ATI's SMOOTHVISION - The key to its "success"

Final Words

This more thorough look at AA quality and performance raised some very interesting questions; at the top of our list is why ATI chose to go with supersampling AA for the Radeon 8500 and not a much more efficient multisampling implementation such as that found in NVIDIA's GeForce3. There are a couple of major reasons why ATI would make this decision:

ATI either felt that the image quality benefits of supersampling outweighed the performance penalties or the Radeon 8500 was originally designed with multisampling AA in mind but the support ended up being broken in hardware after the chip taped out. We'll leave that up to you and ATI to decide, but with the amount of confusion in regards to ATI's SMOOTHVISION floating around it was necessary to provide some followup coverage.

Looking towards the future, ATI's next-generation core had better feature multisampling AA support if it is to remain competitive on all bases. As GPUs get more powerful and more efficient with memory bandwidth not only will rendering resolutions increase but the demand for efficient AA and other such features will as well.