Sharpness

In "Part A" of this article, we're just testing with an aperture grill monitor. One of the challenges is that with the aperture grill design of our test monitor, the electron beams may not fall upon the exact opening behind the grill. That is, if you imagine aperture grill monitors as being a picket fence, it is possible for the electron beam to collide with the pickets. When you change the size or position of the screen on your monitor through the monitor settings, you will alter the spacing of the beam, and thus something that was previously visible may be occluded, or vice versa.

So far, we found no measurable differences in the horizontal lines being output by the graphics cards. There were differences in the reproduction of the vertical lines. As mentioned above, this is highly sensitive to the monitor settings. To let you better understand what we're looking at, we're including one high-resolution sample. Look at the vertical lines and notice that some are double:

This is an example of the screens we were looking at

We took a close look at the 11 vertical lines to see and counted which ones appeared to be a single solid line at the top of the screen. Here are our results.

Green
  ATI: 1
      NVIDIA: 1

Red
  ATI: 9
      NVIDIA: 5

Blue
  ATI: 10
      NVIDIA: 7


We then looked at the bottom of the screen and counted again

Green
  ATI: 1
      NVIDIA: 0

Red
  ATI: 2
      NVIDIA: 2

Blue
  ATI: 9
      NVIDIA: 7


Does this mean that NVIDIA isn't outputting as sharp of a signal? You cannot tell from this test alone. On this particular setup however, the ATI card is producing a sharper picture. That's what the data unquestionably shows.

Then again, my iiyama monitor has a variable aperture grill of 0.25 - 0.27 mm. A perfect output of evenly spaced lines may look worse because the fences are spaced out unevenly. What's sharper on this setup could mean that it gets distance increases from the center. In other words, in the case of my older monitor, one card may very well produce better sharpness – but on something like a 0.24mm aperture grill monitor or something like an Invar Shadow Mask, the results may be reversed…or maybe it's a non-issue.

We don’t know if the variable AG versus fixed AG (i.e. 0.24mm) reflects upon the graphics card, but that's why this is just a "Rapid Communications" article, and not the definitive article.