Two new features are worth mentioning with the GeForce 7800 GTX graphics board, transparent and gamma anti-aliasing
Gamma correct anti-aliasing is a feature that has been found on the ATI graphics boards for some time. This is a feature that can be enabled to improve the anti-aliasing at no cost to the frame rate. Surprisingly, this feature is disabled by default in the NVIDIA driver and it is recommended that users enable it under the Performance and Quality settings.
Transparent anti-aliasing is really the key feature though. Anti-aliasing for 3D graphics has always looked at the edged of polygons for smoothing, but there are a large number of situations where the designers use a transparent polygon to get an effect. Such an example would be a chain link fence. Even with anti-aliasing enabled, these fences would still look jagged.
Transparent anti-aliasing is a form of preprocessing where anti-aliasing is performed on the texture of the polygon to smooth the edges of any content. This has a dramatic effect for things like the chain link fences.
This feature was tested in both the super and multi-sample modes in Half-Life 2 with 16x AA enabled. From testing, a third to full frame was last in the scores when enabled but the texture improvement was tremendous. It is highly recommended to use these settings.
