Texture Filtering and Antialiasing Performance
Unreal Tournament is used to demonstrate the performance of all the AA and AF modes available to NV40. 1024x768 is used, along with the driver's Quality setting with trilinear optimisations off. It's our High Quality custom demo and all scores are in frames per second.
As far as Unreal Tournament goes (not the most taxing of tests for current graphics cards, but a nice way to highlight what can happen with NV40), AA is effectively free until you use the 8X RGMS+SS mode, at which point performance takes a nose dive.
NV40 make a huge deal that the GPU can be CPU limited in a lot of cases, and this is one of them.
2AF is also 'free' and the difference in performance between 8AF and 16AF shows the latter mode's angle-adaptive nature. It's only applied to a minority of surfaces, rather than a majority.
It's nice to see performance being decent with full trilinear, something that can't ordinarily be said with NV3x.
But by far the most interesting data point is the 8X RGMS+SS performance. It's an odd mode, NVIDIA probably implementing it in that fashion because its edge AA quality wasn't massively noticable, compared to their new RGMS 4X mode. Who knows. Whatever the reason, it sucks up performance.
