3D Image Quality

AA quality

From an image quality perspective, we must keep in mind that RADEON 9000 is fundamentally based RADEON 8500, and therefore inherits some of its drawbacks. For starters, ATI’s RADEON 9000 utilizes rotated-grid super-sampling for its anti-aliasing. While super-sampling looks good visually, it draws a significant drain from the graphics core’s fill rate. The end result is a severe performance hit.

NVIDIA on the other hand has used multi-sampling on its line of cards. Multi-sampling produces pretty good visuals as well (although the texture resolution isn’t quite as sharp), but doesn’t come with the severe performance impact of super-sampling. As a result, NVIDIA’s GeForce3 and 4 have offered superior performance to RADEON 8500 once AA is enabled and the GeForce FX 5200 Ultra versus RADEON 9000 PRO comparison is no different. Unfortunately we were not able to produce accurate screenshots with the NVIDIA card so we have omitted those images.

Anisotropic filtering quality

Like our GeForce FX 5800 Ultra article, we ask that you download the anisotropic images we took to see the cards in action yourself. Image quality is difficult enough to judge as it is, downloading the jpegs and looking at them in as uncompressed a format as possible is the closest way to see what we saw on our screen when taking the screenshot. Plus it allows you to judge image quality for yourself.

In the zip file we’ve included multiple sample settings for GeForce FX 5200 Ultra as well as RADEON 9000. We also threw in GeForce4 MX’s 2x setting, the only setting available on that card.

Besides AA, one other drawback with RADEON 8500, and thus RADEON 9000 is its use of bilinear samples when anisotropic filtering is enabled. As a result, textures aren’t as sharp as NVIDIA cards. Have a look for yourself (GeForce FX 5200 Ultra on the left, RADEON 9000 on right):

We’ve also included a quick shot of GeForce FX 5200 Ultra with anisotropic filtering disabled as well as 2x and 8x settings:



Again, we highly recommend that you download the screenshots so you can see the rest of the images. As you can see in the GeForce FX 5200 Ultra screenshots above, NVIDIA still hasn't addressed the issues with UT 2003's DM-Insidious level that we noted with 42.69.