The big news here for most gamers is the Real-Time Full-Scene Hardware Anti-Aliasing (FSAA). FSAA is designed to smooth the edges of diagonal lines on the screen to help get rid of the stair stepping, pixelated look that is commonly referred to as the "jaggies."

Performance

3dfx made an excellent decision with this card in that rather than trying to find a middle-of-the-road solution to try to please everyone all the time they allow the user to find their own optimal balance between performance and image quality. There are three basic options to choose from: Maximum Performance gets every last bit of raw speed out of this 64MB of ram and the twin processors on board, 2x anti-aliasing dramatically improves the image quality at the expense of a little bit of performance, and finally 4x anti-aliasing gives true jaw-dropping image quality but at the expense of performance.

There is plenty of discussion about whether FSAA is worth the performance hit. Personally, having seen it in action there is no way I'll ever go back. My preferred setting is at the 2x level for regular racing, 4x for showing off and Max Performance for hard-core online gaming where framerate is more important than eye-candy. I love having the flexibility to change the card to adapt to my gaming personality!

In general, the "Max Performance" setting provided better frame rate than my old Voodoo3 card while the 2x anti-aliasing setting seems to run about the same as my old card. The 4x setting brings a noticeable drop in frame rate on my system. Since I play mostly racing games the 2x setting is great for the majority of my gaming. It improves the visual quality without affecting my frame rates.

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