Overview
Adaptive Anti Aliasing
Adaptive antialiasing is a new feature present on the X1K series Radeons from ATI. As the name suggest, adaptive antialiasing is a feature that actually tries to perform antialiasing on transparent textures. It works very much like the transparency antialiasing available on the GeForce 7 series of cards. Like many other image enhancing feature on 3D graphics card these days, this option can be turned on and off from the graphics card's driver control panel. You can enable (or disable) this feature without messing around with the 'standard' antialiasing options, that means you'll be able to use this feature both with application controlled and driver forced antialiasing. You can also choose which method of adaptive antialiasing you want: Quality which uses supersampling for best quality at the expense of performance or Performance which rely on multisampling to maximize performance with slightly less effective antialiasing.Like any image enhancing feature, we need to see just how much image quality improvement this feature offer. While there's no substitute to looking at them directly on the screen right in front of you, these screenshots will have to do for now. The first screenshot is adaptive antialiasing with Performance setting and the second one is with Quality. 4x AA was enabled from the in game menu for these screenshots.
Radeon X1900
If you look close enough you'll see the second screenshot (the one with supersampling) has less aliasing than the first. That's also true for the second set of screenshots. There are still some aliasing present, even with supersampling. Now, let's look at the GeForce 7 screenshots. Like the Radeon X1900 screenshots, the first one is with multisampling while the second is with supersampling.
GeForce 7
Up close, with multisampling we can see that ATI's adaptive antialiasing is more effective than NVIDIA's. But remember, it's the supersampling screenshots we're interested in. With supersampling, it looks like the GeForce 7 is actually more effective at removing aliasing on transparent textures than the Radeon X1900. This fact is slightly mudded by the 'thickening' apparent in all GeForce 7 transparency antialiasing shots. This 'thickening' can be seen on all transparent textures, not just on the palm you can also see it on the grass, trees, etc.
One can argue for either camp, but during repeated gameplay sessions, we notice less aliasing on the GeForce 7 than on the Radeon X1900 with transparency supersampling antialiasing enabled. Aliasing can easily be seen on faraway objects with transparent textures on the Radeon X1900, where the GeForce 7 had none or just a small degree of aliasing. However, when the objects are quite near, ATI's adaptive antialiasing and NVIDIA's transparency antialiasing is at par with each other. Unfortunately, we can't show you this fact, so the static screenshots will have to do for now.
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