Transparency AA Performance Hit

Half-Life 2 – Direct3D

Notes

It’s interesting to see that multisampling comes with practically no performance hit, while supersampling isn’t all that bad, only 7% at 1600x1200 with 4xAA and 16xAF. If it were up to us, we’d leave NVIDIA’s new transparency adaptive multisampling mode on, at least in Half-Life 2. We’ll have to run some tests in one of Far Cry’s really thick jungles in the future. We should note that all AA benchmarks from the next page onward utilize NVIDIA’s traditional AA mode for the GeForce 7800 GTX