MFAA Testing And Benchmarks
For those unfamiliar with Multi-Frame Anti-Aliasing, it uses different sampling grids over time in conjunction with an averaging filter to approximate the result of higher, more demanding levels of MSAA. For example, 2x MSAA combined with MFAA results in what Nvidia calls 4x MFAA, a setting the company says is comparable to standard 4x MSAA, but with a much smaller performance hit.
MFAA's weakness is that its filter breaks down with fast camera movement. In practice, though, this isn't really a limitation since you don't notice aliasing artifacts when the view pans quickly.
In our tests, 4x MFAA looked better than 2x MSAA. In my opinion, its quality is on par with 4x MSAA, too. I didn't notice any image quality degradation during camera pans or twitch movement. As you can see from the screenshots above, though, MFAA does add a bit of noise to object edges. It's not perfect, but you may find it to your liking. What about performance, though?
The results are impressive, making MFAA a nice value-add for GeForce owners. While its use was once limited to a handful of titles, Nvidia now claims that all DirectX11 games that support MSAA work with MFAA (except Dead Rising 3, Dragon Age 2 and Max Payne 3). The only downside is that a lot of new games rely on post-processing anti-aliasing techniques like FXAA or SMAA, and we were surprised that of the games in our benchmark suite, only Battlefield 4 invoked 4x MSAA at the detail settings we tested. Nevertheless, MFAA is something that image quality aficionados who demand high frame rates will appreciate.
