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Transparency Antialiasing

We've decided to include transparency antialiasing performance evaluation of the GeForce 7900GTX in this article. Out of our benchmark suite, only three games work with transparency antialiasing - Battlefield 2, Richard Burns Rally and Serious Sam II. We won't include Battlefield 2 in our graphics benchmarks from now on, since this game is system limited, making it a bad graphics benchmark. The second reason is the difference in image quality.

To keep the evaluation short, we ran the remaining two games at a single resolution - Richard Burns Rally at 1600 x 1200 and Serious Sam II at 1024 x 768. The reason should be clear enough - it's the highest setting you most likely use, either because of the limited resolution support of the game or the performance. First of, let's see what the GeForce 7900GTX can offer in old games that benefit from transparency antialiasing.


Obviously, the GeForce 7900GTX has more than enough processing power for transparency antialiasing. The minimum frame rates we're getting out of the GeForce 7900GTX is the same as the average frame rates we're getting out of a reference clocked GeForce 7800GTX. Overall, that means the GeForce 7900GTX is about 40 percent faster! If you compare these transparency antialiasing scores to standard AA and AF scores, you'll see that we experience a quite significant drop - 40 to 50 percent. That's actually the same rate as on the GeForce 7800GTX, but the GeForce 7900GTX have a lot higher frame to begin with.

	GeForce 7800GTX		GeForce 7900GTX
	Default	4x AA 16x AF	Default	4x AA 16x AF
<30 fps	0	7	0	0
30-45 fps	0	114	0	0
45-60 fps	0	121	0	54
60-90 fps	141	19	0	172
90-120 fps	117	0	112	34
>120 fps	3	0	149	1
Total	261	261	261	261

results are in seconds

Looking at the graph, you can see just how huge the differences are. We wonder though whether or not the performance here is real or 'inflated' by some 'optimizations'. From what we can tell by watching the replay and playing the game, the results seems valid. There's still some aliasing, present but that's probably because of NVIDIA's antialiasing sample pattern more than anything else. To make sure there's no such problem like we saw on Battlefield 2, let's look at Serious Sam II results.


Can you say 'Wow' - in your best Bill and Ted impression? Look at those frame rates, that's double the GeForce 7800GTX! Finally a card that's fast enough to push this game at the highest settings (sans HDR and only at 1024 x 768). Yes, it dipped slightly below 30 fps, but that's at the game's heaviest. Repeated gameplay session seem to indicate that doesn't happen that often. This is good news indeed: for games that benefit much from transparency antialiasing. Unfortunately, we didn't test 2x or 2xQ performance, but you probably can expect the same thing - it's significantly faster than the GeForce 7800GTX.

	GeForce 7800GTX		GeForce 7900GTX		Radeon X1900 XTX
	Default	4x AA 16x AF	Default	4x AA 16x AF	Default	4x AA 16x AF
<30 fps	0	0	0	0	0	0
30-45 fps	0	0	0	1	7	29
45-60 fps	39	44	40	57	44	33
60-90 fps	24	19	23	5	12	1
90-120 fps	0	0	0	0	0	0
>120 fps	0	0	0	0	0	0
Total	63	63	63	63	63	63

results are in seconds

Looks like this confirms our Richard Burns Rally scores. The GeForce 7900GTX is truly worth it if you want playable frame rates with transparency antialiasing. Remember this is 4x transparency antialiasing with supersampling. That's the highest image quality setting you can get today.

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