24 Pipelines of Power! NVIDIA 7800 GTX

ForceWare 75 Driver

With every major launch as long as NVIDIA has had a unified driver set, they have also had a new launch of the ForceWare (and then Detonator) driver. And why should this time be any different? One of the items that we are hoping for is the inclusion of 16xAA. It won't be here until early July, but that isn't so far away.

The fact that of the matter is that you can get 16xAA on a dual set of cards and some time down the road we are sure it will be an option on single cards. The option is not going to be the straight forward method of taking the slider and moving it up from 4x to 16x. What it will look like is a combination of 4xSupersampling (SS) plus 4xMultisampling (MS).

How can it be 4xSS plus 4xMS? Doesn't 4 + 4 = 8? Yes but each point in a supersample contains four multisampling points. This will mean better image quality for all of the objects rendered. Since the 7800 GTX is designed to crunch numbers and raise the minimum frame rate, why not turn on all of the bells and whistles? If you are going to spend this much money on a graphics card, and even more so if you buy two, use it for all it is worth: give yourself some eye-candy.

FSAA: The Full Screen Anti-Aliasing settings are the same as they were with the 6800. The current modes are Application Controlled (Default) / Off / 2x / 2x Quincunx / 4x / 8x. 8x is the same as the old 8xS mode, or 4xMS+2xSS.

AF: The settings for Anisotropic Filtering are also the same under the 6800. The current modes are Application Controlled (Default) / Off / 2x / 4x / 8x / 16x.