nVidia Supports SSAA NOW!

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BenSkywalker

Diamond Member
Oct 9, 1999
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Getting sick of people talking about nVidia 'answering' ATi's SSAA in Crossfire- nVidia has supported SSAA since 2000 and they have never dropped support for it. The xS modes they offer handle both SSAA and MSAA- and all of their cores and drivers have supported this all along(well, since the GF3 and they gained MSAA support).

MSAA/SSAA hybrid isn't new, it isn't something nVidia will be 'adding'- nor is there any reason ATi couldn't enable it for ALL of their parts right now. ATi is crippling their current parts not offering it to those of us running their boards. This is not something Crossfire adds- it is something ATi took away and keeps 'hidden' with lack of driver support.
 
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stardust

Golden Member
May 17, 2003
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I haven't seen 4xS on the drivers for a long while, but I know the nvidia cards support it.
 
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Insomniak

Banned
Sep 11, 2003
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Originally posted by: stardust
I haven't seen 4xS on the drivers for a long while, but I know the nvidia cards support it.
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IIRC it's 8xS now.


EDIT: Just verified that in my settings. 8xS.
 
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legcramp

Golden Member
May 31, 2005
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well, this is gonna turn into a flame war..but anyways...I own a 6800ultra, and running SSAA 8x kills performance in newer games...@ 1600x1200 but a little lower res. plays fine. and 4x and 2x are great I guess..but yah..there is gonna be bombing now..gotta take cover...
 
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BenSkywalker

Diamond Member
Oct 9, 1999
9,140
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Shouldn't be any flamewar, this is all point of fact- just pointing it out for those who don't know.
 
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stardust

Golden Member
May 17, 2003
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Well, I want to see just how efficiently ATI handles this AA code. ATI did boast "free AA" for their console chipset..
 
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Ackmed

Diamond Member
Oct 1, 2003
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Originally posted by: BenSkywalker
Shouldn't be any flamewar, this is all point of fact- just pointing it out for those who don't know.
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Except you dont know for fact, what you claim as facts.
 
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Insomniak

Banned
Sep 11, 2003
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Originally posted by: BenSkywalker
ATI did boast "free AA" for their console chipset..
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That's due to eDRAM, nothing at all to do with anything in the PC space that they are planning on offering.
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Yeah. The eDRAM basically provides a massive enough amount of bandwidth that AA won't eat any performance - that's basically what causes performance drop under AA, your card running out of memory bandwidth. This is why performance under AA improves when you overclock your memory, have more on the card, or have a higher bit memory interface (e.g. 256 as opposed to 128).

ATi, in the 360, apparently decided to just sort of provide a large amount of dedicated bandwidth for AA alone - it makes sense, being that things are moving to high def. I imagin Joe Sixpack would be pissed if he played a console game on a hi-def television, and without "poor man's AA" (low res television grainy-ness ;) ), the image looked worse to his view.


Originally posted by: PrayForDeath
Not really, AA takes way more than 10 mb.
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It's the bandwidth that matters, not the physical amount of RAM. 1KB of RAM could do 16xAA at a playable frame rate if it was clocked high enough.


Example:

Remember R300 and NV30?

R300 won in hi res and AA/AF because those are memory bandwidth intensive, and it had a 256 bit memory interface as opposed NV30s 128 bit.

Without AA/AF and at low resolutions, NV30 won, because those are mostly clockspeed functions, and NV30 was clocked higher.

They had the same amount of memory - the only real differences (on a gross scale) were:

pipelines (4 vs 8)
memory interface (128 vs 256)
memory/core clocks (500/500 vs 325/310)
 
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BenSkywalker

Diamond Member
Oct 9, 1999
9,140
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91
Not really, AA takes way more than 10 mb.
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You have a good point there. In order to work around that they would need dedicated logic to handle some sort of special filtering technique where they could chew up bandwidth on the eDRAM's die and then tile the scene data out to system RAM to the front buffer. That is what ATi is saying they have done anyway.
 
