Now that we've seen what Wildcat SuperScene AA does and how it does it I thought it might be an idea to give an example of where its used. For this I spoke to Johnny Widerlund, Software Engineer for Opticore. Opticore are an 'Interactive Visual Communications Provider' and their software 'Opus Realizer' is a real-time interactive design tool that enables designers to accurately display their results and evaluate their designs.
Here is what Johnny has to say about their application's application and how AA fits in:
"One use is for the automotive industry to be able to make design decisions without having a physical prototype. Instead of making a prototype in clay and lacquer they use our software to make digital presentations and due to the realism our application allows this is made possible. So for us it is very important that the final rendered image is as real as possible.
Thus a significant element of reaching this realism is AA. Often our software is used on ‘power-walls’, powered by different kinds of projectors. The resolution of those is usually 1280*1024 or less, so AA makes things look a much better. There are a lot of different kinds of AA out there, nVIDIA makes some simpler ones, while the Wildcat III makes one that looks a lot better. A couple of years ago SGI machines were mostly used because the PC side was not very good. The ONYX machine had a really good FSAA and still is one of the best. The one that comes closest on PC is probably the Wildcat III. We even have software AA so people with not-so-good graphics cards also can enjoy the great image quality. There are customers which have a frame rates around 15Hz without AA, which choose to use a good software AA despite it slowing the simulation down to 3Hz. It is that important that the scene really looks good."
Johnny supplied me a demo CD of Opus Realizer and I've taken a few image from the demo with SuperScene AA enabled and disabled.
All these images are rendered in real-time and when you notice the quality of the rendered images, especially in evidence in the interior shot, the last thing you want is lots of distracting aliasing artefacts ruining your image! Although these still shots can't convey the effect that SuperScene has when they are in motion you can clearly see the degree with which the images are cleaned up from their normal aliased counterparts.
The reasons for doing this article were not just to get the chance to play around with one of the most expensive 3D graphics cards available for a the PC platform, but to investigate where the differences lie between workstation and consumer 3D cards. With the convergence of the two classes getting ever closer, with Workstation cards taking their quality and getting faster and consumer cards increasing the quality of rendered output as well as increasing speed, this article may give us some insights into the areas that consumer cards will be going. This very much applies the the quality of AntiAliased rendering coming up as well; its probably unquestioned that Wildcat's SuperScene AntiAliasing is by far the most advanced form of Multisampling AA currently available on the PC platform today and its likely that we'll see advanced AA approaching this in the not too distant future on consumer cards -- with the recent 3Dlabs P10 and Matrox Parhelia-512 technology announcements it would seem that we may have techniques approaching some of the elements of SuperScene AA already.
- Feel free to comment on this article or its findings here.
I'd like to thank Natasha Davey at 3Dlabs for allowing me access to the Wildcat hardware for this article and setting up all the appropriate meetings, and to all the others at 3Dlabs I hassled for answers to my queries. Thanks also to Johnny at Opticore and Henrik 'Basic' Gustavsson for the coding the FSAA test app and talking me through the results.
