Sapphire Radeon 9200 Atlantis

Name: Sapphire Radeon 9200 Atlantis - Page 2
Brand: Sapphire

by HH Editor — Saturday, June 21, 2003, 12:00 AM EDT

Sapphire Radeon 9200 Atlantis - Page 2

Sapphire Radeon 9200 Atlantis 128MB Vivo/TV-Out
With ATi's Catalyst 3.4 Drivers

By - Tom Laverriere
June 12, 2003

Screenshots with Antialiasing Enabled

Getting rid of the jaggies

While speed seems to be the most important trait concerning today's graphics cards, some people would prefer to see higher quality images over a few extra frames-per-second. To test the Sapphire Radeon 9200 image quality, we used a common tool and a couple of popular games to show the differences between rendered graphics with and without antialiasing and anisotropic filtering enabled.

ToMMTi-SYSTEMS FSAA v2.2

NO AA

2X AA

4X AA

6X AA

For the above antialiasing tests we used ToMMTi-Systems FSAA v2.2 tool. The above graphic is a 3D rendering of a pinwheel-type object. Looking at the first picture without antialiasing enabled, the "pins" of the wheel appear very jagged and badly rendered, especially in the center. Enabling the 2X antialiasing setting improves the quality somewhat, but the 4X AA and 6X AA settings obviously provide the best visual quality. Surprisingly, trying to find the differences between 4X AA and 6X AA is pretty tough, making the 6X AA setting somewhat irrelevant since it will degrade performance without providing that extra visual beauty. Let's move on and take a look at some in game screenshots from Unreal Tournament 2003 and Quake III.

UNREAL TOURNAMENT 2003

UT2003: NO AA

UT 2003: 2X AA

UT 2003: 4X AA

UT 2003: 6X AA

In Unreal Tournament 2003 we took some screenshots to display the Sapphire Radeon 9200's antialiasing capability in a 3D gaming environment. In the above pictures, focus in on the supports on the ceiling and the railing directly in front of the shooter. Both of these parts of the screen appear very jagged with no antialiasing enabled, while 4X AA provides the best visual quality to performance ratio. Again, its very hard to see any differences between 4X AA and 6X AA, suggesting the 6XAA setting is a novelty rather than a necessity with this particular GPU. Let's fire up Quake III to see how the Radeon 9200 performs with anisotropic filtering enabled.

QUAKE III ARENA

QUAKE 3: NO ANISO	QUAKE 3: 2X ANISO	QUAKE 3: 4X ANISO
QUAKE 3: NO ANISO COLORED MIP LEVELS	QUAKE 3: 2X ANISO COLORED MIP LEVELS	QUAKE 3: 4X ANISO COLORED MIP LEVELS

QUAKE 3: 8X ANISO	QUAKE 3: 16X ANISO
QUAKE 3: 8X ANISO COLORED MIP LEVELS	QUAKE 3: 16X ANISO COLORED MIP LEVELS

In the above screenshots, focus on the ground and notice the detail as the AF settings are increased. The colored mip levels make it easier to see exactly where the filtering is done on the screen. We believe the 16X AF setting is not worth using with this card since it does not add much detail to the screen, but does decrease performance somewhat. For the best image quality / performance with this card, we concluded that 4X AA and 8X AF is the sweet spot. One additional note to make here is that with 4X AA and 8X AF enabled, most games would be considered unplayable, however, this card is not meant for such a gaming experience. Now that we've seen the image quality of this card, let's move on to the performance and look at some numbers.