Improved AA quality

Like NVIDIA, ATI provides a new anti-aliasing mode that’s designed to improve the anti-aliasing image quality of thin-lined objects such as chain-link fences and jungle foliage. Dubbed “adaptive anti-aliasing”, ATI uses the same trick NVIDIA does, by combining the image quality of supersampling with the speed of multisampling. We’ve provided a few screenshots taken from Half-Life 2 illustrating the image quality improvement adaptive anti-aliasing brings:

ATI 4xMSAA

ATI 4xMSAA second angle

ATI 4xMSAA w/ adaptive AA

ATI 4xMSAA w/ adaptive AA second angle

You can probably see the difference just scrolling through the screenshots, but we’ve included a crop to really highlight the difference adaptive AA brings:



RADEON X1800 XT 4xMSAA




RADEON X1800 XT 4xMSAA w/Adaptive AA


And now lets see how ATI’s adaptive anti-aliasing compares to NVIDIA’s transparency AA:

GeForce 7800 GTX w/Transparency Supersampling AA

GeForce 7800 GTX w/Transparency AA Supersampling second angle

GeForce 7800 GTX with 4xTransparency AA Supersampling




RADEON X1800 XT 4xMSAA w/Adaptive AA


Both cards do a really good job of smoothing out the jaggies, although the edges on the RADEON X1800 XT appear a bit softer. The bar that runs across the tree has less jaggies on the GeForce board however.

We also ran a quick performance comparison: