Antialiasing
Next up is antialiasing performance, which we've been testing in most of our game tests by turning up 4X AA and 8X aniso. Now we'll isolate the various AA and texture filtering modes to see how the cards scale with each of them.

Edge antialiasing
These AA tests are intended to show performance scaling, but they are not entirely comprehensive. The GeForce FX includes a broad range of edge antialiasing modes, and we didn't test all of them. For instance, we skipped NVIDIA's quirky "Quincunx" mode, which combines 2X AA with a blurring filter. I find that mode essentially useless.

Also, NVIDIA has a couple of AA modes called "4XS" and "6XS" that combine multisampled edge AA with full-screen supersampling. When I tested "4X" AA, I used the usual multisampled mode. Since the FX doesn't have a straight-up 6X multisampled mode, I compared the FX's 6XS mode to the Radeon cards in their 6X mode.

Finally, the 43.45 drivers have a slider option for 16X AA, but I found no performance difference between 8X and 16X mode at all. I didn't include those results, because I couldn't be sure the 16X mode was functioning properly.

The FX takes a relatively big hit when going from 4X mode to 6XS mode, which is to be expected, since supersampling is much less efficient than multisampling. All in all, though, the FX performs pretty well with edge AA in use. The FX scales much better than the GeForce4 Ti, and it's comparable to the ATI chips.

There's much more to say about these chips' edge antialiasing methods, but I will have to try to address those in more detail in another article. For now, we need to concentrate on another type of antialiasing: texture filtering.