24xAA

[Tom|Nbk]

Just had a go of this on my 2900 to see how it would run fired up CSS and the quality is unprecidented, it's like nothing before . Fair enough its near impossible to notice a difference in motion but to have such sheer quality very cool , best of all it ran 70-120FPS in a 40 man server on Office. There are only a select few games that can run this mode and still be playable but when they do it really shines, having anoher 2900 in crossfire should easily provide the extra horse power to make most games playable with this mode. Would be great to see nvidia implement this aswell. Somthing the G9x Series may bring to the table. Shader programmable AA F.T.W

 

[Tom|Nbk]

Is shader AA really that good on old games compared to conventional AA ?

Shader AA:

Pros:

Programmable, tweakable, can add as many different modes as you want and change them around with a driver update etc etc. Still a lot more fun to be had with these modes , I think I'll ask ATi for 48xAA .

Cons;

On some games (Shader Intensive) it can suffer versus the competition as there sometimes is not enough shader power but that has narrowed down now its more or less on par with the GTS at least which is somthing I guess and it shows ATi have mega tweaked the card and theres plenty more to come from it.

Will do some pictures now.

 

[Tom|Nbk]

Yea I get around 60fps IIRC. But then when In game the performance is more than playable around 70-120FPS as I said above. It does really stress the card though and you need crossfire to run it in most games at a playable level atm

Here is a screenshot in untouched BMP format (5MB )

http://download.yousendit.com/06566A770231E955

 

[Tom|Nbk]

I zoomed in and the pixels are still square

Are you for real?.

 

[Tom|Nbk]

Since I'm on a CRT the pixel is normally round or in my case oval as of holes in the Aperture Grille type Shadow Mask set up.

If pixels are round it will will not make a perfertly smooth line if you ZOOM in, as circles stuck together in a line form a hump line, up and down, up and down, square could make a straight line better, if line was horizonal or vertical, its is angled it will again become jaggy.

They will get it better and better but you are always going to see jaggy edge on certain shapes/angles if you ZOOM in.

Correct.

 

[Tom|Nbk]

I guess they can't get 4xAA/8xAA any faster and now try to take the attention away from that by introducing a new FSAA option.

What are you on about?, have you checked some of the latest reviews. Fair enough performance is down in one or two games but it's mostly up there with the GTS and beating the GTX/Ultra even with AA enabled somtimes.

 

[Tom|Nbk]

Performance is good compared to the 8800GTS/GTX but even you must acknowledge that the performance hit of the HD2900XT is bigger than Nvidia's 8800 cards when using FSAA.

I still feel the card is too slow if you look at the hardware specs, it should have a lot less impact from FSAA, even if it is done in shaders.

True the hardware specs of the 2900 pretty much trounce the G80. Only problem is


A. G80 Has a shader clock 2900 does not.

B. G80 Does the AA resolve totally away from the shader units 2900 does not.

Im curious as to whether its possible in drivers to move the AA resolve to the ROP's unit in the card. I believe it has 16 Rop units similar to the X1950XT-X

 

[Tom|Nbk]

They're two very different designs and not at all easy to compare directly. The R600 does have more functions, tessellation for example, but the basic SP are both very complex. Arguably one of the R600's biggest 'problems' is VLIW coupled with a superscaler architecture which can be very hard to program and horribly inefficient. But its lack of hardware resolve is certainly a problem if you like AA.

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by B. It's the resolve people talk about when they say the hardware is broken, obviously the R600 already uses render back ends (ROPs) for AA.

Nope the 2900 does not do any AA resolve in the render back ends (ROPS) afaik its ALL done in the shader units and the rops are used for z-buffer and a few other things.

 

[Tom|Nbk]

Still dunno why they went that route knowing it would cripple fsaa performance.

I think they wanted to take a risk and see if they could get away with the new arc, obviously they couldn't really

 

[Tom|Nbk]

So what you thinking Forn, how versitile is the AA resolve on the R600 how much of it can and can't be tweaked since you obviously know a little more than me

 

[Tom|Nbk]

Forn you free to come on MSN some time I need to pick your brains about somthing . Sorry for going OT

 

[Tom|Nbk]

So is it possible drivers can help the TMU/ROP short coming with the R600?.

 

[Tom|Nbk]

Wouldn't say ati's run was great, it was good with the 97-9800 series, x800 series slipped up, the pro was easy to get, xt hard to get and xt-pe near impossible to get. Refresh wasn't much better x850 introduced the loud cooler and a tiny clockspeed bump, availability still not great. x1800 was delayed for months and was on par with the 7800 when it finally arrived, performance improved with new drivers.

Then the x1900 arrived and stole the show more or less.

Out of all those launches id say the 9700-9800-x1900 were good, the rest were botched with products appearing late or with little to no availability (x800\x850\x1800).

Hmm yea I believe that the X19XX series were the best ATi card's to date and their best run to date.

 

[Tom|Nbk]

The 9700 series was an absolute show stopper when it was released, completely unexpected, the 9800 cards were legendary and I loved mine, best card ive owned to date then my 6800gt was the next best card ive owned. (Voodoo 3 was my favourite but not the best, not by a long stretch )

I agree I loved my 9800 Pro with the HL2 voucher

 

[Tom|Nbk]

JD, since the 6800Ultra came out in April 2004 (paper launch) its no great shame that it was worlds 1st DX9C / S.M 3.0 / P.S 3.0 HDR card and could not use AA at same time, ATI relased a DX9B card then with X800 and X850 bit late in the day IMO.

I remember the ATI cards used the chucky patch to get HDR+AA in Oblivion and was a bit jealous and agree it was bad the next 7000 cards still did not do HDR+AA, as I owned a 7900GTX.

Ahh the chuck patch you can't begin to understand how many cards that alone sold