Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Stefan]

EQAA Modes for AMD 6900 Series Graphics Cards

Overview
Enhanced Quality Anti-Aliasing (EQAA) is a new anti-aliasing technology available from the AMD
HD 6900 series of graphics cards onwards. This new Anti-Aliasing (AA) technology offers
advanced smoothing of aliased edges without requiring additional video memory, and with a
minimal performance cost.

Coverage Sample Details
EQAA offers enhanced AA quality over standard Multi-Sample Anti-Aliasing (MSAA) modes by
adding more coverage samples per pixel but keeping the same number of color/depth/stencil
samples to achieve better AA quality than standard MSAA modes.       Since it doesn’t require 
additional color/depth/stencil samples, it consumes the same video memory as the equivalent
MSAA mode.

The coverage samples are used to test if a polygon is present at the location of the sample, and
these samples can be used as the weight value for calculating the final color of the pixel.
Because coverage samples can be gathered more easily than increasing color sample count,
EQAA can increase AA quality with quite a small performance overhead. EQAA is also
compatible with other existing AA techniques supported by AMD.

[ljbade]

This sounds similar to NVIDIA CSAA that can go to 16x or 32x.

[ljbade]

Also no OpenGL extension support yet 

[ljbade]

Just as I though this is a AMD "clone" of CSAA, just compare how EQAA and CSAA work:
http://developer.amd.com/sdks/radeon/assets/EQAA%20Modes%20for%20AMD%20HD%206900%20Series%20Cards.pdf

vs

http://developer.download.nvidia.com/assets/gamedev/docs/CSAA_Tutorial.pdf

Even the DX9/10/11 API commands to set the various modes use identical values to the equivalent CSAA modes.

But AMD don't (yet) support CSAA/EQAA 32x which NVIDIA supports since Fermi. Perhaps the AMD 7000 series will support it.

Here is a handy table comparing NVIDIA and AMD's names for the different modes:

MSAA Mode	NVIDIA CSAA Mode	AMD EQAA Mode	Colour Sample Count	Coverage Sample Count
1x/Off			1	1
2x			2	2
		2f4x	2	4
4x			4	4
	8x	4f8x	4	8
8x	8xQ		8	8
	16x	4f16x	4	16
	16xQ	8f16x	8	16
	32x		8	24

JeGX:
Does Kombuster correctly detect/use EQAA? I don't have a 69XX card to test it on. You will likely need to add 2f4x since NVIDIA doesn't support that. Also AMD uses different names...
http://www.geeks3d.com/20100611/direct3d-gtx-480-vs-hd-5870-msaa-quality-levels-differences-between-dx11-hardware/