Frames above Everything Else?

Insanely high frame rates may very well prove to be useless to most people. Specially when you are averaging well beyond a hundred frames per second and consistently getting very high minimum frame rates. Excessively high frame rates are practically useless.

For example, at 1024x768x32bit on the High Quality Setting of Quake3, the MX400 is performing very admirably! Averaging well over 60 frames per second, the MX400 is performing 20% faster than what some people ( HARDCORE GAMERS ) consider to be the acceptable frame rate. Some people ( avid gamers ) aren't able to differentiate a game running at 60 frames per second to a game running at 30 frames per second!

Running games at 1024x768 ( and 32 bit color depth ) is slowly becoming the standard nowadays. This resolution is what most people consider the "sweet spot" to run there games on. Running at resolutions above 1024x768x32 wont make much difference for most people, who dont own very large monitors ( 19+ inches )

Considering that MX400 delivers more than enough frames per second when running Quake3 at 1024x768x32, suddenly makes the Geforce2 Ti a very unattractive product, price wise. Why pay more than twice the price for the Ti, when it will deliver an unnoticeable ( overclocked MX 83.5 fps, Geforce2 Ti 108.1 fps ) increase in performance over the MX400. ( at these settings, games, resolution and platform ).

Full Screen Anti-Aliasing ( FSAA )

When playing at a relatively low resolution, it is sometimes not too difficult to notice that lines ( diagonal ) exhibit a staircase effect. This is caused by the lack of number of pixels to represent a line. Cranking up the resolution somewhat lessens the effect. But surprisingly, even at 1600x1200 aliasing of those "jaggies" are still noticeable!

There are many ways to rid lines of those jaggies. With the Geforce, Geforce2 line of cards Nvidia uses what is called "supersampling". This is done by rendering a scene at 2x or 4x its resolution, and then bringing it back to the original resolution. Some sort of blending ( really averaging of subpixels color values ) is performed on adjacent pixels to effectively smoothen the line. To better illustrate this effect, here are some screen shots from Quake3 demo. ( the F11 button was used on Quake3 )

It is very clear on the series of screen shots taken that the jaggies on the statue's arms back and hair are removed through anti-aliasing. The 2X FSAA setting dramatically improves the picture quality of image. And the 4x FSAA further reduces the jaggies to the point that they are barely noticeable anymore. This shots were taken at 1024x768x32.

As with everything else, FSAA comes with a price. Since rendering at 2x and 4x effectively doubles and quadruples the number of pixels rendered on the chip ( fillrate and bandwidth limitations are amplified ) , a tremendous performance drop can be expected. Yes, FSAA looks good, but how much penalty are we talking about here. Let's move on.