NVIDIA GeForce 2 GTS

FSAA Performance - Quake III Arena

First let's look at the performance penalty NVIDIA's GeForce 2 receives when its supersampling FSAA is enabled. The performance hit varies greatly depending on the resolution because of the method in which NVIDIA's FSAA works (it samples a multiple of the screen resolution then scales it down).

The performance hit is pretty significant, over 50% in some cases but the one thing that must be mentioned is that at resolutions above 1280 x 1024 x 16, where the GeForce 2 does not have enough memory to continue rendering in FSAA mode, the drivers shut off FSAA and the performance returns to normal which is why the last three sets of bars jump up suddenly in performance.

In comparison to the Voodoo5 5500, we find that the GeForce 2 with its 2x FSAA enabled features performance that lies between the 5500 using 2 sample FSAA and 4 sample FSAA. You can be the judge as to the quality of NVIDIA's FSAA, but unfortunately, as we mentioned in the section on FSAA, the majority of the games that would benefit directly from FSAA now are Direct3D games that won't work with NVIDIA's AA method.