NVIDIA to support 16xAA in SLI

Written by Tim Smalley

June 13, 2005 | 15:03

Tags: #crossfire #multisample #sli

Companies: #ati #nvidia

Almost as a direct response to ATI's recent announcement for support of a new feature exclusive to its upcoming CrossFire Multi-GPU technology that allows for enhanced image quality - dubbed Super Anti-Aliasing. NVIDIA told us that they would be adding support for 16xAA in SLI mode some time in July, while we were out in sunny San Francisco last week.

The announcement came at the second bout of the World Multi-GPU Championship™, held in a classy San Francisco hotel last Thursday in the form of a presentation designed to set the record straight on NVIDIA's SLI technology.

At the start of Computex, ATI announced its multiple GPU solution known as CrossFire. We had quite a bit to say about the technology over here. One of the benefits of CrossFire over SLI was the fact that you could increase the image quality using their Super Anti-Aliasing method.

NVIDIA have responded to this: stating that there reasoning for inventing SLI was to improve image quality in games, by enabling users to increase the image quality in their favourite games. As such, they have pre-announced that they will be implementing 16xAA for SLI mode in to drivers that are scheduled for release in July this year.

They will achieve 16xAA with 4x MultiSample Anti-Aliasing combined with 4x SuperSample Anti-Aliasing. SuperSampling works a little differently to MultiSampling, in that one SuperSample is basically four MultiSample patterns. Also, SuperSampling is applied to the whole of the scene, whereas MultiSampling is only applied to the edges of polygons and textures. This results in wire fences and other small details being missed by the MultiSample Anti-Aliasing pattern.

This is not all though, as we feel that they are still developing SLI to make it an even more attractive proposition to the high-end consumer. After some of the concerns that were raised with profile updating during our SLI coverage, we get the impression that NVIDIA are looking at ways to substantially improve the availability of new game profiles.

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