Anti-Aliasing Analysis, Part 2: Performance

Test System And Benchmarks

We chose a wide variety of graphics cards for our tests, ranging from the Radeon HD 5670/GeForce GT 240 to a pair of Radeon HD 6850s in CrossFire and GeForce GTX 460s in SLI. The games we're testing include Just Cause 2, F1 2010, Aliens Vs. Predator, and Left 4 Dead 2; these titles allow forced AA modes from both graphics vendors. We're also including Lost Planet 2 to demonstrate supersampling on Radeon cards. Unfortunately, the feature does not work in most of the other titles we tested.

You may notice that the GeForce GTX 460 SLI results are not included in the Left 4 Dead 2 benchmark. This one is our bad. Our original test runs were rendered invalid after the game decided to self-update and break compatibility with our test sequence. We’re confident that the SLI data generated in the other benchmarks is representative of two 460s rendering cooperatively.

Also note that the GeForce GT 240 does better than some of the higher-end cards (like the GeForce GTX 550 Ti) in F1 2010. This is because the GT 240 is not DirectX 11-capable, forcing it to fall back to DX 9. This same limitation also explains why the GeForce GT 240 is absent from our Aliens vs. Predator DirectX 11 benchmark.

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