Performance - Anti aliasing & Anisotropic filtering

Full Scene Anti Aliasing (FSAA)Full-Scene anti-aliasing (FSAA) is a sampling technique that creates more detailed and realistic looking images, by removing the stair stepping effect seen on the edges of objects within computer generated images. High quality anti-aliased graphics are achieved with sub-pixel edge detection and color compression for greatly improved performance. Full scene anti-aliasing modes 2x/4x/6x.

Anisotropic Filtering
Anisotropic filtering enhances overall 3D quality by rendering sharp, detailed textures. As more texture samples are filtered, the image quality improves. Without Anisotropic Filtering, objects and environments in the 3D world will appear blurry and fuzzy, effectively degrading the level of realism.

Anisotropic filtering improves image quality by sampling textures more frequently. This is particularly important for objects rotated at sharp angles relative to the viewpoint. For example, textured flat ground in the distance and scenes with rotating 3D objects in the foreground will both benefit from anisotropic filtering, and are typically found in todays gaming content. The Radeon 9700 Pro VPU filters more samples than the competition, with minimal performance degradation. Anisotropic filtering modes 2x/4x/8x and 16x.

As we can't test all modes and options we recently decided to test this mode, 4x Anti Aliasing and 8x Anisotropic filtering enabled as default. Let's take a look at some numbers.

As you can see, the GeForce4 architecture is by far not as advanced as the Radeon 9500/9700/9800 and GeForce FX series, it's not at all bad though. Yet that is the choice you need to make. Do you use quality settings like these ?