ATI RADEONX1900 User Guide - Page 35

31 SmartShader™ SmartShader™ is ATI's patented shader technology, providing custom transform and lighting effects for vertex shaders, allowing for finer control over the shape and position of 3D objects, as well as pixel shader effects that produce more accurate simulations of natural properties such as hair, metal, glass, and water in a real-time rendering environment. Important visual cues such as reflections, highlights, and shadows from multiple light sources can be rendered more speedily and accurately. It also increases the number of graphical effects that can be created, increasing overall performance while conserving memory bandwidth. SmartShader™ HD SmartShader™ HD contains advanced vertex and pixel-shading capabilities. A shader is a small program that runs on the GPU and describes how an image should be rendered. Vertex shaders manipulate the individual polygons that make up 3D objects, and pixel shaders operate on the individual pixels that fill in these polygons to create a visible image. SmartShader™ HD is designed to alleviate the resource constraints of earlier shader hardware, paving the way for more complex, detailed, and realistic shader effects in applications requiring high-performance 3D rendering. SmoothVision™ SmoothVision™ supports high-quality and high-performance anti-aliasing modes, both of which are required for creating high-quality 3D computer graphics. Both of these modes provide users with the ability to choose between 2x, 3x, 4x, 5x, and 6x sampling, allowing for a total of 10 different anti-aliasing settings, providing incrementally better, more realistic visual displays. The SmoothVision™ technology maintains a high level of performance even when a high anti-aliasing sampling rate is selected. SmoothVision™ 2.0 This technology provides improved levels of image quality with advanced full-scene anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering. This technology enhances image quality by removing jagged edges and bringing out fine texture detail at no cost to performance by optimizing the filtering methods used.