My young padawan (actually he’s pretty old), Brian, has posted his preview of NVIDIA’s latest flagship video card, the GeForce FX 6800, over on 3DGPU. He has done well without my watchful gaze and advice, even the typos are at a minimum. The 6800 looks exciting, but at the same time, disappointing. The FSAA implementation is the same as previous generations, and nothing was mentioned on anisotropic filtering levels, so I assume it’s not 128-tap yet. Maturing of the drivers will definitely make the card even faster, and it’s impressively fast as it is in this early stage. The card was tested on a system using an Athlon64, which will be the standard system for gamers when this card is in its prime, so it’s good to see how it fares with it.
I think I’ve become jaded over the years though, raw numbers just doesn’t do it for me anymore. I’m interested in one thing only – how does it play with my games? Can I leave 2x FSAA on all the time? That’s something I can’t do with the Radeon 9800 Pro, with games like Lineage 2, Far Cry, and Battlefield Vietnam all choking at key points of the game. I can’t stand the slightest stutter in my games, it has to be perfectly fluid. Perhaps I just need to upgrade my Pentium 2GHz CPU first and get another stick of 512MB of memory.
Actually, the FSAA implementation is completely different, using RGMS…While I didn’t get a chance to use the 5950 for FSAA comparison, many site did and it is considerably better..2x FSAA is useable in almost all games, at 1280×1024, and you can run 1600×1200 16X AF in everygame I have seen
That’s good, it should handle more games better with RGMS, especially those with alpha textures if I remember correctly. Still though, I wish there was a higher/better implementation of AF than what is currently available. Some of the older games could truly benefit from 128-tap AF.
What tap is currently used?