Peformance Anti Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering

OverclockingOf course with most videocards we can do some easy tricks to boost the overall performance a little yet we ran into a nasty problem with the Radeon 9500 Pro series graphics cards .. they can not be overclocked as ATI has locked down that option. If you insists on overclocking the product then please download RivaTuner and use the Softr9700 Patch. This will hack the Catalyst drivers and enable overclockability. Do this at your own risk of course.

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.

We did the following tests with Quake III Arena. This software can do high framerates so it's better to see actual performance difference in numbers.

As you can see, the performance hit is high in the 16x12 resolution. Running 125 Frames in 10x7 at 6x FSAA is awesome.

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. Let's take a look.

As you can see the performance decrease in games at the highest level of anisotropic filtering is small .. very small. Excellent. Now let us mix up the numbers and do FSAA and ANI together.

Of course there are many combination possible. With a game like Quake III you can do even the highest resolution with everything turned on.