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The T&L Engine
As you probably know, the GeForce has a hardware Transform & Lighting engine
(which I believe is truly a fruitful technological advantage). Compared to the
GF 256 the performance has been boosted quite a lot. The Engine can now
calculate 31 Million triangles/sec compared to the 15 Million from the GeForce
256. It has now been almost 12 months since the first T&L videocard became
available, and luckily there are several T&L compatible games available, and
a lot will be released quite soon.
Another newbie in the newer Detonator
drivers (officially called Detonator2 en recently released Detonator3) release
was support for Texture Compression. After shaking hands and burying a cold war
with S3 we instantly saw this cool method integrated in the new drivers. The
large advantage from S3TC (S3 Texture Compression) is that more textures will
fit into the videocards memory making textures bigger, higher quality which
results in a clearer and sharper image.
Full Scene Anti Aliasing
The GeForce based product range can support Full Scene Anti Aliasing
(FSAA).
FSAA removes the so called 'jaggies' from your game. If you draw a straight line
(under an angle) using a paint program and you zoom in, you will discover that
the line kind of looks like a stairway. To remove this and make the line
look like a line points in different colors are added to the side of the line to
make it look more like a real line.
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Anti-Aliased line
- If you draw a straight line (under an angle) using a paint program and
you zoom in, you will discover that the line looks like a stairway.
To remove this and make the line look like a line points in different
colors are added to the side of the line to make it look more like a
real line. |
You eyes are actually being fooled
by letting you think that it is a straight line without the stairway effect.
FSAA comes at a big price ... and this factor is performance. In higher
resolutions the performance can drop easily 50% of your costly framerate. At
this time do not expect miracles from FSAA.
The pictures above shows how FSAA
is handled, look closely at the magnifications.
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