AA/AF Quality

Anti-aliasing

Like all DeltaChrome products, S3 is utilizing supersampling for their AA in S4, which is limited to one setting, 2x. Unfortunately, S4’s AA quality has definitely taken a turn for the worse since we’ve last explored DeltaChrome’s AA quality with the S8. Take a look:

S3 S4 DeltaChrome:

S3 AA disabled

S3 2xAA

ATI RADEON 8500:

ATI AA disabled

8500 2xAA

8500 4xAA

NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 Ultra

5200 AA disabled

5200 2xAA

5200 4xAA

There are several instances where S4’s AA quality isn’t up to the level of ATI and NVIDIA’s. Some notable examples include the right wing of the F-15’s wing and its cockpit canopy. S3’s AA produces noticeably sharper jaggies than the other cards (excuse the NVIDIA shot with no AA, for some reason the canopy and other areas weren’t accurately reproduced in the screenshot, this didn’t occur in the game).

Anisotropic filtering

With ATI, S3, and NVIDIA all implementing some form of filtering optimizations in their current drivers, it’s important to keep an eye out for any shenanigans in terms of image quality. We decided to boot up Far Cry to take a closer look at the filtering implementations presented by the three contenders:

S4 DeltaChrome

S4 with AF off

S4 8xAF

S4 16xAF

RADEON 8500:

8500 AF off

8500 8xAF

8500 16xAF

GeForce FX 5200 Ultra:

5200 AF disabled

5200U 8xAF

Taking a closer look at this screenshot, we can clearly see the richest textures on the S4 DeltaChrome. The NVIDIA and ATI boards are closer to each other in IQ, with the edge going to RADEON 8500. You can see the added detail just underneath the hedge in this screenshot.



DeltaChrome S4 Pro


RADEON 8500


GeForce FX 5200 Ultra