The nVIDIA GeForce2 GTS Ultra and Detonator 3 Drivers
nVIDIA's Technology War Machine Rolls On

By Dave "Davo" Altavilla
8/14/00

OpenGL FSAA:

First, let's look at Quake 3, a game that will penalize you for standing around looking at the pretty FSAA enhanced scenery.  These were taken at 1024X768 in 32 bit color.  Image sizes are approximately 300K.

 
Now if you have a keen sense of the obvious, you will note that the 1.5X.1.5 is just plain horrible.  In fact, it doesn't look like FSAA at all.  What is amazing to us is that this setting was the only one available to the average user who didn't want to edit their registry to get 2x2 FSAA.  This is not even taking into account the fact the the performance with this setting at 800X600 and above, was basically unplayable.  For all intents and purposes, OpenGL FSAA the nVIDIA way, until now, was just a lot of marketing.  However, with this new Detonator 3 driver release and of course the GeForce2 Ultra powering it, 2x2 (4X) FSAA is realized and running at VERY playable frame rates. In these shots, the GeForce2 Ultra is running at around 35 fps with 2x2 FSAA  at 1024X768X32.  Finally, the image quality of nVIDIA's 2x2 FSAA is VERY close to 3dfx's 4X FSAA image quality, as you can see.
 
Let's fire up a few more FSAA shots taken on the GeForce2 Ultra.

Here are a few shots from nVIDIA's Technology Demos as well.  These were taken in 32 bit color, so if you have your desktop color depth set to 16 bit or below, you will see banding.  For best viewing switch to 32 bit color mode.

Well, that pretty much covers the visuals.  Let's look at the score board, shall we?

Benchmarks!