Today's PC Games Hardware face lifting: Star Wars Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy, Painkiller: Battle out of Hell, Prey and World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King. One of the features offered by the Radeon HD 5000 series is the ability to display eightfold Sparse Grid Supersampling Anti Aliasing. This kind of edge smoothing is the best which is currently delivered by modern graphics cards: The whole frame, including the textures and pixel shader effects is smoothed - in contrast to "normal” Multisampling Anti Aliasing where only the polygon edges are dealt with. PC Games Hardware used a HD 5870 to check the mode in several games. Of course we had 8x SGSSAA active all the time and used an appropriate Texture LOD of -2 (for best texture sharpness).

Radeon HD 5870: 8x SGSSAA in action
As owner of a Radeon HD 5000 you best use the spare performance if you activate the mentioned Anti Aliasing in the Catalyst control Center. At 1680 x 1050 pixels - which is one of the most popular resolutions for gaming - all the titles are running smoothly. Many of our maxed out titles in 1920 x 1200 or higher resolutions can also be upgraded with the high-end Anti Aliasing without considerably lowering the frame rate.

More game classics with 8x SGSSAA:
Max Payne 2, Bioshock, Fear, Serious Sam 2, Flatout: Ultimate Carnage
Call of Duty 1 + Addon, Call of Duty 2, Gothic, Gothic 2

The screenshots in our gallery demonstrate the excellent quality of this AA mode. What do you think about this feature? Tell us in the comments.