Written By:
Date Posted: October 2 , 2002

3D Features

    As I'm sure that many have read about hardware displacement mapping, I will not go into detail about it, if you would like to read Matrox's documents on it .  I find that this feature looks like it has allot of promise as it is included in the DirectX 9 spec and is supported by the Radeon 9700 as well, so far.  The fact that it also uses small files (64*64 ~4kb) to create a large mesh, is something that lessens the dependency on bandwidth and still looks very nice as we can see below. 

    I think that this could be used in software programs, not only in games.  A terrain generator program I use is based on the same principals as displacement mapping, in taking a topographic texture and then converting it to a 3D mesh for rendering as seen here:

    To do something like this in real time would be a good enough reason to buy this card in my opinion, but as of yet this feature still is too new to have been added to many programs.

    Now let us look at another very interesting feature, Fragment Anti-Aliasing.  Unlike other anti-aliasing techniques used by ATi, Nvidia, Power VR and others, the antialiasing technology does not render the full screen multiple times, even though other techniques may be more efficient than rendering the screen 2-4X larger or 2-4X times.  FAA uses a different technique to do the same thing as these other technologies, and it seems more 'elegant'.  Instead of taking the same image and rendering it four times (or two times) FAA locates the edges of polygons, which are the cause of most of the jagged edges that we see on the screen.   Because there are less areas that need anti-aliasing, the amount of samples used by FAA is higher at 16 samples.  There are problems with this technique however such as not working on stenciled shadows or any other jagged edges that aren't on a polygon's edge.  This technique seems like it would only lose a little in the way of performance, but is any performance 'gain' lost in quality problems.   We will see later on.

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