BUILT-IN FXAA AND NEXT-GEN NVIDIA CARDS SOON

Posted Today, 10:57 AM
The anticipation and hype has been building. NVidia will soon release their next-generation video card code-named Kepler and most likely built-in FXAA will also be released at the same time with it. Recently at the Game Developers Conference they showed off the Samaritan game demo using a model of the Kepler card. They were touting the fact that when they demo'd the game one year ago it took three GTX 580's to run the demo but this time it only takes one Kepler card. But wait a minute. Haven't you heard about optimizing a game engine? Epic, the game developer, has had one whole year to optimize the game engine and that can make a huge difference in game performance.

Then there's the FXAA (Fast Approximate Anti-Aliasing) built into drivers. It is a post-processing Anti-aliasing technique and much faster than MSAA (Multisample Anti-Aliasing) commonly found in most games. It is of higher-than-usual benefit to the game Samaritan because Samaritan uses a lot more deferred shading than a game usually does. We have recently seen some Heaven benchmarks involving the NVidia 295.18 driver which has the FXAA feature. Tested on Win 7 64-bit with a GTX 580, 4x Anisotropic, Ambient Occlusion off, 1920 x 1080 resolution.

Scores - Min FPS - Avg FPS - Max FPS
2331 ----- 46.7 ----- 92.6 ----- 192.2 ---> DX 9, driver 296.10, 4x MSAA
2333 ----- 47.8 ----- 92.6 ----- 192.1 ---> DX 9, driver 295.18, 4x MSAA
2625 ----- 50.3 ---- 104.2 ----- 204.7 ---> DX 9, driver 295.18, FXAA ON
1824 ----- 35.1 ----- 72.4 ----- 169.1 ---> DX 11, Norm Tess, driver 296.10, 4x MSAA
1817 ----- 34.7 ----- 72.1 ----- 169.7 ---> DX 11, Norm Tess, driver 295.18, 4x MSAA
2053 ----- 46.3 ----- 81.5 ----- 181.6 ---> DX 11, Norm Tess, driver 295.18, FXAA ON

In DirectX 9 tests the Average FPS is improved by 12.6% when using FXAA rather than 4x MSAA.
In DirectX 11 with Normal Tessellation tests the Avg FPS is improved by 13.5% and the Min FPS is improved by a tremendous 33.4%. That's big.

So yeah, I think we're going to see the FXAA come with the release of the drivers that come with the release of the Kepler cards. I've seen some mention that the NDA on discussing the card and the driver is off on Thu March 22 and I've seen some mention that NVidia is holding a press conference on Wed Mar 28. There's a little bit of hype in it all but without question we're going to want the end result whatever it is.
Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/s5x3R.jpg FXAA option in the NVidia Control Panel. Note description at the bottom.