling quality setting on GeForce 7 series video cards.

TR SSAA = Transparency Supersampling Anti-aliasing ? Indicates the use of NVIDIA?s Transparency Supersampling quality setting on GeForce 7 series video cards.

Now I just wanted to know, from real users, if I should turn them on or not and weather I would be able to tell the difference between Transparency AA (MS/SS) and regular AA.
I have 2x7800GT's in SLI just to let you know. I know everyone is going to say "sure, you have a kick ass setup, why not turn them on...", but I just want a more detailed explination then that...Please??

Thanks in advance

 

[Gamingphreek]

SS = Supersampling = Supersampling is when you take the image of the picture and, essentially, just blow it up and increase the resolution on those parts, which effectively anti aliases. It also is not limited to edges.

MS = Multi Sample anti aliasing. Is when you almost add pixels here and there and blend it together.

The transparency aspect is Nvidias (ATI also has something similiar) new addition. It is also referred to as edge anti aliasing. It uses alpha, (essentially colors) to blend the colors together as it goes. This is used on things like fences, and power lines in games.

The MSAA is going to be much less taxing than SSAA. The Transparent aspect, incurs only a minor performance hit, you should just leave it on.

-Kevin

 

[Munky]

Transparecy AA does antialiasing on textures that have parts of the texture transparent. This is a common way to draw stuff like tree leaves, wires, fences, and similar things in games. SSAA is the only effective way to do transparency AA that makes a noticeable improvement in image quality, but it's also more taxing on the video card. MSAA is only good at antialiasing edges of polygons, so on transparent textures there would be almost no visual improvement. If you have the gpu power to run transparency SSAA, then use it, it makes some scenes in a game look much better.

 

[TheRyuu]

The only game pretty much that I could use the full 4x transparancy SS would be half-life 2 and probably doom 3 or quake 4 since their sort of cpu games.

 

[nitromullet]

4x trSSAA makes HL2 look great, trMSAA not so much. 8x trSSAA makes it look even better if you can run that, but that carries a pretty steep performance hit along with it. I actually had issues with my SLI rig that never let me run 8xtrSSAA, except for once... Odd, I know, but my system would always give me a BSOD when I tried 8x, but I still tried every driver revision. It worked one time, and I thought they had fixed the issue, but it cam back again. However, for one afternoon I played HL2 in full 8xtrSSAA splendor, and it looked great.

 

[TheRyuu]

Originally posted by: nitromullet
4x trSSAA makes HL2 look great, trMSAA not so much. 8x trSSAA makes it look even better if you can run that, but that carries a pretty steep performance hit along with it. I actually had issues with my SLI rig that never let me run 8xtrSSAA, except for once... Odd, I know, but my system would always give me a BSOD when I tried 8x, but I still tried every driver revision. It worked one time, and I thought they had fixed the issue, but it cam back again. However, for one afternoon I played HL2 in full 8xtrSSAA splendor, and it looked great.

It goes up to 8x TRSSAA?? I thought it only went up to 4x. I heard there wasn't much of a performance hit when using 4xTRMSAA opposed to regular 4xAA. The performance hit gets noticably worse when you go to SSAA. But I bet my SLI rig can handle it. (Except FEAR maby...)