The software prototypes have been created in C# and HLSL, using Microsoft .NET and Managed DirectX, which is based on DirectX 9. The speed benchmarks were run fullscreen at 1280x1024 pixels without vertical synchronization on an AMD Athlon 64 X2 dual core 4600+ (2.4 GHz) computer with an Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTS graphics card (320 MByte, ForceWare driver 163.44) running Microsoft Windows Vista (32 bit).

The benchmark scene contained 400 billboards of 2.2 million pixels in total with about 900,000 of them visible in the final image. We switched off z-buffering to eliminate early-z culling and to focus on the effect of the texturing. To avoid rendering small and thus inefficient batches, a large vertex buffer and a large index buffer are used that contain all signs. The texture used comprises 512x512 grayscale texels.

The techniques and the measured speeds are specified below. All techniques are gamma-correct and use a maximum anisotropy of 4.0 unless specified otherwise. This value was chosen as compromise between the speed on the one hand and the sharpness of renderings of tilted signs on the other hand.

a; Standard MIP, not gamma-correct; 740.6 fps
b; Standard MIP; 740.0 fps
c; Standard MIP, bias -0.5; 740.7 fps
d; Standard MIP, bias -1.0; 739.2 fps
e; Standard MIP, bias -1.5; 700.6 fps
f; Standard MIP, bias -2.0; 708.5 fps
g; Unsharp masking, texture space, not gamma-correct; 723.8 fps
h; Unsharp masking, screen space, factor 2; 720.6 fps
i; Contrast enhancement, tex2D; 735.0 fps
j; Contrast enhancement, bias -1.0; 690.4 fps
k; MIP sqrt(2), 0 degrees; 634.4 fps
l; MIP sqrt(2), 45 degrees; 640.5 fps
m; Regular supersampling, fixed number, 2x2, bias -1.0, no anisotropic MIP filtering; 631.7 fps
n; Variance supersampling, 10-20 samples per pixel, variance threshold 0.1, bias -1.0, no anisotropic MIP filtering; 33.0 fps
o; Spatio-temporal supersampling, 10 samples per pixel, bias -1.0, no anisotropic MIP filtering, tex2Dbias; 202.3 fps
p; RGB subpixel rendering, bias -1.0; 637.9 fps
q; RGB subpixel rendering, bias -2.0; 591.0 fps
r; RGB subpixel rendering, bias -1.0, adaptive through extra channel, samples retrieved from two-channel texture; 514.0 fps
s; RGB subpixel rendering, bias -1.0, adaptive with one channel; 514.8 fps
t; Regular supersampling, variable number, 2x2, bias -1.0, adaptive through extra channel; 555.4 fps
u; Regular supersampling, fixed number, 2x2, bias -1.0; 562.4 fps
v; Regular supersampling, fixed number, 3x3, bias -1.0; 270.0 fps
w; Regular supersampling, fixed number, 3x3, no MIP mapping; 350.2 fps
x; Regular supersampling, variable number, 2x2; 129.7 fps