NVIDIA's GeForce 7800 GTX Hits The Ground Running
by Derek Wilson on June 22, 2005 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Transparency AA Performance
For our Transparency AA testing, we ran through the AT_Canals_08-rev7 timedemo in Half Life 2. This demo has quite a few fences, and we wanted to test NVIDIA's claim that graphical quality is indeed improved significantly. Our performance tests show that MSAA comes at a marginal performance hit to overall framerate, while SSAA consumes quite a bit of our performance.
In order to illustrate the effect of the new AA mode, we took screenshots of a tell tale frame from our demo run. The screenshot shows very clearly that SSAA provides quite a quality improvement over no AA. MSAA ends up not looking worth the investment.
No Transparency AA
MS Transparency AA
SS Transparency AA
Below we have prepared some mouse overs to demonstrate the difference between the various levels of Transparency Anti Aliasing. Put your mouse over the first image to see the difference betweeen no Transparency AA and SSAA. The second image compares no AA with MSAA and the final image compares SSAA to MSAA.
No Transparency AA versus SSAA
No Transparency AA versus MSAA
SSAA versus MSAA
The difference between no Transparency AA and MSAA is very small. Only with a difference map are we even able to distinguish between the two. However, the difference between MSAA and SSAA is very pronounced.
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Diasper - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - link
oops posted before i wrote anything. Some of the results are impressive, others aren't at all. In fact results seem to be all over the board - I suspect drivers are something of the culprit and are to be blamed. Hopefully, as new drivers come out we'll see some performance increases or at least more a uniform distribution of good resultsDiasper - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - link
Live - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - link
Derek get cracking, the graphs are all messed up! And the Transparency AA Performance section could use some info on what game it is tested on and some more comments. I also think that each benchmark warrants some comments for all of us that have a hard time remembering two numbers at the same time. Keep it simple folks….Johnmcl7 - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - link
I agree something is wrong with these results, I thought they were odd but when I got to the Enemy Territory ones they seem completely wrong - at 2048x1536 and 4xAA the X850XT is apparently getting 104 fps, while the 6800 Ultra gets 48.3 and the SLI 6800 Ultras are only getting 34.6 fps! Especially bearing in mind it's an OpenGL game.John
rimshot - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - link
This has got to be an error by Anandtech, all other reviews show the 7800GTX in SLI at those same settings hammering the 6800Ultra in SLI.Lonyo - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - link
The benchmarks are all a load of crap it seems.Check the Wolfenstein benchmarks.
The X850XT goes from 74fps @ 1600x1200 w/4xAA to 103fps @ 2048x1536 w/4xAA
A 33% increase when the res gets turned up. Good one.
There also seem to be many other similar things which look like errors, but they could just be crappy nVidia drivers, or something wrong with SLI profiles.
Who knows, but there's definately a lot of things which look VERY odd/suspicious here.
Dukemaster - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - link
My Iiyama VMP 454 does 2048 no prob so i'm game :pvanish - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - link
oh and in several of the benchmarks, the 6800U SLI more than doubles the performance over the single 6800U. Is that normal? I thought SLI gains were generally about 45% or so.rimshot - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - link
Is it just me or is it a little strange that the 6800Ultra SLI outperforms the 7800GTX SLI at 1600x1200 with 4xAA in every benchmark ???PrinceXizor - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - link
No comment on the fact that in virtually every game it LOSES to the 6800 SLI at 1600x1200 at 4XAA.All other scores look very impressive. But, in this particualar group of settings, the 6800 SLI eats it for lunch.
P-X