Nvidia also introduced a new anti-aliasing mode named Multi-Frame Sampled AA (MFAA), which combines multiple AA sample positions to produce a result that looks like higher quality anti-aliasing but with better performance (for example an image that looks similar to 4xMSAA at the compute cost of roughly 2xMSAA).

The idea is to sample two frames (frame n and frame n-1) with half as many sample position as required by 4xMSAA. The result is then combined into a single image, hence the name – mutli-frame.

These three operations, two sampling actions and the composition into a single frame, are less demanding than sampling a single frame using 4xMSAA. Unfortunately we could not test the new technology because it is not implemented in Nvidia’s current driver.

Nvidia is working hard to make it available in an upcoming driver release. The next image set explains the procedure. As you can see from the resulting image, the quality of MFAA is approximately the same as with 4xMSAA.

The samples are from Nvidia and they show an Apollo 11 demo based on the UE4 engine.