You might know by now that NVidia cards now support Anti Aliasing with the latest 5.xx drivers. You might also know that this takes a big performance hit and is done in software mode on the GeForce while oversampling is done in partly hardware in the GF2 while the Voodoo5 FSAA is done in hardware. 3dfx claims that it's 4X FSAA is in a class of it's own and the 2X FSAA is comparable to their competitor's FSAA because of the special algorithms in the VSA-100 chip combined with the methods of Anti Aliasing the card uses. We will investigate this further and include this in a future article..

3dfx quote: "We believe strongly that FSAA is something that no graphics card should be without"

2 processors at 166MHz at 2 pixels per clock, pumping out 667-733 MP/S fillrate. That's impressive. But not so impressive when you combine FSAA into the equation. Yes, 667 megapixels/sec is more than any other card available today aside from the GF2 but lets see how much FSAA will reduce it to. On 2X sample FSAA, the frame is sampled twice to reduce the jaggies. So with 2X FSAA, it takes twice as long to render a frame and with 4X FSAA, it takes 4 times as long. This can be calculated easily.

667 / 2 = 333 Megapixels/second. Still pretty fast 667 / 4 = 166 Megapixels/second. Not so fast. Yes, there is a large performance hit, even if it is done in hardware. 3dfx doesn't try to cover up this fact either, it's well known that FSAA will tax your video card but are the effects worth it? Maybe in low resolutions but don't think of playing Quake at 1024s768x32 with 4X FSAA anytime soon with good framerates. For more information on fillrate, please read the preview.

Large textures are great, when studying a highly detailed wall in Quake 3 I could make out everything, even the small eyes of a demon. This is the advantage of having larger textures. Highly detailed textures can be stored and rendered in the Voodoo5 because 3dfx has finally upped the texture size to 2048x2048 from the lowly 256x256 of the Voodoo3. I went back to my Voodoo3 for a while to see what the same wall looked like and I could not make anything on that wall out because of the restrictions in size. Another stab from 3dfx to make games more realistic. Now lets go onto Texture Compression and the T-Buffer.