Image Quality

The Quack Changes

Before even Quack, it was noticeable that Quake 3 was changed. ATI has always rendered scenes slightly differently (in fact, the rendered outputs from different chipsets are never identical), but what we saw was very interesting. Below are images from the ATI Quake, ATI Quack, and an Nvidia GeForce 3 for comparison, in lossless PNG format. You can also snag the original 800x600 TGA files (1.9MB).

R8500 Quake3.exe

R8500 Quack3.exe

GF3 Quake3.exe

Best Quality Ever

In the above screenshots, you can easily see that the large animated star texture is set to a low-quality texture in shot 1, even though we have explicity set Quake 3 to its highest-quality image setting. In fact, this particular texture is a pixel-perfect matchup for a low texture quality setting on an 8500 running the modified quack3, and a very close to the same setting on an Nvidia GeForce3, as the following 200% crops from the above images will show.

8500 Quake3.exe	8500 Quack3.exe	GF3 Quake3.exe

What does this do?

Quite simply, reducing the detail of the textures decreases the amount of memory required to store them, and thus amount of information needed to be sent down the pipeline. This reduction in required fill-rate should have a large impact at high resolutions, where large textures are frequently the bottleneck. You'll see this borne out in our benchmarks further on.

This alone could have been enough to account for the Radeon 8500's increased benchmark scores. But wouldn't it have been a bit too obvious to anyone who does more than simply run through the benchmarks?