Could someone explain Transp. Anti-Aliasing/nVidia CP settings?

C

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[H]ard|Gawd
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I have several questions about this, and haven't found the answers that I am looking for (or they didn't explain it well enough). My questions partially pertain to the nVidia control panel. Specifically, what does it do, does regular AA have to be enabled, does forcing AA off in the nvcpl force it off in games regardless of whether it is on in game...

Uh oh. I have more questions than I thought. Could someone do a run down on what these features mean and how to benefit from them?
 
Transparency anti-aliasing (TR AA) is a means with which NVIDIA provides anti-aliasing for alpha-channel transparency textures. Things like chain-link fences and the foliage on the trees in most (if not all) games use alpha-channel transparency textures. Without TR AA, those textures appear jagged and pixellated even with high-level traditional anti-aliasing applied to the scene. TR AA extends the anti-aliasing sampling to those textures to smooth them out. Multisampling TR AA (TR MSAA) uses the typical multisampling AA method, while Supersampling TR AA (TR SSAA) uses the superior, but more costly (in terms of performance) supersampling AA method.

Anti-aliasing has to be enabled either in the game or in the control panel to be able to benefit from TR AA.

ATI offers basically the same thing with their Adaptive Anti-Aliasing (AD AA), though it is a slightly different implementation.

If you play games like Battlefield 2 or Counterstrike:Source, you will definitely benefit from enabling TR AA. If you play WoW, you will see less benefit, mostly with the trees.

-Mark
 
Thank you Mark. I wasn't sure if it worked with AA forced off or not. Any game with heavy tree usage, i.e. Oblivion & the upcoming Silverfall (demo is out and it's cool) then would benefit and need AA on + TRAA on then. Of course on my desktop rig (and laptop for that matter) I can't enable AA in Oblivion without turning of HDR, so that's out :(.

Okay, so here is a further question. What does triple buffering do? Should this be on or off? I usually leave vsync off.
 
Triple buffering allows the video card and game to render into 3 different framebuffers, which are then switched around internally. It is primarily designed to lower flickering or tearing when the video card is rendering faster or slower than the vertical refresh rate of the display device. It is almost always dependent upon v-sync, though it that is not an absolute. The most common design method for triple-buffering does require v-sync, however, so if you disable v-sync, it is more than likely safe to disable triple-buffering. However, in the odd even that a programmer goes the extra step of designing a v-sync independent triple-buffering implementation into his or her game engine, it will help, so it is also safe to leave it on.
 
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