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Which has better performance? 4x MSAA or 8x CSAA

I

It's Not Lupus

Senior member
I understand that 8x CSAA looks better, but does it perform better (more or less FPS than MSAA)? I don't have any benchmarks to run so I ask. A something search didn't provide a direct answer.
 
x8 CSAA would be slightly more performance hit than x4 MSAA based on x8 CSAA is x4 MSAA+4 additional coverage samples.
 
^Yeah, I'm not sure on the specifics but 8x CSAA does everything 4x MSAA does with a little additional effect. You won't get better performance out of CSAA. I don't get much of a performance hit between forced 4x MSAA and forced 4x EQAA (AMD's counterpart to 8x CSAA) in the games I use it for (mostly low-res texture console ports though).

If you're looking for an AA solution that has better performance than MSAA, try a post-process solution like FXAA or MLAA. Be warned that such AA methods also come with lower quality and a little bit of blurring.

This article over at Tom's Hardware is a good overview of the different types of anti-aliasing.
 
One of the strengths of CSAA is for extremer higher resolutions as well where there is a much less memory footprint and bandwith efficiency.
 
Here are some benchmarks I did for an article I wrote a while ago. It compares all of the major AA modes (at the time) on nVidia's parts.

Graph_2560.png


As you can see, coverage samples are extremely cheap in terms of performance. If you're running 8xCSAA I'd go straight to 16xCSAA. Likewise I'd pick 32xQ over 16xQ.
 
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