Transparency AA Performance

Before we move on to the benchmarks, we wanted to take a quick look at the GeForce 7800 GS AGP’s performance with NVIDIA’s transparency AA enabled. Our Half-Life 2 demo that we use for testing happens to have a few chain link fences that we run by towards the beginning of the demo, so we used that particular demo for our testing. The EVGA e-GeForce 7800 GS CO Superclock results are highlighted in yellow, with the “MSAA” results indicating 4x multisample anti-aliasing and the “TRSSAA” indicating that transparency anti-aliasing with super-sampling was used.

We should also note that gamma correction was turned on as well for all transparency AA results.

Half-Life 2 – Direct3D

As you can see, turning on transparency AA didn’t impact performance too greatly. At most the EVGA Superclocked board sees a performance hit of 7% at 1600x1200. Of course, the performance hit you’ll see will likely vary from level-to-level. In scenes with lots of foliage where transparency AA really kicks in, you’d likely see a greater performance hit.