What is FSAA?

[Garet Jax]

Can someone explain to me the concept of FSAA, what is does and how it is used? Thanks.

 

[Tanked]

You'd be better off reading the reviews and stuff made by Anandtech, but here's basically how it works. This is for 4x Anti-aliasing.
In Geforce 2's, Radeons, and Kyros, they anti-alias by taking the image, rendering it 4 times, but each time, moving the image slightly out of line and then blending the pixels together. This also cuts frame rates into fourths, which is why 4x is usually impractical.
In Voodoo 5's, it anti-aliases by taking the original image, and renders it 4 times (but each time, it rotates it slightly). This gives better quality, and I believe this method also can fix some visual artifacts (though correct me if I'm wrong).
I'm not sure about Geforce 3's.

 

[mitaiwan82]

makes your games look purty...
I think one conventional method of using FSAA is by rendering a scene at a higher resolution, and then scaling it down to the designated resolution. Ergo, better picture w/ tradeoff in speed. Of course different companies use various methods of FSAA...