Anti Aliasing
The DX9 FSAA Viewer allows us to see not only the number of samples used when anti aliasing is enabled, but also the pattern they are organized. Modern cards uses some modified form of Rotated Grid multisample anti aliasing (MSAA), which offers much better results quality wise than Ordered Grid MSAA.GeForce 7950GT
Radeon X1950 Pro
GeForce 8800GTS
GeForce 8800GTS (CSAA)
GeForce 8800GTS 16xQ
With the GeForce 8800 and quite possibly the whole GeForce 8 series, NVIDIA introduce a new form of multisample anti aliasing to the masses - Coverage Sampling Anti Aliasing or CSAA for short. Like the traditional form of MSAA, CSAA still uses the same number of color samples, but adds more 'coverage samples'. We'll get more into this in a while.
The interesting comparison in this test is how the GeForce 8800 uses different sample patterns for its 'true' 8x sample MSAA than NVIDIA's previous generation - the 8xS anti aliasing mode. With a much less 'ordered' sample pattern, the 8xQ MSAA seem to offer an improvement in image quality, but the use of 2 texture samples in super sampling in 8xS may still offer the better image. The trouble with 8xS is that since it uses supersampling, performance is usually poor with current game titles. Because it relies on multisampling, 8xQ MSAA should offer less of a penalty hit than 8xS but we'll have to see if the image quality is worth switching from 4x MSAA.
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