Just a quick note: there is no fillrate difference between normal (non-antialiased) rendering and multisampling. The extra samples are generated on the fly by a dedicated part of the GPU hardware, so no additional fillrate is required. The only problem is that requires more video memory, but not as much as one might imagine, esp. with tricks like Quincunx AA. And finally it gives you an opportunity to actually use those 128MB video memory on your 3D card...

I''m working on an experimental 3d engine using OpenGL for rendering and want to include support for FSAA. As far as I know GeForce 2MX graphic cards support this feature via WGL_ARB_multisample extension. My latest driver from Manli (manufacturer of my card) supports this extension but I was unable to find any suitable pixelformat (via WGL_ARB_pixel_format) with sample buffer. There are 48 different pixel formats but none of them has sample buffer. So I have downloaded new driver from NVidia and have discovered that it even don''t support multisample extension. Why? Is antialiasing supported only for DirectX? Anybody knows how to enable it and use it correctly? Any help would be very appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Stan

Hello everyone. Long time lurker here, but my first post.

Anyways...on with the subject:

I cannot think of a single video card that is capable of FSAA that doesn''t have the ability for FSAA to be enabled and/or forced via the driver binaries (for both DirectX and OpenGL.) Same goes for anisotropic filtering, btw.

An engine-side implementation of FSAA (and/or Anisotropic filtering) could never match the efficiency of the implementation on the low-level end (the drivers). If you thought that other parts of OpenGL implementation lacked uniformity, you will be appalled when seeing just how non-uniform the implementations for FSAA and AF are for the different hardware vendors.

In conclusion, I have to say that coding an engine to perform FSAA (the implementation itself) would be both unproductive and unneccesary.

There are things that you can do to make the engine more FSAA/AF friendly, though. Read through the documentation that ATi/nVidia provide for developers.