Half Life 2 FSAA

[bsdgeek]

I was reading over at Beyond3D that currently ATI and Nvidia cards cannot do FSAA in HL2. ATI cards have the ability to do it, but it is not exposed in the drivers.

They never said anything about FAA though.

[GNEP]

Apparently the (Valve/Steam whoever) have indicated NO mainstream cards can FSAA at present. I take that to include the parhelia unfortunately.

[Nuno]

FSAA is very easy to implement, as it´s mostly a driver job. If you have a 800x600 frame to render, just render it at 1600x1200 and then downscale to 800x600. There you go, 4x FSAA (2x vertical 2x horizontal). Even oldies like G400 or Kyro could do FSAA.

Point is that FSAA is very inefficient as you simple double the fillrate requirements and the image can get a bit blurry. It has one single advantage: it´s the only AA method that can do antialiasing on alpha textures.

It´s so unused (it always have been) that FSAA is completely away from video card drivers for some time now.

Why Valve is ressurecting FSAA is really beyond me.

[bsdgeek]

We can't be talking about SuperSampling, because NV cards (and Parhelia for that matter) can use SS, but ATI cards use MultiSampling, and cannot (AFAIK) SuperSample.

[bsdgeek]

The missing feature that ATI cards have is "centroid sampling", which I don't know much about right now, I'll get back to you later.

Edit: It appears to be usable in OGL atm, but not in current DX9. (It is part of Pixel Shader 3.0)