Anisotropic Filtering

We've discussed the angle invariance G80 sports when it comes to texture filtering quality, and the following image comparing 16xAF on G71 and G80 (on the right) says a lot. G, you're welcome!

Total invariance eludes modern consumer hardware, but that's pretty close and the most important thing is that it's the out-of-the-box quality, rather than anything you have to select yourself. We've measured filtering performance on G80 under Half Life 2 to be very high, and anisotropic filtering is effectively pretty much free, depending on your game and target resolution of course. The hardware is able to perf a huge number of bilerps for every screen pixel, though, so don't be scared to get your app to ask for AF in your games, if you own a G80-based board.

Antialiasing

We mentioned the hardware can apply true 8xMSAA to a scene, no matter the surface format being used by a game or application. We quickly snapped the sample grid positions and took a shot of it at work in Oblivion with HDR rendering enabled in the game options, and 16xQ AA enabled in the driver control panel.

We mentioned CSAA before, and using a tool we've written in house we're able to detect the primary and secondary samples that CSAA takes when determining subpixel coverage. We'll reveal all in the Image Quality analysis piece but as a teaser here are the subpixel samples from the 16xQ mode.

We'll cover AA performance in the Performance part of our G80 analysis.