FSAA Sample Patterns

To take a look at the sampling positions of the FSAA modes available on the GeForce FX 5900 Ultra we'll use Colourless's FSAA Test Viewer. Each image shows three squares, the left one shows the geometry sample points (red squares), the right shows the texture sample points (green squares) and the middle square shows all the sampling points (geometry and texture) that occur for each pixel under that FSAA mode.

2x

Quincunx

4x

4xS

6xS

8x

Given that this is a refresh part it's unlikely that there would be any major architectural changes to the FSAA mechanism employed, hence the sample positions shown here remain the same as those on the 5800. One element that has changed is that the 8X mode has change from an 8xS mode, so this now operates within both DirectX and OpenGL (even though it does still rely on mixed Super-Sampling and Multi-Sampling).