AF image quality

S3’s anisotropic filtering is fully up and running in their latest driver, up to 16 samples can be taken, just like ATI. Since NVIDIA’s latest drivers still don’t give us true anisotropic filtering in Unreal Tournament 2003, we decided to rely on Quake 3 and IL-2 Sturmovik: Forgotten Battles. S3 is up first in IL-2:

S3 AF disabled

S3 8xAF

S3 16xAF

ATI:

ATI AF disabled

ATI 8xAF

ATI 16xAF

NVIDIA:

NVIDIA AF disabled

NVIDIA 8xAF

Notes

We’re going to have to zoom in to get a real good look, but offhand the S3’s grass really stands out on the left hand side, just off the runway. Whereas the grass on the ATI and NVIDIA cards blends smoothly up to the runway in this area, you can clearly see the difference between the runway and the field on the DeltaChrome card at the 16x setting, while it’s hard to spot a difference between ATI’s 8x implementation and their sharper 16x setting:

S8 Nitro


RADEON 9600 XT


GeForce FX 5700 Ultra



After S3 takes the top spot, it’s a hard call between ATI and NVIDIA.

Quake 3

S3:

S3 AF disabled

S3 8xAF

S3 16xAF

ATI:

ATI AF disabled

ATI 8xAF

ATI 16xAF

NVIDIA:

NVIDIA AF disabled

NVIDIA 8xAF

Notes

Once again, we’re going to examine image quality at their maximums, although in Quake 3 the differences are harder to spot. The bottom line is that all three cards look good, so the final call is going to be more subjective.

We’re going to crank out the magnifying glass and focus in on the area just beneath the rocket launcher. The screenshots below are taken with a 500% zoom:

S8 Nitro


RADEON 9600 XT


GeForce FX 5700 Ultra




Even when zoomed in, it’s very hard to see a difference here. The S3 and ATI boards render the floor beneath the rocket launcher very similarly. It does look as if the gray floor textures behind the RL on the S3 board are sharper and more distinct, with the ATI and NVIDIA cards a step behind. We leave this call to you to decide.

Before we go, we did notice one interesting aspect with the S3 card once the mipmap transitions are highlighted:

S3 16xAF

ATI 16xAF

NVIDIA 8xAF

Notice the harsh transitions between the mipmap levels, which are highlighted red, green, and blue. This suggests that S3 isn’t giving us true trilinear filtering, although we’ve clearly enabled it in the control panel.