Both new antialiasing modes—transparency adaptive supersampling and transparency adaptive multisampling—are ideal for outdoor environments, scenes with vegetation, chain link fences, and any situation where the models are seen as very thin from the angle of viewing.
Building on the revolutionary NVIDIA® Intellisample™ technology, the NVIDIA® GeForce™ 7 Series graphics processing units (GPUs) introduce Intellisample 4.0 technology. The fourth-generation Intellisample technology introduces two new antialiasing modes—transparency adaptive supersampling and transparency adaptive multisampling—which increase the quality and performance of antialiasing.
Transparency adaptive supersampling and multisampling take additional texel samples and antialiasing passes to enhance the quality of thin-lined objects such as chain link fences, trees, and vegetation. These types of objects are generally rendered on very simple polygon models (or even one polygon). The complexity of the final image (a group of branches or vegetation) comes from the texture that is mapped onto the polygon. Conventional antialiasing does not help this situation, because the edges of the vegetation or branches are actually inside the projected texture. Pixels inside a polygon are not touched by current antialiasing methods.
Transparency adaptive multisampling also improves antialiasing quality—with even higher levels of performance because one texel sample is used to calculate surrounding subpixel values. Although transparency adaptive multisampling is not as high quality as the supersampling method, its increased efficiency balances improved image quality and high levels of performance. The visual improvements of adaptive supersampling are obvious when compared to generic supersampling/multisampling approaches.