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April 9th, 2012
By Andrew Burnes
The new NVIDIA GeForce 301.24 beta drivers are now available to download. An essential upgrade for all GeForce users, these drivers enable NVIDIA FXAA, NVIDIA Adaptive VSync, and NVIDIA Frame Rate Target on all GeForce 8-series and later GPU's and also add new NVIDIA Surround features for all Surround-capable GPU's. Also included are numerous performance improvements for top titles, new SLI profiles, and new 3D Vision profiles.
NVIDIA FXAA Technology
The majority of today's games allow players to enable Multisample Anti-Aliasing (MSAA), either as part of a preset as in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, or as an in-game option. If you’re unfamiliar with anti-aliasing, it is a GPU-powered technique used to remove jagged, distracting object edges, and to enhance overall image fidelity. Unfortunately, MSAA is a particularly demanding anti-aliasing technique, reducing frame rates by a significant degree.
With the release of the GeForce 301.24 beta driver, a high-speed, shader-based anti-aliasing technique can be applied directly to hundreds of games through the NVIDIA Control Panel. Called NVIDIA FXAA, this technique is up to 60% faster than 4xMSAA, and can produce results equal to or better than the aging anti-aliasing solution. Furthermore, FXAA is able to anti-alias increasingly-popular transparent textures, as shown in our Batman: Arkham City Graphics Breakdown and Performance Guide, making it the clear winner in many of today’s games.
Using NVIDIA FXAA, we took a number of comparison screenshots to highlight the benefits of the new technique in games that lack anti-aliasing support, and in games that make use of MSAA. If you’re trying this at home, please note that Fraps and other frame grabbing applications cannot display the FXAA improvements as FXAA is a shader-based technique. Instead, run the game in a window, and press Alt and Print Screen simultaneously to grab an FXAA anti-aliased screenshot.
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By Andrew Burnes
The new NVIDIA GeForce 301.24 beta drivers are now available to download. An essential upgrade for all GeForce users, these drivers enable NVIDIA FXAA, NVIDIA Adaptive VSync, and NVIDIA Frame Rate Target on all GeForce 8-series and later GPU's and also add new NVIDIA Surround features for all Surround-capable GPU's. Also included are numerous performance improvements for top titles, new SLI profiles, and new 3D Vision profiles.
NVIDIA FXAA Technology
The majority of today's games allow players to enable Multisample Anti-Aliasing (MSAA), either as part of a preset as in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, or as an in-game option. If you’re unfamiliar with anti-aliasing, it is a GPU-powered technique used to remove jagged, distracting object edges, and to enhance overall image fidelity. Unfortunately, MSAA is a particularly demanding anti-aliasing technique, reducing frame rates by a significant degree.
With the release of the GeForce 301.24 beta driver, a high-speed, shader-based anti-aliasing technique can be applied directly to hundreds of games through the NVIDIA Control Panel. Called NVIDIA FXAA, this technique is up to 60% faster than 4xMSAA, and can produce results equal to or better than the aging anti-aliasing solution. Furthermore, FXAA is able to anti-alias increasingly-popular transparent textures, as shown in our Batman: Arkham City Graphics Breakdown and Performance Guide, making it the clear winner in many of today’s games.
Using NVIDIA FXAA, we took a number of comparison screenshots to highlight the benefits of the new technique in games that lack anti-aliasing support, and in games that make use of MSAA. If you’re trying this at home, please note that Fraps and other frame grabbing applications cannot display the FXAA improvements as FXAA is a shader-based technique. Instead, run the game in a window, and press Alt and Print Screen simultaneously to grab an FXAA anti-aliased screenshot.
MORE