FSAA and S3TC on NVIDIA cards

has posted an article looking at some new beta drivers from NVIDIA for their GeForce cards. Apparently with a little tomfoolery these allow S3TC and Full Scene Anti-Aliasing support in OpenGL games (like Quake 3).

The article includes a few impressive comparison shots of Quake 3 with and without anti-aliasing, although the performance hit is pretty hefty. The drivers aren't perfect yet, which is why they are labelled beta and the features aren't active by default, but hopefully we will soon see an officially supported driver from NVIDIA enabling these features on GeForce cards.

Looks like another bloody nose for 3dfx, as FSAA and cross-platform texture compression are two of the biggest features on their new VSA-100 based graphics cards...