AA image quality

Of course, all the performance in the world is worth nothing if your output looks like a stick figure. This is why we decided to take another look at DeltaChrome’s 3D output display quality. In our last preview, we were limited by S3’s driver, most features were disabled. Fortunately S3’s latest build opens up 2xAA, which is limited to just Direct3D for now.

We say “2xAA” as that’s the name of the setting S3 has chosen, but S3’s 2x implementation actually takes 4 samples. As we've mentioned previously, S3 utilizes less efficient supersampling rather than multisampling, so DeltaChrome will likely never win any benchmarks with AA enabled, and for optimal performance you will want to stick to low resolutions. We originally reported that AA was limited to 1024x768 (as we were told) but found that 1280x1024 seemed to work properly. Let’s take a look at FutureMark’s 3DMark first:

First S3:

S3 AA disabled

S3 2xAA (4 samples)

ATI:

ATI AA disabled

ATI 4xAA

NVIDIA:

NVIDIA AA disabled

NVIDIA 4xAA

Notes

If you look along the leading edges of the two B-17s on the bottom of the image, you’ll see that the ATI RADEON 9600 XT continues to rein supreme in AA. Play close attention to the wings in particular. We’d have to give the second place nod to NVIDIA, the jaggies on the edge of the wings with GeForce FX 5700 Ultra blend a little bit smoother than S3 DeltaChrome S8 Nitro.

DeltaChrome S8 Nitro


RADEON 9600 XT


GeForce FX 5700 Ultra

IL-2 Sturmovik

Normally we run IL-2 Sturmovik: Forgotten Battles in OpenGL mode, but since the S3 driver doesn’t offer AA support in OpenGL we ran the S3 card in D3D mode. Let’s start with S3 first again:

S3 AA disabled

S3 2xAA setting (4 samples)

Now ATI:

ATI 0xAA

ATI 4xAA

NVIDIA:

NVIDIA AA disabled

NVIDIA 4xAA

Notes

The standings remain unchanged, clearly ATI is the leader in AA quality (we apologize for the 800x600 S3 IL-2 screenshot).