Nvidia GeForce GTX 680 – The Nitty Gritty

As I mentioned on the previous page, there is a new anti-aliasing technology that we will be seeing with the GTX 680, this is TXAA

As we can see below, there are two stages to TXAA; namely TXAA 1 and TXAA 2. Comparing them to MSAA, TXAA 1 offers up an image quality better than what would be experienced with 8x MSAA enabled, yet only has the same performance hit as 2x MSAA would. TXAA 2 over TXAA 1 offers significant gain over 8x MSAA image quality, but like TXAA 1 only takes a fraction of the performance hit, here only requiring performance levels similar to that of 4x MSAA.

Demonstrating this makes everything much easier to grasp, and using a model made up of thousands of straight edges at angles to each other shows the technology at work. With no AA enabled, like we saw on the last page, edges have a very jagged appearance to them and this is no just on close objects, but also those in the distance.

8x MSAA as we also saw before is very effective at smoothing out all of these edges yet incurs a huge hit on the cards overall performance.

Ramping up the quality with TXAA has a marked change in the environment and the user experience is vastly improved whilst only using a fraction of the performance as before.

Unlike FXAA, TXAA is not incorporated at driver level and so will be set into the game engine by the developers. Such games will be Borderlands 2, Eve Online and Mechwarrior Online. we also expect to see this implemented into a number of yet to be named titles in the near future based on supporting game engines.