NVIDIA Linux Anti-Aliasing Performance Update

After delivering Radeon Gallium3D MSAA benchmarks earlier in the week to share where the open-source AMD driver is at in its support for multi-sample anti-aliasing, here's some AA benchmarks from NVIDIA's high-class binary Linux graphics driver. The NVIDIA Linux driver offers some of the best anti-aliasing support among Linux graphics drivers.

Like the Radeon Gallium3D MSAA results, these numbers in this article are mostly for reference purposes in setting expectations for the performance impact of different AA modes and sample counts. A NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770 was used during all of the testing from our Core i7 4770K system.

The tested anti-aliasing modes for a range of Linux games and other OpenGL benchmarks included no AA, FXAA, 2xMS, 4xMS, 4xMS + 4xCS, 4xSS + 2xMS, 4xMS + 12xCS, 8xMS, 4xSS + 4xMS, 8xMS + 8xCS, and 8xMS + 24xCS. All of these anti-aliasing levels for the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770 "Kepler" graphics card were controlled via the nvidia-settings GUI panel. All benchmarking was facilitated in an automated and industry-accepted manner using the Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking platform.