FSAA mini-benchmark

Have you ever looked at the FSAA settings in the control panel for your graphics card and wondered what the real visual difference is between them?

FSAA Settings dialog

I was curious myself and decided to do a mini benchmark test. I pulled up a game I wrote a while ago called "The Adventures of Bruto" where you fly around as a dragon and fend off a naval attack. All of the graphics in the game are vector images, so it is a good visual test case for FSAA:

The Adventures of Bruto

I took screenshots of the game at each FSAA setting level for a comparison. Here are closeups of the castle at 0x, 2x, 4x and 8x:

FSAA 0x

0x

FSAA 2x

2x

FSAA 4x

4x

FSAA 8x

8x

Overall the screenshots seem to confirm the idea that "more is better" when it comes to FSAA, but once you get past 2x the improvements don't seem to be that noticeable. I'll probably leave games on 2x or 4x and bump up other settings like model/texture detail if I need to make a tradeoff.

Posted on June 11, 2006
Comments (4) Trackbacks (1)
  1. What graphics card do you have? What is the difference in FPS when using no AA, 2x, 4x and 8x?

  2. I have a GeForce 7800 GTX (256 MB version) on an nForce4 chipset.

    I didn’t see any framerate difference with that game (it’s pretty simple), so I fired up Half-Life 2: Lost Coast and set the resolution to 2560×1600 in order to really stress-test it. Here are the results I got:

    None: 22 fps
    2x: 15 fps
    4x: 9 fps

    The 8x mode failed to work and I got an “out of video memory error”. I guess that is expected, since a quick calculation would indicate that it would have to render a 20480×12800 buffer, which would take up 1000 MB of VRAM 🙂

  3. I want to play this game!

  4. For a newbe this is by far best explanation I have found so far, and I have looked on many forums I can actually see the examples of the fsaa settings and I have learned it still depends on your computer,video card,and something I did not expect games,I’m still learning I comment you with a great piece of writting. THANKS

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