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- Date:
- Tuesday , November 25, 2014
- Author:
- Brent Justice
- Editor:
- Kyle Bennett
- Share:
NVIDIA Multi-Frame Sampled AA Video Card Review
NVIDIA's Multi-Frame Sampled AA (MFAA) technology is available in the latest GeForce driver release. We look at performance and image quality on the GeForce GTX 980 and GTX 970 and see if this is something gamers can benefit from. Only a handful of games support it right now, if yours is on the list, give it a spin.
Introduction
NVIDIA introduced Multi-Frame Sampled AA (MFAA) when Maxwell launched on September 18th of 2014. We talked about MFAA and what it would bring to gaming on this page of our evaluation. However, at launch, MFAA was not quite ready for prime time. It was to come in a future driver release. That time has finally come, sort of.
We got to experience MFAA in real games demonstrated to us at NVIDIA Editors day prior to the launch of Maxwell. We saw it in action, experienced it working, saw how it compares in image quality and saw the performance advantages associated with it. This was most certainly not just a paper technology, it was something NVIDIA just wanted to spend a little more time validating it and figuring out how best to implement it to the end user.
With the release of driver GeForce 344.75 MFAA support is possible for GeForce GTX 980 and GeForce GTX 970 gamers. Keep in mind it will only work on those two GPUs, this is Maxwell specific technology. It is also very limited right now in scope. There are only a handful of games MFAA will work with. If your game is not on the supported list, tough titty. You might also think that would be supported only newer games, games like Far Cry 4, but you would be wrong. Maybe Far Cry 4 is a bad example since so many other things are broken in this "AAA" "The Way Its Meant to be Played" title. NVIDIA should be ashamed to see that game released bearing its green fish head logo every time it starts up as it serves to remind us just how bad PC implementation is...but that is a story for another day.
Current supported games are: Assassin's Creed IV Black Flag, Assassin's Creed: Unity, Battlefield 4, Civilization V, Civilization: Beyond Earth, Crysis 3, Dirt 3, Dirt Showdown, F1 2013, F1 2014, Far Cry 3, Far Cry: Blood Dragon, Grid 2, Grid Autosport, Hitman: Absolution, Just Cause 2, Saints Row IV, Splinter Cell: Blacklist, Titanfall, Wargame: European Escalation.
How MFAA Works
Before we begin, NVIDIA has some great resources filled with MFAA information. The official NVIDIA MFAA technology page is a great resource for MFAA information. NVIDIA has a technology demo of this available on YouTube that demonstrates MFAA.
MFAA's goal is to produce 4X MSAA image quality at the performance cost of 2X MSAA. Or, create the image quality of 8X MSAA at the performance cost of 4X MSAA. That is the simple gist of what the benefits are to gaming. You can have a higher level of antialiasing at a reduced performance cost.
Instead of sampling four sample patterns for 4X MSAA, it samples two, but on alternating frames. A sophisticated filter combines the colors of the pixels and what you have is the illusion of 4X MSAA. The actual hardware is still only taking two samples, not four, and a hardware filtering is doing the averaging of colors.
There might be a downside to this however. Images in extreme motion, or very quick changes could result in visible aliasing. There might be situations where the filter cannot compensate for what a real hardware sampled MSAA can do.
It should however be good enough that in most situations you don't notice the difference. The thing about this being completely programmable is that the sample pattern positions can be changed for each game, individually in the driver. Therefore, if such things occur, NVIDIA could improve image quality of MFAA in that game simply via a driver update.
The big downside right now, is that this is limited to the handful of games we listed above. NVIDIA has to qualify this for each game in its driver, and that is going to take time.
With this method of AA dynamically changing sample patterns still screenshots using FRAPs will not work. We have to record via video and take screenshots of the video, just to be able to show you that 4X MFAA looks like 4X MSAA. And quite frankly that is not a good solution for us to accurately show you what you will experience during gaming.
To enable MFAA you have to turn it on in the driver control panel. Then, in your game you set the MSAA level and MFAA is a multiple of it. For example, if you set 2X MSAA in your game, the output is 4X MFAA. If you set 4X MSAA in your game the output is 8X MFAA. That means the game will be running at the performance cost of what you set it in-game, but will actually output a higher AA quality thanks to MFAA.
Our Goals
On the next page we are going to look at GTX 980 and GTX 970 performance in three of the supported games. We will use Battlefield 4, Crysis 3 and Far Cry 3. Then we will look at image quality as best we can, what we need to find out is if 4X MFAA looks like 4X MSAA.
Our test system setup is the same we used in the Maxwell launch.
For all NVIDIA GPU based video cards we are using GeForce 344.75.