New Forms of SLIAA draw near.

[ChrisRay]

*Note* This is a Carbon Copy of my SLIZONE post. But I am really excited about what I have seen in this area of driver development.


Since the introduction of Windows Vista I have been petitioning and on Nvidia's case about SLIAA. The old 185x.xx driver simply offered a preview that Nvidia was doing with SLIAA. In the very near future. We're going to see an official driver with SLIAA support that has improved beyond what we already saw with the 185.xx driver. Alot of the modes have changed "Completely" and look alot better than they did in the leaked driver. Improvements have been made to SLI 32x. SLI 64x, SLI 64xQ and SLI 64x. As well as the Dual GPU modes, SLI 32xQ and SLI 32x.


http://chrisray.soterial.com/chrisraymisc/latestsliaa.jpg

[zer0]

nano anti aliasing.

[gstanford]

About damn time Vista SLI users were able to use SLIAA too!

[MUYA]

64XQ would be approaching the levels of AA that is used in render farms for animated movies right?

Wow, but again, begs the question, would it be playable even with 2 x 295 GTX's tho!

8XQ kills my 295 GTX in Age of Conan / DX10 mode :p

[JasonPC]

Hmm I thought this has been around for a while even on Vista? Oh and you lose the SLI rendering abilities when you enable this AA so not only do you get a decrease in frames due to AA, but also because of this setting.

[|MaguS|]

64XQ would be approaching the levels of AA that is used in render farms for animated movies right?

Wow, but again, begs the question, would it be playable even with 2 x 295 GTX's tho!

8XQ kills my 295 GTX in Age of Conan / DX10 mode :p

Quake 2 with 64xQAA!

[MUYA]

Quake 2 with 64xQAA!
:D

[ChrisRay]

Hmm I thought this has been around for a while even on Vista? Oh and you lose the SLI rendering abilities when you enable this AA so not only do you get a decrease in frames do to AA, but also because of this setting.


SLIAA has been around for a while. However the flexibility and quality of the upcoming modes has not bee. Theres an early really crappy leaked driver that has an early look at some of them. However they have mostly all changed to something of higher quality.

[ChrisRay]

64XQ would be approaching the levels of AA that is used in render farms for animated movies right?

Wow, but again, begs the question, would it be playable even with 2 x 295 GTX's tho!

8XQ kills my 295 GTX in Age of Conan / DX10 mode :p

Depends the game. I know SLI 64x works with age of conan and produces performance similar to 16xAA of a single GTX 260. To be honest. SLIAA is extremely important feature to me. And hence why I have been on Nvidia's case about it. Actually its kinda a joke around Nvidia because how much there internal QA teams make fun of me for it.

But in reality. SLIAA is usable in more games than its not. It doesnt provide the quality of pure supersampling. So it may not always be preferable to say 32xS. But its also a hell of alot more usable in most games and has better HDR compatibility.

[gstanford]

SLIAA is one of the main reasons to even bother with a SLI setup in the first place IMO. Most of the time I'm pretty happy with the performance a single highend card can provide.

Now, if only nvidia would forget about this GTX275 response to ATi and release some 2 or 4 gb GTX285's with full speed memory, I'd be very happy.

[MUYA]

Depends the game. I know SLI 64x works with age of conan and produces performance similar to 16xAA of a single GTX 260. To be honest. SLIAA is extremely important feature to me. And hence why I have been on Nvidia's case about it. Actually its kinda a joke around Nvidia because how much there internal QA teams make fun of me for it.

But in reality. SLIAA is usable in more games than its not. It doesnt provide the qiuality of pure supersampling. So it may not always be preferable to say 32xS. But its also a hell of alot more usable in most games and has better HDR compatibility.

When these drivers become available, I will give them a spin!

However, on an unrelated note, is there any indication that NVIDIA will work with Funcom for Age Of Conan and DX10? Coz DX10 mode for this game is more demanding than Crysis Warhead!!

[CaptNKILL]

Man, what kind of monitors are people using that they can actually see the difference in anything more than 8xAA? :p

Are you guys on 52" 720P screens? :lol:

[gstanford]

Man, what kind of monitors are people using that they can actually see the difference in anything more than 8xAA? :p

Are you guys on 52" 720P screens? :lol:

See my signature. I use a Samsung 30" 305T. You don't need that big a monitor to see the difference though, the differences were quite visible with SLI'd 7900's on a 19" Philips 109P20 CRT I used to own.

[JasonPC]

Also on an unrelated note when will nvidia release a NEW driver that properly supports SLI in Empire: Total War. No drivers have been released with any notes of any support for that game. I think there's even some non-SLI issues with the newer drivers.

[CaptNKILL]

See my signature. I use a Samsung 30" 305T. You don't need that big a monitor to see the difference though, the differences were quite visible with SLI'd 7900's on a 19" Philips 109P20 CRT I used to own.

I guess I'm thinking more of resolutions.

I'm used to playing games at 1600x1200 or 2048x1536, where AA isn't even needed that badly and 4x is nearly perfect. It just surprises me that 32xAA actually isn't good enough for some people. :lol:

I never even use AA because it still causes large frame rate fluctuations, even on a GTX 260.

[ChrisRay]

I cant give an exact date. Because it could change. But when I said near. Probably within the next 2 weeks. More likely sooner.

