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Anti-Aliasing
Tests Continued:
Once again, the
GF4 Ti 4600 and the Ti4200 from Asus lead the pack, and were
the only two cards with which we could complete a benchmark
at 1600x1200. The others dropped out due to insufficient
free RAM for high-res antialiasing, or a lack of support in the
drivers, which was the case with the Radeon. At the
higher resolutions with 4xAA enabled, the framerates were
getting too low to be considered playable.
Anisotropic
Filtering:
Anisotropic Filtering is another filtering method used to clean up
image quality by filtering textures in order to prevent "fuzziness"
on sloped surfaces. A in-depth dissertation on AF can be
found on ExtremeTech's website,
right here.
Anisotropic filtering takes a toll on the video card's
performance, more so for
NVIDIA's GeForce line then for ATI's Radeons. We should also
mention that what NVIDIA calls 32-Tap
Anisotropic filtering (4X in their drivers) is not what ATi
calls 32-Tap Anisotropic filtering (8X in their drivers).
Another thing to consider is that the Radeon 8500 we used
for testing can't do
trilinear filtering when Anisotropic filtering is enabled.
The differing methods and capabilities traditionally gave
ATi a huge performance advantage over NVIDIA.
As we alluded to
earlier, the Radeon 8500 took first place in each test, but
with a marginal lead at best over the Ti 4600. NVIDIA's
newer drivers seem to finally be boosting anisotropic
filtering performance. The Asus card repeatedly remained 3 frames
over the other Ti 4200, yet was firmly entrenched in third
place behind the Radeon 8500 and the Ti 4600.
Using 64-tap
aniso, there
isn't much else new to say, although the gap between the Radeon and the GeForce line has widened some.
Once again,
however, let me point out that Trilinear filtering is not
supported in AF on the Radeon, and using Bilinear filtering
for the GeForce cards would raise the numbers to more competitive
levels.
Serious Sam & Comanche 4...
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