Two Geforce 8800 GTX in SLI supports 32 X FSAA

Zarolho

Power Member
WE FIGURED out that Nvidia has at least three different drivers for the Geforce 8800 GTX. We discovered a third one named 97.03 but this is the only one of the three that has the 32 X FSAA option.

FSAA is a cool thing and it didn’t take Nvidia much to get from a maximum of 6X FSAA in Geforce series 7 to 16X for a single card in Geforce series 8 cards. With the right driver and two cards in SLI you will get the FSAA 32 X option.
We tried it, it works well and looks cool.

At 20x15 it can bring even two G80s to their knees. At 20x15 - even in Far Cry - we got some twentyish frames per second performance. In its PR documents, Nvidia spins that in 16X mode a single card should not perform much slower than in FSAA 4 X mode. We still have to check this claim.

The FSAA 32X Q driver is called 96.89 dated 10/16/2006 and it supports FSAA 8X, 8X Q, 16 and 16Q and only 32Q. There are no signs of a normal 32X mode.

We still remember how former 3DFX employees, currently Nvidia's Luciano Alibrandi and Andrew Humber wanted to spin us about how VSA 100, Voodoo 5 chip was super fast with this brand new FSAA effect. That was back in February 2000, more than six years ago, and no wonder VSA 100 got nicknamed Very Slow Architecture. Things got better for the 3DFX marchitecture embraced by Nvidia these days. The chips got much faster and FSAA is an old algorithm and even schools teach you about that.

Oh yes and in FSAA 32 Q, Q stands for Quality, which in Nvidia's case might mean that it finally dropped bending rules on the picture quality equation. Oh yeah, Nvidia engineers both hardware and software, did a great job on the new Geforce 8 fast card.

http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=35695
 
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