3dfx Voodoo5 5500

So you are probably board with having to read about FSAA here as well. That’s understandable. FSAA has been the talk of the town with 3dfx making it their marketing tool for the Voodoo5. That’s due to the fact that FSAA is by far the best t-buffer feature of the card. Anybody who’s into 3D games knows the two most common problems associated with the graphics in these games. Without Anti-aliasing when something is rendered, the rendering is done to the nearest pixel. When this approximation is done to an object like a telephone pole then we see a stair stepping effect called ‘jaggies’. And if this image is moved about then the approximated pixel keeps changing giving a pixel popping effect. What the t-buffer’s FSAA does is instead of doing this pixel approximation it takes more high-resolution samples of the object than what is seen on the screen and then colors the pixels the object has fall upon to match the objects color. This method gets rid of jaggies and pixel popping, giving a smoother & realistic looking image. 3dfx let’s the user decide whether to have this feature enabled or not and also the option of 2X FSAA (Rendering the frame twice) or 4X FSAA (Rendering the frame four times). With 2X FSAA, two sub-samples are taken, while with 4X FSAA the number increases to four sub-samples but effects the performance of the card in a greater magnitude than with 2XFSAA.More on this later.

With FSAA	Without FSAA