NVIDIA GeForce 2 GTS Direct3D FSAA Update (Detonator 5.22 Drivers)

Performance

Because of the lack of any decent benchmarks in Direct3D games, we resorted to using 3DMark in order to illustrate the performance penalty incurred by enabling the various FSAA settings.

Here we see the immediate performance penalty you pay for enabling FSAA. The fact that the performance increases when going from 640 x 480 to 800 x 600 illustrates the premature nature of these drivers, meaning that performance could definitely improve (and most likely will) upon the final release of the drivers. There are also a few more settings between turning off FSAA and this setting (the 4th position on the slider) that will give you a slightly higher frame rate in exchange for degraded FSAA quality.

The second game test in 3DMark 2000 is a simulation of a third person adventure game, whereas the first game was more of a action flight simulation. The scores here are much higher and the performance drop is much less significant. However, the highest setting at 800 x 600 is still faster than the highest setting at 640 x 480 indicating, once again, that these drivers are still in their beta stages.

If you're interested in seeing exactly how big of a fill rate penalty is incurred by enabling FSAA, watch as the GeForce 2's 1.2 GTexels/s fill rate is dropped to under 200 MTexels/s. Once again, you shouldn't pay too much attention to the performance figures because the drivers aren't final yet.