G400's Anti-aliasing

[JoeLi]

When you turn
the "anti-aliasing" feature on in 3D games, you get a unthinkable
speed reduction. Especially in "Bleem1.4" and "Expendable". I doubt
G400 really support hardware anti-aliasing?

[Nuno]

The antialias effect is achieved by super sampling. It renders the frame at an higher resolution and then scales it to a lower resolution. If it renders it internally at a higher resolution, it´s natural that a performance hit occurs.

But hey, antialias is just like anisotropic filtering. Everybody advertise them, but there isn´t no video card available today with enough fill-rate to perform them properly.

[GTI]

Hi Nuno:

I have G40016MDH. I enabled Anisotropic in the registry.
When I run 3DMARK99maxpro it saids Anisotropic filtering is not supported.
Also in the TECHDEMO cycle thru F5(texture filter) only gives point/bilinear/trilinear and no Anisotropic available.

So it is becasue the G400 is NOT supporting Anisotropic filtering?? Or I need to tweak it some more to test this.

Thanks, GTI.

[Nuno]

As I said, no current card has a correct implementation of anisotropic filtering. It´s useless because it need alot of rendering power to achieve.
The are two types of anisotrofic filtering: maximizing filters and minimizing filters. G400 only supports minimizing. Don´t know for sure how to explain what exactly minimizing/maximizing do, but it just doesn´t matter. Anisotropic is useless in present time.

TNT´s are even worse, althought they clame to support both maximizing and minimizing, their anisotropic filtering is just the old bilinear! At least the G400 has trilinear filtering, TNT´s don´t even have that one.

[GTI]

Thanks Nuno for the clarification.

It would seems a little odd that Matrox advertised the G400 supports Anisotropic filtering yet they cannot demonstrate this feature in their Techdemo.
They should at least enable the Techdemo for showing the Minimizing filter but may be the performance hit is already too big they don't want the benchmark to look bad with it on.

Just my 0.02