Which 3D cards support full scene antialiasing?

Question

Is there a list of 3D cards available that provide full scene antialiasing as well as which are able to do it in hardware (decent performance)?

Answer 1

Off the top of my head, pretty much any card since a geforce 2 or something can do it. There's always a performance hit, but this varies on the card and AA mode (of which there are about 100 different kinds) but generally it's quite a performance hit.

Answer 2

Agree with Orion Edwards, pretty much everything new can. Performance also depends greatly on the resolution you run at.

Answer 3

Having seen a pile of machines recently that don't do it, I don't think that's quite true. The GMA 950 integrated ones don't do it to start with, and I don't think that the 3100/X3100 do either (at least not in hardware... the 3100 was enormously slow in a demo). Also, I don't believe that the GeForce MX5200 supported it either.

Or perhaps I'm just misunderstanding what you mean when you refer to "AA mode". Are there a lot of cards which support modes that are virtually unnoticable? :)

Answer 4

Integrated GPUs are going to be really poor performers with games FSAA or no. If you want even moderate performance, buy a separate video card.

For something that's not crazy expensive go with either a nVidia Geforce 8000 series card or an ATI 3000 series card. Even as a nVidia 8800 GTS owner, I will tell you the ATIs have better support for older games.

Although I personally still like FSAA, it is becoming less important with higher resolution screens. Also, more and more games are using deferred rendering which makes FSAA impossible.

Answer 5

Yes, of course integrated cards are awful. :) But this wasn't a question about gaming, but rather about an application that we are writing that will use OpenGL/D3D for 3D rendering. The 3D scene is relatively small, but antialiasing makes a dramatic difference in terms of the quality of the rendering. We are curious if there is some way to easily determine which cards support these features fully and which do not.

With the exception of the 3100, so far all of the cards we've found that do antialiasing are plenty fast for our purposes (as is my GeForce 9500).

Answer 6

Ahhh! See what happens when I make assumptions?! ;)

It's a good question, and I think it is a tough one to answer since in general most cards support it.

Answer 7

Pretty much all cards since DX7-level technology (GeForce 2 / Radeon 7000) can do it. Most notable exceptions are Intel cards (Intel 945 aka GMA 950 and earlier can't do it; I think Intel 965 aka GMA X3100 can't do it either).

Older cards (GeForce 2 / 4MX, Radeon 7000-9250) were using supersampling (render everything into internally larger buffer, downsample at the end). All later cards have multisampling, where this expensive process is only performed at polygon edges (simply speaking, shaders are run for each pixel, while depth/coverage is stored for each sample).