System setup

Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800

ASUS P5W DH Deluxe (for ATI system)
ASUS P5N32-SLI SE Deluxe (for NVIDIA system)

NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GTX 512MB
ForceWare 91.33

Unannounced upcoming ATI graphics card
Catalyst 6.8

Control panel for all cards left at default settings

Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2
DirectX 9.0c

Benchmarks

3DMark 06
Half-Life 2
Call of Duty 2

Notes

Armed with the GeForce 7900 GTX and ATI’s latest Radeon graphics card, we set out to evaluate the IQ delivered by both manufacturers high-end products. We should note here that while we’re only looking at the IQ of two graphics cards, ATI and NVIDIA apply the same graphics optimizations used in these cards to the rest of the products in their respective graphics lineup, so the images we’re displaying here also apply to other cards such as the X1900 XTX or X1900 XT/GT, X1800s, etc from ATI, as well as the GeForce 7800/7900 GT/GTX.

We’re sticking with the default control panel optimizations for both manufacturers except when using transparency AA/adaptive AA. In that case, we used ATI’s “Quality” setting for adaptive AA (which forces the use of supersampling to improve IQ) and NVIDIA’s “Super-sampling” setting for the GeForce card. We also turned on gamma correction for AA in this case as well.

With that being said, let’s take a look at some screenshots!