Image quality

Anti-aliasing

We’ll start by taking a look at the 4xAA modes for ATI and NVIDIA’s latest mainstream offerings, the RADEON X1600 XT (which hasn’t hit retail shelves yet) and the GeForce 6800 GS. First our sample image of both cards with AA disabled:

ATI X1600 XT 0xAA

NVIDIA 6800 GS 0xAA

And now 4xAA:

RADEON X1600 XT 4xAA

GeForce 6800 GS 4xAA

RADEON X1600 XT 4xMSAA




GeForce 6800 GS 4xMSAA




Other than the subtle differences you’re always going to see whenever comparing the image quality of cards from two different manufacturers, there aren’t any glaring deficiencies in one board that the other exploits. The cables hanging from the telephone poles on both cards look similar, and each does an equally poor job of handling the gated entry in front of us. Of course, this is a perfect case for the X1600’s adaptive AA mode, which can apply supersampling to select areas to improve image quality (NVIDIA has similar technology in their GeForce 7 series cards dubbed transparency AA, but not GeForce 6):



Gate w/ RADEON X1600 XT 4xAA




Gate w/GeForce 6800 GS 4xAA

RADEON X1600 XT w/ adaptive AA

Gate w/ RADEON X1600 XT 4xAA & Adaptive AA


As you can see, once adaptive AA is turned on, most of the jaggies that were present before on the gate are now gone.

With the advantage of transparency AA, we’re giving the AA edge to ATI’s RADEON X1600 XT, but it’s only because of adaptive AA.

Anisotropic filtering

Infinity Ward uses fog extensively throughout many of CoD 2’s maps to enhance the game’s visuals, unfortunately it’s what you see in our AF shots below, so try not to focus on it too much:

RADEON X1600 XT 0xAF

GeForce 6800 GS 0xAF

RADEON X1600 XT 8xAF

GeForce 6800 GS 8xAF

With the exception of the bank of fog, it’s pretty hard to spot any differences in AF quality between the two boards. Edges look a little softer on the ATI board, but that’s completely subjective:



RADEON X1600 XT 8xAF




GeForce 6800 GS 8xAF

Improving CoD 2’s performance

One performance tip that’s rising in popularity for CoD 2’s is to enable the game’s “Optimize for SLI” setting. We were curious to see just how much of an improvement the setting brings. Let’s take a look shall we?