ATI Radeon 64MB DDR

FSAA Performance - OpenGL

As always, FSAA comes at a price. Due to the fact that each pixel must essentially be rendered 4 times before finally making it to the monitor, enabling FSAA on the Radeon causes a huge performance hit.

As the above graph shows, performance is about halved in each resolution with FSAA enabled. This means that really the only playable resolutions are 640x480 and 800x600. Above this level, the Radeon's 4x only FSAA mode becomes too much for the card to handle. Let's see how the card compares to other cards when running in FSAA mode.

As mentioned before, the image quality of the Radeon with FSAA enabled has about the same image quality as NVIDIA's cards in 2x2 HQ mode. Thus, it is most useful to compare it to these scores if the GeForce 2 GTS cards.

As you can see, the Radeon still gets dominated when in 16-bit color, due to its slow performance in 16-bit even with FSAA off. At 16-bit color, the Radeon is easily dominated by the GeForce 2 GTS. The Voodoo5 5500 in 4X mode provides for a much better image, however it does run a bit slower. In 32-bit color, the Radeon looks as good as the GeForce 2 GTS in 2x2 mode high quality, but it goes much faster. This makes gameplay in FSAA in 640x480x32 an option for gamers.

When at 800x600x16, the Radeon performs almost equally with the GeForce 2 GTS in 2x2 HQ mode. It is not until the Radeon 64MB DDR is forced to use FSAA in 32-bit color does it begin to rock. With a much more playable frame rate of 50.7 FPS, the Radeon beats the equally as good looking GeForce 2 GTS in 2x2 high quality mode by over 30 FPS. ATI may not think much of FSAA, but the Radeon sure does.

At 1024x768, running FSAA on any card becomes almost pointless. Since the high resolution is killing speed anyway, the last thing one needs is another thing being rendered. We find that the Radeon essentially ties with the GeForce 2 GTS in 2x2 HQ mode and comes out way on top in 32-bit color. Too bad the card still only gets 29.7 FPS, well too slow for fast gameplay.