Image quality

Since we’re testing the GeForce 6800 card with a new driver, we felt it was important to go over the card’s image quality. We won’t go into quite as much depth as before as we’re pressed for time, but we did want to demonstrate the visuals NVIDIA’s GeForce 6800 is capable of dishing out.

Anti-aliasing

In our GeForce 6800 Performance Preview, we gave the AA crown to ATI, however in our X800 article, we re-examined a few scenes and found areas where NVIDIA excelled. Quite simply, with NVIDIA’s new rotated-grid sample pattern, their AA quality has improved substantially. While there are still differences between the two architectures, the distinctions between the two cards aren’t as apparent. Check out these screenshots taken in LOMAC:

ATI X800 PRO AA disabled

NVIDIA GeForce 6800 AA disabled

RADEON X800 PRO:

X800 PRO 4xAA

X800 PRO 4x AA on an A-10 Thunderbolt II

GeForce 6800:

GeForce 6800 4xAA

The A-10 on GeForce 6800 w/4xAA

In our first example, with the group of F-15s on the runway, NVIDIA has a distinctive advantage:



GeForce 6800


RADEON X800 PRO


Changing scenes to a group of A-10s sitting on the tarmac, the cards are much closer, but the shadows on the X800 are slightly sharper than those on the GeForce 6800:



GeForce 6800


RADEON X800 PRO

Anisotropic filtering

There has been lots of controversy surrounding ATI’s filtering algorithms lately. In order to provide the fairest comparison, we decided to leave optimizations on for both companies, but we’ll implore ATI to do the same we asked NVIDIA around this time last year: provide a setting to disable them. NVIDIA provides a full trilinear option in its latest driver (although it’s disabled by default), hopefully ATI will follow suit shortly.

X800 PRO AF disabled

GeForce 6800 AF disabled

RADEON X800 PRO:

X800 PRO w/ 8xAF

GeForce 6800 Ultra:

GeForce 6800 w/ 8xAF

GeForce 6800


RADEON X800 PRO