Gary Tarolli Interview

I've never noticed any real blurring of text. I suppose it happens, but the effect is very minor. I don't own a 5500, but I do get to see them running quite often as all my fellow FWGG cronies (www.fwgg.org) have 5500s.

The LOD Bias is there to help eliminate that. In D3D I believe anything written straight to the frame buffer is not blurred on either hardware. (this is the reason that Nvidia's FSAA was very incompatibly at first). I don't think OpenGL allows direct writes like that.

But if it is a flat texture rendered on a polygon (i.e. Quake or Half-life text) it doesn't have mipmap levels to adjust, thus gets blurred slightly because of the way it is aligned and sometimes the wrong source texel gets read. (Tarolli mentions this) Wumpus thinks this is horrible, but really I don't think it is a big deal. He posted a few screenshots on Gamebasement.com but I can't find them right now.
Anyway, comparing 800x600 4X to 1280x1024 in Counter-Strike, the text is more readible at 800x600 4X because the text is bigger on screen anyway. IMHO. Regardless I still prefer resolution.

#4: I don't disagree. If your monitor supports 1600x1200, play at 1600x1200. Yes, compared to 1600x1200, 800x600 4X is blurry and is only an emulation of true 1600x1200. The biggest downer is that high resolution textures are basically wasted because they have to be downsampled so much to correctly display. Very noticable in games like Q3 that contain high res textures. 1600x1200 looks TONS better than 800x600 4X. I think even 1280x1024 is better.
And given that 1600x1200 is past the dot pitch on even a decent 19", aliasing and pixel popping will not be very noticable if at all.

BTW, I own a TNT2 Ultra and plan on getting a GF2 GTS or MX next. I'm not really into FSAA either. I'd rather have more resolution and 32bit

Ok, atleast the way Nvidia's FSAA works, the theory is like downsampling higher quality..
Say you took a 640x480 image and downsampled to 320x240... each pixel would be an average of about 4 from the 640x480 image, it might look blurry, but it is incorporating that larger amount of data. Then take a 320x240 image by itself, in its blocky glory. You could blur it but it is only using 320x240 worth of data.

Actually, FSAA just uses some sort of troll magic.

but you see that example of the car game on 3dfx.com
and at the top of the screen it has some shit about, commentator.
and that is blurred aswell.
so if you had your speedometer or horsepower on the screen,
that would be blurred ASWELL

i reckon it would look good with the high quality games, like flight sims and detailed shit like that.
but maybe it should be more accurate?

i dunno

*sigh* Some people just don't get it. Blur != FSAA

You should check out some of the demos that were linked in that article. Only irk I have is that those demos are with 4X FSAA which is very slow. Good luck trying to play Midtown Madness at 4X FSAA at 800x600+. You might pull it off at 640x480. And Midtown Madness just plain fucks up mipmapping. The LOD is off and it only uses two or three mipmap levels so at a distance the textures alias badly. This makes FSAA look artificially good. If they just fixed the mipmapping it would look twice as good anyway.

i say the FSAA is crap.
it makes the WHOLE screen blurry.

you might aswell just take your glasses off when you play a game, if you want it blurry