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Well then, you've seen the fruits of 16X FAA in action, so
you'll have to make judgments on your own, since visual
attributes are subjective. However, it is our
personal opinion that Matrox's 16X FAA image quality is
superior to anything out there right now, at equivalent
resolutions and even 1280X1024 - 4X Multi-Sample AA versus
1024X768 16X FAA at a lower resolution.
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16X
FAA Versus 4X Super Sample AA |
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Better image
quality and a better showing for the Parhelia |
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Here we see
the obvious benefits of Fragmentation Anti-Aliasing versus
traditional Super Sample and Multi-Sample techniques.
Since the Parhelia only samples the edge pixels of a
given scene, it also only has to process a fraction (on
average about 5 - 10%) of a frame with anti-aliasing at
16X. As a result, the Parhelia surges past even the
GeForce4 Ti 4600 at 1280X1024 with traditional 4X AA.
However, notice we did include one score with the Parhelia
running in 4X Super Sample mode at 1024X768. One
word... OUCH. Obviously, Matrox has focused on their
16X FAA performance and left out optimizations in Super
Sample mode. Frankly, we don't even see a need to
enable the feature in the driver control panel, if these
are the type of frame rates that are produced.
Here the
Parhelia drops back to second place, with the Jedi Knight
II taxing the GPUs a bit more in this test. Now,
remember
the
screen shots we took back on page 3? Decide for
yourself if you think that the Parhelia's 1024X768 16X FAA
mode looks better than the NVIDIA 4X AA at 1280X1024.
We think it does but it's up to you to decide. Then
consider the above scores again. In any event, at
1024X768 with 16X FAA running, Jedi Knight II looks great
on the Parhelia and frame rates are solid and playable at
nearly 60 fps.
Here things
are a little bit more nip and tuck for the GeForce4 Ti
4600 and the Parhelia but GeForce 4 still pulls out in
front. Once again, you'll have to be the judge of
which is more important to you, frame rate or image
quality. Again, image quality is superb at 1024X768
with 16X FAA on the Parhelia and it is no slouch on the
GeForce4 either, at 54 fps. with 4X AA.
Finally, let's
keep turning up the eye candy coefficient and enable
sharper more detailed textures with Anisotropic Filtering.
16
Tap Anisotropic Filtering and AA In Motion
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