The ambient occlusion feature which was in the earlier beta drivers is also going to be officially supported. And the game support is far wider than it was in those broken beta drivers.

[gstanford]

The thing is you can't have 32xAA unless you are using 32xS (big performance hit but top notch IQ providing the application will run in that mode - some won't go past 16xS) or SLIAA. nvidia's standard control panel AA modes top out at 16xQ.

I guess I'm just pretty sensitive to aliasing and shimmering.

Speaking of which ChrisRay, you might like to ask the nvidia driver team when they are going to get around to fixing the aliasing on the battlecruiser at the start of the 3dmark05/06 demos (pics attached, see "saw teeth" on horizontal edges under hangar opening). This has never been addressed and looks butt ugly (horrendous in motion). Of course it could be a futuremark modeling error, I'm not sure.

http://img19.imageshack.us/img19/9830/clipboard01kxg.jpg
http://img19.imageshack.us/img19/514/clipboard02jzc.jpg

[newparad1gm]

The thing is you can't have 32xAA unless you are using 32xS (big performance hit but top notch IQ providing the application will run in that mode - some won't go past 16xS) or SLIAA. nvidia's standard control panel AA modes top out at 16xQ.

I guess I'm just pretty sensitive to aliasing and shimmering.

Speaking of which ChrisRay, you might like to ask the nvidia driver team when they are going to get around to fixing the aliasing on the battlecruiser at the start of the 3dmark05/06 demos (pics attached, see "saw teeth" on horizontal edges under hangar opening). This has never been addressed and looks butt ugly (horrendous in motion). Of course it could be a futuremark modeling error, I'm not sure.

http://img19.imageshack.us/img19/9830/clipboard01kxg.jpg
http://img19.imageshack.us/img19/514/clipboard02jzc.jpg

That seems more of a shadow rendering issue, where the mapping for the shadows creates the saw tooth effect, maybe due to lower resolution shadowmaps. It doesn't look like something that AA can fix.

[gstanford]

I know its not an AA problem.

As you said most likely shadows (like farcry1). The thing is, did futuremark code it that way for nvidia cards, or did nvidia "optimize" the shadow maps?

[newparad1gm]

I know its not an AA problem.

As you said most likely shadows (like farcry1). The thing is, did futuremark code it that way for nvidia cards, or did nvidia "optimize" the shadow maps?

If it looks better running under ATI, then I would definitely attribute it to nvidia buggery in the 3DMark driver profiles.

[gstanford]

Anyone here with an ATi card (preferably 48xx series) that can provide a comparable image? (resolution need not be the same, and I just hit printscreen to get it).

[ChrisRay]

The thing is you can't have 32xAA unless you are using 32xS (big performance hit but top notch IQ providing the application will run in that mode - some won't go past 16xS) or SLIAA. nvidia's standard control panel AA modes top out at 16xQ.

I guess I'm just pretty sensitive to aliasing and shimmering.

Speaking of which ChrisRay, you might like to ask the nvidia driver team when they are going to get around to fixing the aliasing on the battlecruiser at the start of the 3dmark05/06 demos (pics attached, see "saw teeth" on horizontal edges under hangar opening). This has never been addressed and looks butt ugly (horrendous in motion). Of course it could be a futuremark modeling error, I'm not sure.

http://img19.imageshack.us/img19/9830/clipboard01kxg.jpg
http://img19.imageshack.us/img19/514/clipboard02jzc.jpg

Actually. SLI 64xQ is 32x multisampling. Its 32x multisampling, 32x Coverage Sampling, ((and a very weakly positioned 2x2 Supersampling)). ((8x8x8x8x)) + CSAA 8x8x8x8x

I'll look into the 3dmark thing. I dont have any comments because I'm not familiar with the problem. 32xS "working" is entirely dependent on whether the driver detects the available memory amount. Say you may find that 32xS will work on a 512 card at 800x600 but will revert back to 16xS at 1024x768. Its a driver fail safe thing. 32xS can be used in some games like World of Warcraft with Quad GTX 295 and net about an AVG of 45-50 FPS typically at 1680x1050.

[gstanford]

Back when I was replaying Severance: Blade of Darkness, I found I couldn't use 32xS with it, or I ended up with a garbled screen (like it was made up of lots of oblong lego blocks). going back down to 16xS corrected the problem. That was last year and quite a few driver revisions ago though. I recall seeing the issue a couple of other times, but the details escape me.

[ChrisRay]

Sounds like a video ram issue to me. You gotta keep in mind. Nvidia doesn't actually support those modes. So driver bugs are bound to happen as they don't go through Nvidias QA. They also are not 100% compatible with HDR using titles which are becoming more prevalent.'

The main reason they are included is basically a friendly "use at your own risk" for the hardcore enthusiast.


One other thing to point out. The new SLIAA modes ((that were available for Windows XP users with G80 and above)) are not the same as the new ones available to Windows Vista. SLI 32xQ has been modified and now there are more CSAA options ((SLI 32x which is 16x CSAA x2))

[gstanford]

Yes, I know the xS modes are consumer "courtesy" modes, which is why I typically do not kick up too much of a stink if they don't work properly in a title (particuarly newer titles). I really only mentioned them as a way of getting a 32x AA mode without SLIAA, since normal MSAA/CSAA modes top out at 16xQ.

I'm thankful to see the new SLIAA modes have more CSAA options available. I believe I suggested something similar along these lines could happen a while back.