3DMark Quality and BF2 Video!

0xAA 16xAF

Radeon card 0xAA/16xAF

GeForce 7900 GTX 0xAA/16xAF

This was the most difficult comparison to spot a difference in. The best area to look is on the fronts of the crates, especially the one on the left side where the trooper is taking cover. You’ll see on the front of those crates little gratings or vents near the top of each. On the GeForce cards they are slightly more prominent, but this difference is almost insignificant and these pictures merely serve as a baseline for the AA pics.

4xAA 16xAF and ATI 6xAA

Radeon card 4xAA/16xAF

GeForce 7900 GTX 4xAA/16xAF

Radeon card 6xAA/16xAF with adaptive AA

We have ATI 4x and 6x AA with 16xAF and NVIDIA 4xAA 16xAF screenshots to compare here, and again, it is almost impossible to tell a difference. Once again the only place that strikes the eye is the little vent or grating on the front of each crate, where the dark parts appear darker on the NVIDIA cards for better contrast. Otherwise, the images appear identical, even with 6xAA on.

Battlefield 2

EDIT 8/24: We've removed the BattleField 2 screenshots of the ATI and NVIDIA cards as this test relies on the AF videos presented below.

Right click on the thumbnails and select Save As to save the videos to your PC. (Note:You'll need to download and install FRAPS to watch the videos)





For Battlefield 2 we use video to show the texture flashing effect which occurs in motion due to NVIDIA’s optimizations. It happens in two areas, horiztonal lines a couple of dozen pixels thick, both below the crosshair. The first is directly below the bottom hair, the second is about 10% of the video below that. The problem with the optimizations and the pixel crawl/texture flashing they induce is not that it exists, but that it’s the most subjective of all things there. When you watch the video it is clearly happening and quite annoying, but have you ever noticed it when playing a game? Would you even notice if Brandon was doing an action shot rather than run-through, if there was sound and explosions and communications going on? Of course, this doesn’t change the fact that when you do see it, it is rather glaring.

Finally, it can be disabled. NVIDIA provides an option in its driver panel to disable the optimizations (at some cost in performance). Why don’t we test with it disabled then? Because most people run drivers at default or nearly default settings, because even with the optimizations turned off, it’s still not a direct comparison to the way ATI does things. Just like 4xAA looks different on an ATI card than an NVIDIA one, so too do unoptimized filtering methods. Quite frankly, if the card manufacturer feels comfortable with the optimizations turned on, knowing they’ll get discussed in an article, we’re happy to oblige.

You’ll notice that this is not something that is evident in the screenshots we present above. It is only when we take video that it becomes clear.