Keysplayr

Keysplayr

Elite Member
Jan 16, 2003
21,211
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Originally posted by: Ackmed
Originally posted by: BenSkywalker
Shouldn't be any flamewar, this is all point of fact- just pointing it out for those who don't know.
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Except you dont know for fact, what you claim as facts.
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You spiteful, Malignant F**ker......

 
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xtknight

Elite Member
Oct 15, 2004
12,974
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OK so essentially this means Super AA is nothing new and has been on nVidia cards (under a different name) for ages now? Damn. I was hoping for something new or innovative. I wonder why Anand didn't mention this? Maybe I just missed it. I hope he wasn't tricked by the marketing.
 
apoppin

apoppin

Lifer
Mar 9, 2000
34,890
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alienbabeltech.com
SO . . you want "something innovative"? . . . in case you missed it , , , , copied from a related post:

Nvidia starts working on SLI 2
even if Crossfire defeats SLI, Nvidia has some secret horses for a new race. It is working on something that we know as SLI 2.

As you know SLI, has been around for a few quarters now and Nvidia is working to improve this marchitecture. One of the teams was working to get some better silicon at the same time and that?s what we believe is going to be called SLI2.

We learned that Nvidia is working on a motherboard that will have more PCIe lanes and might actually get close to two times 16 PCIe lanes, the ultimate for PCIe graphic cards in SLI mode.

We are not sure how much two times PCIe 16 times lanes will change the actual SLI score but this is something that we need to see before making our own mind . It could be good thing you never know.

Nvidia will also improve number things on its new silicon once it polishes it enough as it learned from its first born SLI chipset. We don?t have any idea about timing of final specification and features of such SLI 2 chipsets and boards but we will work on it.
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:thumbsup:
 
BFG10K

BFG10K

Lifer
Aug 14, 2000
22,709
3,002
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Does Super AA look much better than Multisampling?
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SSAA addresses aliasing on alpha (transparent) textures and on polygons internally which MSAA doesn't.

OTOH having a higher MSAA level smooths out polygon edges much better. Also MSAA is a lot faster and uses far less resources than SSAA does.
 
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Gstanfor

Banned
Oct 19, 1999
3,307
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Originally posted by: DaveA
with rivatuner you can get access to the old 4xSSAA mode for the geforce 6 series.
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nHancer is the tool of choice for this task, because it does three jobs very well indeed (not saying rivatuner isn't good).

nHancer allows:
Total control over nVidia application profiles - this means you can set every game up individually from every other game. Far easier to use than nVidia's built-in profile manager to boot.

Control over SLI options for applications when running an SLI configuration.

Control over all known Antialiasing modes through the application profiles.

It is an excellent tool, and anyone with a geforce3 or greater should get a copy and learn to use it and profiles.
 
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Insomniak

Banned
Sep 11, 2003
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Originally posted by: BFG10K
Does Super AA look much better than Multisampling?
Click to expand...
SSAA addresses aliasing on alpha (transparent) textures and on polygons internally which MSAA doesn't.

OTOH having a higher MSAA level smooths out polygon edges much better. Also MSAA is a lot faster and uses far less resources than SSAA does.
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Yeah, that's the main thing....if you think MSAA results in a performance hit, you ain't seen nothin' yet...
 
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bunnyfubbles

Lifer
Sep 3, 2001
12,248
3
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Originally posted by: BenSkywalker
Shouldn't be any flamewar, this is all point of fact- just pointing it out for those who don't know.
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I don't think you understand that SSAA and Super AA are different things, its a mix of SSAA and MSAA. Unless you're saying nVidia supports this AND supports it with playable performance.

Or unless people are wrongly touting Super AA as SSAA...

"ATI is able to handle SSAA by rendering the entire scene at the desired resolution on each card with a half pixel diagonal shift. They combine this method with either their 8x or 12x MSAA modes in order to produce 10xAA (4x + 4x + 2xSS) and 14xAA (6x + 6x + 2xSS). These quality modes should prove to be phenomenal. "
 
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