Nvidia GeForce GTX 680 – The Nitty Gritty

FXAA (Fast Approximate Anti-Aliasing) is one of two aliasing technologies that Nvidia have incorporated into the new GTX 680, you may get this a bit confused with TXAA which is the other new technology of which we will go into on the next page. FXAA utilises the power of the extra CUDA cores, and along with the other image processing steps such as motion blur and bloom. For games who’s engines use deferred shading as part of the processing, FXAA will give a better level of performance and a memory advantage over MSAA. Whilst FXAA is not new with the launch of the GTX 680, with the launch of the updated R300 drivers, FXAA will now be available directly from the Nvidia control panel.

So what is the advantage of having FXAA in the control panel? Well simply put, it now means that having FXAA at the driver level, hundreds of games can take advantage of the vastly improved anti-aliasing technology.

With no AA enabled we can clearly see that the edges are jagged and on the whole doesn’t give any real depth to the game experience.

4x MSAA as most people are used to works pretty well in the in game engines to reduce and smooth out the edges however there is still a certain level of roughness to the image.

TXAA however takes this to a whole new level as we explained above and gives a very smooth edge to the blow torch as we can see below not only along its edges but around the tip giving the appearance of a more rounded edge.