FSAA, or Full Scene Anti-Aliasing, is a method of smoothing out the ends of images and removing so-called jaggies. An image is made up of millions of little, square dots called, pixels. When you're running games at any resolution, regardless if it's as low as 640x480 (where the pixels are bigger) to a super-high resolution of 1600x1200 (where pixels are usually so small on most monitors that the "squares" are barely noticeable), you notice that edges are jagged, because of the square pixels--this is called the "jaggies." FSAA also helps to reduce another effect called "flashing pixels," where an object or detail in an image is larger than one pixel. When viewing the entire animation, you notice that certain pixels flash to sometimes display and sometimes not display the tiny detail.

The overal effect that you get when enabling FSAA is this:

No FSAA

With FSAA

Let's zoom in and take a closer look:

No FSAA

With FSAA

This is an excellent example as it also shows a "flashing pixel." Notice how a pixel is non-existent on the zoomed image with no FSAA, and notice how, with the usage of FSAA, that pixel is now in place. The overal effect showed in all these pictures is that the edges are smoothed out, therefore removing the jaggies that are very noticeable on the images with no FSAA.

FSAA was first introduced by 3dfx's Voodoo5 chipset and was later adopted by NVIDIA by a quick driver update, namely the 5.xx driver set, which introduced FSAA on the Geforce. The method that NVIDIA uses to display FSAA is called Supersampling, where the chip will render the image larger by a certain amount of porportion and then size it down to fit on your screen. The oversal effect by this upersampling method is that the edges get slighly blurred, hence removing the "jaggies."

Common porportions supported by the FSAA slider in the Detonator drivers are:

• 1X horizontal, 2X vertical (A.K.A. 2 sample FSAA)
• 2X horizontal, 2X vertical with no filters to help sharpen textures (A.K.A. 4 sample FSAA, low quality)
• 2X horizontal, 2X vertical with minimal filters to help sharpen textures (A.K.A. 4 sample FSAA, medium quality)
• 2X horizontal, 2X vertical with extra filters to help sharpen textures (A.K.A. 4 sample FSAA, High Quality)
• ...and so on...

There are a total of 8 settings in the drivers for Direct3D FSAA, which basically alter the 2 numbers and filter settings to change settings, and only 3 settings for OpenGL FSAA. The 3 FSAA settings for OpenGL are:

• 1.5X screen resolution
• 2X screen resolution
• 2X screen resolution, 2X MIPMaps*

* MIPMaps are lower-resolution versions of high-resolution textures

Because the graphics chip has to render at higher resolutions than it is currently displaying on-screen (sometimes many times higher in resolution), the speed of the chip is effectively decreased; therefore, with all the power of current graphics accelerators, such as the Geforce2 GTS GPU in this review, FSAA is still only useful in low resolutions such as 640x480 or 800x600. Personally, I perfer to keep the higher resolution setting over enabling FSAA, but FSAA can be useful in times such as taking screen shots for web pages that don't take up the entire screen and don't have "jaggies" in them. It's also useful for those people who have older monitors that don't support high resolutions, but would still like to rid of those annoying "jaggies."

On to: FSAA Performance