NVIDIA Anti-Aliasing Performance Under Linux
For some Sunday benchmarking, here are some results of the different anti-aliasing levels available within NVIDIA's binary Linux graphics driver when using a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 "Kepler" graphics card.
The available anti-aliasing (AA) levels exposed for the GeForce GTX 680 by the NVIDIA 302.17 Linux graphics driver are listed below.
2x AA: 2x Multi-Sample Anti-Aliasing
4x AA: 4x Multi-Sample Anti-Aliasing
8x AA: 4x Multi-Sample, 4x Coverage Sample Anti-Aliasing
8x AA: 4x Super-Sampling, 2x Multi-Sample Anti-Aliasing
16x AA: 4x Multi-Sample, 12x Coverage Sample Anti-Aliasing
8x AA: 8x Multi-Sample Anti-Aliasing
16x AA: 4x Super-Sampling, 4x Multi-Sample Anti-Aliasing
16x AA: 8x Multi-Sample, 8x Coverage Sample Anti-Aliasing
32x AA: 8x Multi-Sample. 24x Coverage Sample Anti-Aliasing
Those are the different combinations of multi-sample anti-aliasing (MSSA), coverage sample anti-aliasing (CSAA), and super-sampling anti-aliasing (SSAA) that are supported for the high-end Kepler graphics card for the binary Linux graphics driver. The NVIDIA AA mode can be easily adjusted from the nvidia-settings utility.
Meanwhile for the open-source Mesa/Gallium3D drivers, there is basic Morphological Anti-Aliasing (MLAA) and only limited support for MSAA.
The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 600 series graphics card was running with the Intel Core i7 3770K system and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS on the software side.