NVIDIA Anti-Aliasing, Linux & Lenvik
We can also look at the anti-aliasing performance in Enemy Territory: Quake Wars by running phoronix-test-suite benchmark etqw-demo etqw-demo-iqc. As you can see from the results below, Enemy Territory is more affected by the anti-aliasing levels considering the more advanced game engine and its graphics compared to Nexuiz. Running 16x AA (8x MSAA, 8x CSAA) is not really playable with a NVIDIA GeForce 8600GTS while even 4x MSAA is still on the brink of being playable or not. To some surprise, 4x MSAA with 4x CSAA had little impact over running just 4x MSAA. However, even running just 4x MSAA with Enemy Territory: Quake Wars cost 35% of the original frame-rate.
Again, the Phoronix Test Suite can produce some nice images showing off differences between the different AA levels. Below is a "vegetation" shot from the Enemy Territory: Quake Wars Demo.
The two images below are quite good for illustrating the difference in the image quality settings.
In addition, the second automated screenshot from the Phoronix Test Suite etqw-demo-iqc test profile.
The below screenshot is more difficult to analyze for the visual differences, but again, the Phoronix Test Suite can help out there with phoronix-test-suite analyze-image-delta for spotting the few differences found in the water rendering.
Below is the Phoronix Test Suite highlighted version.
Lastly is a look at the AA performance of some distant trees in Enemy Territory: Quake Wars.
Originally, we intended for this to be a thorough look at the anti-aliasing performance of NVIDIA and ATI hardware/drivers under Linux both with frame-rates and with image quality comparisons, but that has been postponed. Below is the etqw-demo-iqc output when using Catalyst 9.11 on Ubuntu Linux with an ATI Radeon HD 4850 graphics card.
As you can see, AMD currently has some serious issues at hand with their various anti-aliasing options (at least though it is easily automated using the Phoronix Test Suite!) So until we are able to deliver such a comparison, if you want to see the results for your own system just run phoronix-test-suite benchmark nexuiz nexuiz-iqc etqw-demo etqw-demo-iqc using the Git phoronix-test-suite.tar.gz snapshot to produce what you see in this preview. There are also many other particularly interesting features coming soon to the Phoronix Test Suite for image quality comparison analysis and related areas.
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