Elite Bastards take a look at adaptive anti-aliasing, a feature that's getting a lot of press with ATI's new Radeon X1800 boards, but is also in fact available to Radeon 9500 users and up if you know where to look.

What firstly NVIDIA, and now ATI, have done is implement an algorithm that attempts to detect alpha textures in an application, and apply super-sampling (or also multi-sampling in NVIDIA's case) selectively to a scene, hunting out and anti-aliasing only alpha textures in this fashion while allowing the rest of the scene to be handled by the usual anti-aliasing method.

This feature was first seen in NVIDIA's G70 core, courtesy of their Transparency Anti-aliasing feature. Now ATI have brought their own equivalent of this to the table with the launch of R520, labelling it instead Adaptive Anti-aliasing. The good news is however, that this feature isn't limited only to ATI's newest architecture - In fact, if you know where to look it can be enabled on any ATI graphics core from R300 up - That's any card from the Radeon 9500 upwards!

Today, we'll be looking at just how you can do this on ATI boards using CATALYST 5.9, as well as examining both the performance and image quality ramifications of doing so.

Adaptive anti-aliasing on ATI Radeon X800 boards investigated