‘The Secret World’ Is The World’s First Game To Feature TXAA

The Secret World is continuing its promise to be a true innovator with the announcement on August 9, 2012 that it would be the world’s first game to feature TXAA anti-aliasing. Funcom, the game’s developer, is working closely with Nvidia to bring the very latest in visual wonders to players of The Secret World.

The tech team at GeForce explained how TXAA would improve The Secret World, saying:

“With the launch of the latest Secret World update, gamers can now leverage TXAA, a new anti-aliasing technique introduced with the latest “Kepler” generation of GPUs. Designed specifically to reduce temporal aliasing (crawling and flickering in motion), TXAA is a combination of hardware anti-aliasing, a custom anti-aliasing resolve, and a temporal filter. To filter pixels, TXAA uses a contribution of samples both inside and outside of the pixel in conjunction with samples from prior frames, to offer the highest quality filtering possible. In motion, TXAA approaches the quality of other high end, professional anti-aliasing algorithms, though the higher quality filtering used by TXAA does result in a softer image compared to the lower quality filtering of traditional MSAA.”

Technical mumbo jumbo aside, TXAA will help remove the jagged edges that drive gamers crazy and produce a smoother, more realistic image. The graphics in The Secret World will look even better with the addition of TXAA for Nvidia graphics cards. If you are interested in seeing a comparison between what a game looks like with and without TXAA, you can go here to view an informative video.

To take full advantage of TXAA when you play The Secret World, Funcom reminds gamers “to enable TXAA in the video options of the game please install the NVIDIA 304.79 beta drivers available from this page and then select TXAA as your anti-aliasing under the video options of the game.” The drivers will also be available in the next regular Nvidia driver set, scheduled to be released on August 13, 2012.

Now that Nvidia has once again pushed the graphics envelope, we can only wait to see what goodies rival graphics card manufacturer, ATI, has in-store for us.