3dfx Voodoo5 5500

FSAA Image Quality in OpenGL

The most important metric with which to gauge FSAA "performance" is with the resulting image quality. For that, let's head to the screen shots.

All screenshots were taken using Hypersnap-DX available at http://www.hyperionics.com

We've highlighted the key points to look for, but in order for you to see the true difference in the images you'll want to download the uncompressed Targa files which are about 900KB in size.

FSAA Off - Voodoo5 5500

2 Sample FSAA - Voodoo5 5500

4 Sample FSAA - Voodoo5 5500

FSAA Off - GeForce2 GTS

FSAA Setting 0 (lowest quality) - GeForce2 GTS

FSAA Setting 1 - GeForce2 GTS

FSAA Setting 2 (highest quality) - GeForce2 GTS

While looking a bit more washed out than the GeForce2 GTS (because of the default MIPMap LOD settings that we'll discuss later), the Voodoo5 does seem to have an advantage when it comes to FSAA but it is just a slight one under OpenGL. Although some will argue that at the middle and highest quality settings (1 & 2), the GeForce2 GTS looks just as good as the Voodoo5 5500 with FSAA enabled.

FSAA in OpenGL doesn't matter nearly as much as FSAA in Direct3D, which we will get to shortly.

Original Files (*.tga)

GeForce2 GTS @ 640 x 480 - No FSAA - FSAA Setting 0 - FSAA Setting 1 - FSAA Setting 2
3dfx Voodoo5 5500 @ 640 x 480 - No FSAA - 2X FSAA - 4X FSAA