AMD Radeon HD6990 Review

The latest Catalyst drivers support ‘Enhanced Quality Anti Aliasing' (EQAA) which delivers improved anti aliasing performance by doubling the number of coverage samples per pixel, while keeping the same number of colour/depth/stencil samples.

This algorithm from AMD produces smoothing of aliased edges without requiring additional video memory.

You can select these modes by using the 2xEQ, 4xEQ or 8xEQ options that are now in the anti aliasing slider in AMD Catalyst Control Center. The good thing about EQAA is that it is compatible with all other supported anti aliasing techniques including Adaptive AA, Super Sample AA, Custom Filter AA (Edge Detect) and Morphological AA.

By selecting these modes in the driver they will cause applications which natively support MSAA modes to use the equivalent EQAA modes instead. You can always try the ‘override application settings' option to force games to use EQAA modes if they are selected in Catalyst Control Center. This can often work, even if the game doesn't natively support anti aliasing.

When we enable EQAA, the performance hit is minor, at only 3 frames per second.

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