Image Quality

Before we get started with the benchmark results, we’re first going to quickly take a look at the anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering quality of the NVIDIA and ATI cards.

Anti-aliasing

ATI X800 XL 0xAA

X800XL 2xAA

X800XL 4xAA

GeForce 6800 0xAA

GeForce 6800 2xAA

GeForce 6800 4xAA

While ATI has traditionally held the edge in AA quality, NVIDIA implemented a new rotated-grid sampling pattern for GeForce 6, which has significantly narrowed the gap between the two manufacturers. Looking closely at the images above, both cards look rather good, but once you look a little closer, you can see a few slight differences:



RADEON X800 XL 2xAA



GeForce 6800 2xAA


Zooming in on the edge of the very first stair, we can see that the GeForce 6800 card does a slightly better job of smoothing the edges out than the RADEON X800 XL. Let’s try 4xAA:



RADEON X800 XL 4xAA



GeForce 6800 4xAA


Cranking up the AA to the 4X setting improves things significantly, but the NVIDIA board still looks slightly better than ATI, although the two cards are very close.

Anisotropic filtering

ATI 0xAF

X800XL 2xAF

X800XL 8xAF

GeForce 6800 0xAF

GeForce 6800 2xAF

GeForce 6800 8xAF

RADEON X800 XL 0xAF



GeForce 6800 0xAF




RADEON X800 XL 2xAF



GeForce 6800 2xAF


While this is entirely subjective, we prefer the crisper textures found on the GeForce 6800 with 2xAF. You can really see the extra detail near the rust on the metal floor.



RADEON X800 XL 8xAF



GeForce 6800 8xAF


Under the 8xAF setting it’s harder to declare one card a winner of another in our opinion; they both look really good.