A new breed of antialiasing technology comes in the form of NVIDIA's Accuview Technology was introduced with the launch of the GeForce4 family of video cards. This new Accuview engine improves upon NVIDIA's multisampling technique by providing improved 2X, Quincunx, 4X, and their all new 4XS antialiasing modes. The advanced technology of the GeForce4 GPU and nVIDIA's Accuview Antialiasing subsystem will offer 2X AA and Quincunx AA on the GeForce4 at speeds of the GeForce2 with antialiasing turned off. It is almost like getting Antialiasing for "free". So how do the new GeForce4 GPU's and the Accuview Antialiasing subsystem work together to provide improved antialiased images with higher performance? Read on to find out! For further details about antialiasing click here. Quincunx
Revisited The Quincunx approach above was revolutionary in its ability to offer high quality res screens with acceptable performance. Although, NVIDIA's Accuview AA subsystem on the new GeForce4 GPUs, takes this technology one step further by shifting the point at where the subpixel samples are taken, resulting in lower counts of color error thanks to a more accurate sampling pattern. Thus, the user is left with a better antialiased image. Accuview is a suite of antialiasing techniques that includes 2X AA, Quincunx AA, 4X AA, and 4XS AA modes.
4XS AA mode delivers improved subpixel coverage and a higher level of texture quality. By offering more texture samples per pixel, 4XS AA produces a higher quality graphic image. With 50 percent more subpixel coverage than previous modes, 4XS AA has finer gradation in final pixel color values at the edge of an object. The final result yields a smoother, more refined edge.
The picture on the left uses 4X AA mode and the picture on the right uses 4XS mode. Notice how jagged the blow-up on the left plane is and how smooth it appears on the right. By using increased gradations in color, 4XS makes the lines and edges look crisp when viewed at screen resolution. The difference is even more noticeable in the actual game play as the jaggies become more apparent when objects begin to move. The GeForce4
GPU family integrates the NVIDIA Accuview antialiasing subsystem, which
provides wider internal data paths. In fact, the GeForce4 GPUs can compute
sampled pixels, or additional samples, at full speed with no reduction
in engine performance whatsoever. The wider data paths also enable the
GeForce4 GPUs to use the same texture data for all of the samples in the
pixel, significantly reducing the memory bandwidth required to texture
all of the AA samples.
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