SLI to offer 16AA...

[SVT Cobra]

sorry if this is a repost...

sounds cool to me...especially since both ATI and Nvidia are now both going all out in competition...which only means good things for consumers...

and 80$ SLI board for a backup system or lowend would be sweet....or crossfire none the less

 

[biostud]

more than 4xAA = waste IMHO, I would rather use the processing power another way.

 

[Lonyo]

Not quite as nice as ATi's solution, IMO.

This mode will not be a simple combination of two scenes rendered with the current 8xAA, but rather each card will render 4xSS + 4xMS. For alternate and split frame rendering, each card will be doing full 16xAA.

ie: it's gonna be seriously slow except for in really old games, while ATi's method has each card render at 6xAA IIRC, then they use the sample patterns to create higher AA.
ie: ATi's 14xAA will be a lot faster than nVidia's 16x.
Also, why does this need SLI if each card does 16x? Surely if a single card does 16x, this could be offered in non-SLI setups?

 

[trinibwoy]

Originally posted by: Lonyo
Not quite as nice as ATi's solution, IMO.

This mode will not be a simple combination of two scenes rendered with the current 8xAA, but rather each card will render 4xSS + 4xMS. For alternate and split frame rendering, each card will be doing full 16xAA.

ie: it's gonna be seriously slow except for in really old games, while ATi's method has each card render at 6xAA IIRC, then they use the sample patterns to create higher AA.
ie: ATi's 14xAA will be a lot faster than nVidia's 16x.
Also, why does this need SLI if each card does 16x? Surely if a single card does 16x, this could be offered in non-SLI setups?

It does not need SLI - single cards support it even now. Nvidia just officially announced 16x support to counter ATi's claims of 14x for Crossfire. It's all marketing BS. The downside of ATi's approach is obviously that single card users don't have any option higher than 6x and when using Crossfire's superAA the other scaling modes are disabled IIRC.

 

[JBT]

4XAA at high resolution is about as smooth as can be so I really don't see the need for 14 or 16 x. I suppose I should shut up though, as improvment is always good.

 

[Lonyo]

Originally posted by: trinibwoy

Originally posted by: Lonyo
Not quite as nice as ATi's solution, IMO.

This mode will not be a simple combination of two scenes rendered with the current 8xAA, but rather each card will render 4xSS + 4xMS. For alternate and split frame rendering, each card will be doing full 16xAA.

ie: it's gonna be seriously slow except for in really old games, while ATi's method has each card render at 6xAA IIRC, then they use the sample patterns to create higher AA.
ie: ATi's 14xAA will be a lot faster than nVidia's 16x.
Also, why does this need SLI if each card does 16x? Surely if a single card does 16x, this could be offered in non-SLI setups?

It does not need SLI - single cards support it even now. Nvidia just officially announced 16x support to counter ATi's claims of 14x for Crossfire. It's all marketing BS. The downside of ATi's approach is obviously that single card users don't have any option higher than 6x and when using Crossfire's superAA the other scaling modes are disabled IIRC.

ATi offers Temporal AA where sampling patters are alternated, which offers theoretically 18xAA, but it's not true 18x, so if we go marketing, ATi can win it, their 14xAA is also better than nVidia's 16x in terms of performance I think (although maybe not IQ).
I thought single cards were 8x (4x + 2xMS), but maybe they updated.

 

[otispunkmeyer]

yeah if you use nhancer you can go all the way up to 16xS (combined AA) or 4x4 super sampling. nhancer tells you which ones nvidia supports though and the higher ones are there, juts nvidia dont have official support for them. doesnt mean it wont work, just not guarranteed too

 

[trinibwoy]

Originally posted by: Lonyo
ATi offers Temporal AA where sampling patters are alternated, which offers theoretically 18xAA, but it's not true 18x, so if we go marketing, ATi can win it, their 14xAA is also better than nVidia's 16x in terms of performance I think (although maybe not IQ).
I thought single cards were 8x (4x + 2xMS), but maybe they updated.

I don't really buy into Temporal AA - too many conditionals and questionable IQ improvement. But there are lots of debates at B3D on that so we won't get into that here.

It's a moot point anyway since ATi is going to be using more of its AA sample grid to alternate the patterns between cards so there won't be enough resolution on the grid to allow for alternating samples for Temporal AA as well.

Yes, when you are talking about 14x vs 16x you are really talking about ATi's single card 6x vs 2xNvidia's single card 16x. So since ATi's 6x is definitely more than twice as fast as Nvidia's 16x then 14x will always be faster.

And yes, the official 8x is (4x + 2xMS) but the one most people use is the hidden mode (2x + 4xMS).

 

[Ackmed]

As I understand this, its not anything new. Just re-worded for something they already have?

 

[mwmorph]

referring to how aa blurs pixels together, wont TOO high aa actually lower IQ?

 

[BFG10K]

Single nVidia cards can already do 16xAA.

 

[Elcs]

x4 is good enough for me @ 1280x1024.

x6 is a noticeable but not terrific upgrade.

x14 or x16.... Im not that interested yet. It might look good but is the improvement worth the frames hit? In most cases, Im going to guess at 'no'.

 

[sbuckler]

Elcs - got to remember it's not x16 ms which is the anti aliasing you are used to. It's x4 SUPER SAMPLING and x4 ms. Super sampling is mostly better then ms as it anti-aliases all the transparent stuff as well (e.g. leaves on trees are nearly always done this way - they don't get anti-aliased with multi-sampling but they do with super-sampling). The only downside is if the game isn't written carefully it ends up aa the in-game text which makes it look naff. Obviously pointless for new stuff as performance hit is huge but great if you want to play an old game for some reason.

 

[JackBurton]

At 1900x1200, more than 4X AA I'm sure will be virtually indistinguishable. Not to mention, if the G70 has dual link (I sure hope they do), I can finally buy a 30" Apple display and hopefully run it at its native res (2560 x 1600) with NO AA. 😉 Now THAT would be sweet!