Antialiasing options with AMD/ATI - How good are they?

[Matrices]

What level of control do you have with AMD's antialiasing compared with Nvidia? I'm intrigued by the notion of switching to 6950 CF mostly to access that sweet 2GB of vRAM...but only if it will let me use supersampling and particularly sparse grid supersampling for transparency AA.

For whatever reason, enabling 4x sparse grid transparency AA makes games look ridiculously sharp without causing as massive a performance hit as fullscreen supersampling AA, at least with Nvidia cards.

 

[Mr Mean]

What level of control do you have with AMD's antialiasing compared with Nvidia? I'm intrigued by the notion of switching to 6950 CF mostly to access that sweet 2GB of vRAM...but only if it will let me use supersampling and particularly sparse grid supersampling for transparency AA.

For whatever reason, enabling 4x sparse grid transparency AA makes games look ridiculously sharp without causing as massive a performance hit as fullscreen supersampling AA, at least with Nvidia cards.

Image quality AA is subjective. To be honest I would just get an AMD 69xx card and test it myself to see if it is indeed better than Nvidia.

But to be honest. When I got my ATI 9800 XT and my HD 5970, I noticed something is "different" about AMD AA. It looks "better" and "sharper" in motion. I can't explain it. I do like their digital vibrance (color saturation) better than Nvidia on my monitor. I had a GTX 280 FTW when I upgraded to the HD 5970. I always picked high quality for bother Nvidia and AMD in the control panel.

 

[Unknown-One]

I can't tell the any difference between ATi and Nvidia's MSAA modes.

SSAA is another matter, ATi's has always looked too soft, while Nvidia's is nice and sharp. Must be the method they use to scale down the image.

 

[BababooeyHTJ]

Nvidia's transparency AA is far, far better than ATI's. In DX9 I like the option to just force multisampling TSAA. It looks good and the performance hit isn't even noticeable. AMD's AAA on the other hand doesn't seem to have as complete of coverage.

Then there is the fact that you can't force transparency AA in any DX10 or 11 app with ATI. I don't see why people aren't more bothered by that.

 

[SicKlown42012]

Nvidia's transparency AA is far, far better than ATI's. In DX9 I like the option to just force multisampling TSAA. It looks good and the performance hit isn't even noticeable. AMD's AAA on the other hand doesn't seem to have as complete of coverage.

Then there is the fact that you can't force transparency AA in any DX10 or 11 app with ATI. I don't see why people aren't more bothered by that.

I haven't noticed an IQ difference when running 4x Adaptive AA on AMD and 4x MSAA/wtih MS transparency*. Also, AMD's implementation isn't limited to just MSAA on alpha, but switches between SS and MS in the driver. Though I do wish they would give users back that option. And Adaptive AA does work in DX10, it's only Full Screen Super Sampling that doesn't.

* But I don't take screen shots and then blow them up to 400% to look for it either. There might be some difference, but I haven't noticed it.

 

[fullvietFX]

Then there is the fact that you can't force transparency AA in any DX10 or 11 app with ATI. I don't see why people aren't more bothered by that.

What about DX9 apps? I haven't used a Radeon since my 9700 Pro, I had a 5870 for about a day though didn't really get to test it out.

 

[Caltone]

I can't tell the any difference between ATi and Nvidia's MSAA modes.

SSAA is another matter, ATi's has always looked too soft, while Nvidia's is nice and sharp. Must be the method they use to scale down the image.

This has been my experience as well. I've been on an ATI kick the last two card upgrades but think I am switching back to Nvidia with the next round. In addition to the small AA issues, I'm seeing more games that are optimized better for Nvidia.

 

[SicKlown42012]

This has been my experience as well. I've been on an ATI kick the last two card upgrades but think I am switching back to Nvidia with the next round. In addition to the small AA issues, I'm seeing more games that are optimized better for Nvidia.

Unfortunately, AMD doesn't change the LOD when using SSAA. You have to use a tool like RadeonPro to set it to -1.0 since CCC doesn't have the option built in. There's a mod over at Anandtech that says they've fixed that with the latest drivers, butI haven't tested for myself since I set up a profile for each game and manually set the LOD myself.

 

[BababooeyHTJ]

I haven't noticed an IQ difference when running 4x Adaptive AA on AMD and 4x MSAA/wtih MS transparency*. Also, AMD's implementation isn't limited to just MSAA on alpha, but switches between SS and MS in the driver. Though I do wish they would give users back that option.

I completely agree.

And Adaptive AA does work in DX10, it's only Full Screen Super Sampling that doesn't.

Transparency AA does not work in DX10/11.