HDR standard for High Dynamic Range. HDR facilitates the use of color values way beyond the normal range of the color palette in an effort to produce a more extreme form of lighting rendering. Typically this trick is used to contrast really dark scenery. Extreme sunlight, over-saturation or over exposure is a good example of what exactly is possible. The most simple way to describe it would be controlling the amount of light used present in a certain position in a 3D scene. Now then, why explaining HDR this much? Well because the G70 has specific new functionally to make HDR function faster and more widespread. Games usually are limited to an 8-bit (ARGB8) back buffer, which offers a range of only 256 levels. The G70 can manage 64-bit floating point texture filtering and blending folks. HDR is already present in Far Cry, next month in Half Life 2: Lost Coast and will be available in Unreal 3 to name a few titles.

Anisotropic filtering


Texture mapping is a rather easy graphical modeling technique that makes complex and impressive looking 3D objects. The technique of Anisotropic filtering tries to achieve the best possible texture mapping in situations where the model’s geometry places stringent requirements on the texturing process. Anisotropy is the effect (distortion) that you notice in Texels (Texture per Pixel) of a 3D object who's surface is oriented at an angle with respect to a viewpoint of the screen.

If a pixel from such a surface is mapped to texels, its shape becomes distorted. Currently the most advanced filtering technique available that compensates for anisotropic pixel distortion is... Anisotropic filtering. Okay, now for non Guru's. Anisotropic filtering is a way to create better and sharper image quality for perspective in depth scenes. When you make use of this function remember this, the greater the degree of Anisotropic filtering the lower the performance of the videocard.

GeForce Series 7 can handle 16 levels of AF and yours truly recommends you to enable it where possible!

Transparent Antialiasing

Antialiasing. There's a phrase you heard a million times before. But what exactly is it? These technical things although sounding very common can be very unclear to udnerstand for the most of you.

If you are a beginner with this topic, Antialiasing -> Simple explanation. This is to get rid of the "jaggies" on diagonal lines.  It boils down to this. To recover a signal, or image, you need a minimum of samples to be able to give a realistic representation of the image. The problems start with texture maps being either too close or too far away from the viewpoint. If the polygon is far away then you only have a limited number of points to show the texture map, so logically you have to drop a lot of the real pixels of your texture map.

NVIDIA offers a wide variety of AA modes, All AA modes are supported up-to the lovely 8x Super Sampled. Now the real fun begins when you are filthy rich and have 7800 GTX setup in SLI. You'll be able to play games with 16 levels of AA!! At the time of writing this has not been finished yet but during the first weeks of the product release a new driver should become available that will allow you to handle 16x AA (if you have SLI). The way this is gonna work is a mix of 4x Multi (rotated grid) and Super sampling modes.

Well we could bore you to death with tech talk, but shall we just say available just for the more fortunate ones?

There's something else for antialiasing technology that we need to discuss though. NVIDIA introduced a new mode. If you use the new ForceWare 75 drivers or later and flag the advanced tab you'll notice a new AA mode all the way at the bottom and it's called transparent antialiasing. It'll be offered to you in both supersampling and multisampling modes.

The new transparent sampling modes bring you better image quality. Of course we tried it on a couple with a couple of tests and the performance difference was really low. Transparancy antialiasing is offered on the 7800 boards, transparent antialiasing in its simplest terms permits transparent pixels. Textures can be used in edge blending operations to clean up jaggies. Let me translate, take a fence and now add another fence behind it. The background fence can not properly be antialiased, with this new technology it can (shown below).

New in the ForceWare drivers, these settings can be found in the advanced tab.

Ah you know what? Just see image below. The apparent drawback is, that it's power hungry. Enabling this setting can get your frame rate down by 10%. But since we have the raw horsepower of the 7800 GTX, you probably want to use and enjoy :)