Radeon Gallium3D MSAA Performance

Nexuix is already hopelessly slow on R300g with the default PTS settings, even for the Radeon X1800XT, so the multi-sample anti-aliasing level had no impact.

With OpenArena 0.8.5 we see a first look at the real impact caused by MSAA on R300 Gallium3D. Without anti-aliasing, the average frame-rate for the X1800XT 256MB graphics card was 50 FPS while it fell to just a four FPS average with 2x MSAA and then to a two FPS average with 4x MSAA.

While multi-sample anti-aliasing can improve the image quality of games, the performance hit taken by even 2x and 4x MSAA for this higher-end R500 graphics card is very dramatic and results in the games being completely unplayable...