ATI CrossFire Technology Showcase
Due to the sheer number of anti-aliasing modes now offered by ATI with CrossFire, and NVIDIA for that matter with SLI, it would be a monumental undertaking to do an as close to apples-to-apples comparison of all of the AA modes available on both platforms. We know you'll be interested in how Super-AA performs however, so we ran one of our custom benchmarks in every Super-AA mode to give you an idea as to how these new modes affect performance.
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ATI's Super-AA modes had a major impact on performance in our custom FarCry benchmark. We wouldn't consider any of the modes above 10X AA playable in FarCry when the resolution is set to 1280x1024. And with the resolution turned up to 1600x1200, nothing above 6X AA (a non-Super-AA mode) was playable in our opinion. Like NVIDIA's SLI AA, however, ATI's Super-AA is not meant to be used on a relatively demanding game like FarCry. On a more CPU bound game like Unreal Tournament or even Half Life 2, or many other older games, Super-AA should be playable, and it will definitely clean up those jaggies.
We should also note, that we couldn't confirm that super-sampling was working in FarCry, which is why there weren't big performance drop-offs when 10X AA and 14X AA were used. The modes were definitely functional in Half Life 2, as you can see on the previous page, but thanks to a game update that rendered our custom demos useless, we don't have HL2 scores for you here.
