Problem No.2

The second issue with FSAA is one we can all agree on, speed. Supposedly 3dfx's Voodoo5500 could have coped with FSAA and have no real loss in speed. That was until the first review boards arrived and people saw how completely wrong 3dfx could be. Everything, be it a Voodoo6000 or a GeForce2 GTS with 64mb gets a serious slowdown with FSAA on, even when low.

Thankfully the Voodoo5500/6000 isn't anywhere near as bad as the GeForce/2 in D3D, OpenGL is quite good, but D3D performance is infantile to say the least. Even on our monster system that's been overclocked and cooled as far as possible, anything above 640*480 in D3D with FSAA on is a choir. It's not so much the game itself that's lagging behind, but the time in which it takes the FSAA to render the overlay.

For example you can hear the sound of the game as though it were perfectly in sync, you can even run an FPS test and it'll be slower but easily playable. However when you actually try to move, the image you see lags behind the physical game speed, this produces a kind of drunken sway that most will be quite familiar with.

This is a sign that Nvidia have got to stop rushing chipsets out, the GeForce2 isn't even that must faster than my old GeForce DDR Pro from creative, it's just plain silly. It took them over a month after the GF2's first started to ship before the actual drivers finally cut most of the bugs out, utterly unacceptable and Still D3D FSAA doesn't work properly. We dare anybody to put it on MAX @ 32Bit in 1024*768 and get it to work, it doesn't! But it does in OpenGL, just fine actually.

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