NVIDIA Temporal AA Technology

Whether FXAA makes it to the older GeForce cards, one thing is for sure - NVIDIA is going to reserve what they call "the next level in image quality" for the GeForce GTX 680. Introducing the NVIDIA TXAA Technology - temporal anti-aliasing is here! Well, almost anyway. Games that support TXAA will only appear later this year, and the temporal component is optional.

NVIDIA TXAA has two operating - TXAA 1 and TXAA 2. The TXAA 1 mode uses a mix of hardware anti-aliasing and custom CG film style (higher quality) AA resolve to provide edge quality superior to that of 8xMSAA, but at the same performance cost as 2xMSAA.

TXAA 2 takes things a bit further with a temporal component - instead of just averaging the pixels along jaggies in a particular frame, it also grabs pixels from the previous frame and the future frame (rendering in the back buffer) and averages them. The end result is an anti-aliasing result that is close to 16xMSAA for the performance cost of 4xMSAA.

Here are screenshots of an NVIDIA test scene, demonstrating the quality differences between no anti-aliasing, 8x multi-sample anti-aliasing and NVIDIA's TXAA.

Note that this is a worst-case scenario, not what you would expect in any game. Basically what TXAA offers is better image quality at the same cost as multi-sample AA. If you have no problem running 4xAA, for example, then go ahead and flip the TXAA switch by all means. But no gamer is going to sacrifice frame rate over anti-aliasing quality, which brings us to the next topic - Adaptive Vertical Sync.

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