(08-23-2010, 03:03 AM)NaturalViolence Wrote: [ -> ]Quote:Lol, my video card can't handle 9X AA . (I'm still wondering why).
Because your using SSAA. So your basically rendering at 9 times the resolution then downscaling to your screen resolution. So let's say your running a game at 1920 x 1080. Each frame is 2 mp (megapixels) in resolution. Let's say your gpu is capable of rendering 180 mp per second. That means you can render 90 fps at this resolution (180 mp/s / 2mp per frame = 90 fps). Now add 9xSSAA (triple width, triple height, 3x3=9x). Each frame is now 9 times the resolution since you've tripled the width and height, 18mp. So once again let's do the math (180 mp/s / 18mp per frame = 10 fps). Your down from 90 fps to 10 fps. So as you can see you need a VERY powerful gpu to handle that without any slowdowns.
Wow, thanks! I somehow do understand this ^^, so even with the ATI 5970 or 480 GTX it's not possible to run a game with a constant 60 FPS with 9X SSAA.
Quote:Wow, thanks! I somehow do understand this ^^, so even with the ATI 5970 or 480 GTX it's not possible to run a game with a constant 60 FPS with 9X SSAA.
Under normal circumstances (most regular pc games) if your gpu was powerful enough you wouldn't get any drop in framerate (although a drop is actually occurring it's just that even after the drop your still above 60 fps, which is the max that your monitor can display anyways so you wouldn't notice it, when this happens we say that their is no drop in framerate, that's not technically true but from our perspective it is, in other words to get 60 fps with 9xSSAA your gpu had to have been capable of drawing 540 fps without SSAA). And I mean REEAALLYY powerful, vdram bandwidth, pixel throughput, and vdram capacity have to be through the roof. However with dolphin the RGB combiner (last step in SSAA) seems to run on the cpu so extra cpu power is needed as well. I figured this out when I noticed that even though using SSAA lowered my framerate significantly (clearly showing that the gpu is bottlenecking the cpu) when I lowered my resolution I still had the same framerate, no increase (indicating that cpu load is also increased with SSAA). This means that even if your gpu could handle it you still might experience massive fps drops because of that. But in most circumstances if your gpu is powerful enough and the game isn't gpu heavy then you should be able to use 4xSSAA without any framerate loss. 9xSSAA on the other hand MIGHT not have any framerate drops at high resolutions if your using a 5870 or 480 and the game is "weak enough" if you get my meaning, otherwise the answer is an automatic "no, it's going to massacre your framerate".