Hercules 3D Prophet II GTS Pro:
pure potency or with anti-aliasing

His publicity in CsH

A slightly pretentious title... but quite descriptive. The anti-aliasing, which we might translate like anti-perforation, is never one of the principal advances realized in the visual quality of the graphs, so much 3D as 2D (even the texts suffer from this problem).

The anti-aliasing, which also knows each other for the acronym FSAA, Full Scene Anti-Aliasing, thinks about how to smooth the toothed rims of the images that take place in any line of the image that is not horizontal or vertical.

This is realized of diverse methods: observing the values of color of the píxels that surround the given one and calculating his average, renderizando to major size and climbing later to the wished size... Be as it is, the sudden separation between (for example) a white area and another black woman remains subdued drawing on his border píxels in several gray tones.

One of the biggest advantages of the anti-aliasing is that normally it is independent from the secondhand game, she does not need specific optimizations. We take a lot of time hearing to speak of T&L and of the new effects of DirectX 7 (and of DirectX 8), but the programmers are always late in applying this progress... when they decide to do it. With the anti-aliasing he will not have to wait, it comes in the drivers.

Pulsate in the image to see it to major size

Pulsate in the image to see it to major size

The anti-aliasing, in the generic NVIDIA drivers (the most finished and updated, used by all the manufacturers with more or less esthetic changes), is activated inside Additional Properties in two different places, as it is for games for which OpenGL uses the API (like Quake3) and other for those who use the Direct3D of the Microsoft DirectX.

To the right we include the correspondents' pantallazos to the configuration, and next a few graphs with diverse anti-aliasing grades, to compare the results:

Without Anti-Aliasing (Direct3D) Pulsate in the image to see the finished scene

Anti-Aliasing 4x4 (Direct3D) Pulsate in the image to see the finished scene

Without Anti-Aliasing (OpenGL)

Anti-Aliasing 2x2 (OpenGL)

Without Anti-Aliasing (OpenGL)

Anti-Aliasing 1,5x1,5 (OpenGL)

Anti-Aliasing 2x2 (OpenGL)

Well, the graphs speak for themselves. The flight pretender is very outstanding for DirectX (the F-22 Lightning 3), since in games as Quake3 hardly we will have time to stop to appreciate the quality of the graphs while a dozen of rabid enemies chases us...

The problem of the anti-aliasing? Yes, there is always one "but", and in this case it is the enormous quantity of calculations that it implies: think that to a resolution of 800x600 480.000 exist píxels on screen, each of which is even surrounded with 8 píxels... calculating only the average value of those who are just in his horizontal and/or vertical one, MANY thousands of calculations would be tens of times per second.