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As the chipsets
powering today's video cards have gotten faster and more
powerful, more attention has been paid to image quality than
ever before. It is no longer acceptable to produce
video cards with sub-par Antialiasing and Anisotropic
filtering performance. Both ATi and NVIDIA have made
great strides in this area. Just ask anyone running
Unreal Tournament 2003 on a Radeon 9700 Pro at 1280x960 with
6X AA and 16X anisotropic filtering enabled! We took a
number of screenshots with the Radeon 9600 Pro to
demonstrate its AA and Aniso capabilities.
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Screenshots with Antialiasing Enabled |
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This
should give you some idea... |
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This first group
of screenshots was taken with a "Pin-Wheel" demo given to us
by ATi. This simple tool is very useful to show the
affects of Antialiasing on lines running in
different directions..
PIN-WHEEL: NO AA |
PIN-WHEEL: 2X AA |
PIN-WHEEL: 4X AA |
PIN-WHEEL: 6X AA |
As you can see
in the first, non-AA screenshot, the lines at 12, 3, 6 and 9
o'clock are very jagged. The jaggies don't seem as
pronounced at the other angles, but they are most definitely
there. As you run through the screenshots with
the different AA methods enabled, you can clealy
see the dramatic improvement in quality. Open the
non-AA and 6X AA shots simultaneously and switch between
them and you'll see just how much of an improvement AA
makes. Pay special attention to the center of the
images.
We're fairly
certain none of you are playing any games with this gorgeous
pin-wheel as a centerpiece, so we also took some actual
in-game screenshots using Unreal Tournament 2003.
The screenshots above are
from the "Asbestos" DM map. They were taken at a
resolution of 1024x768. We snapped off some
screenshots using all of the different Antialiasing methods
available with the Radeon 9600 Pro, and in the last shot we
enabled 16X Anisotropic filtering as well. We took a
portion from the upper left corner of each screenshot and
enlarged it 500% to get a clear indication of how the
Radeon's AA technique was affecting the image. As you can see,
with each successive level of Antialiasing jagged edges
become less and less prevalent. As you'll see a later
on in the benchmarks, the Radeon 9600 Pro maintained
playable, or almost playable, frame-rates with all of these
settings.
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In
Game Screenshots with Anisotropic Filtering
using Quake 3 Arena |
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Quick and Dirty Screenies |
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We also took a
few screenshots with Quake 3 Arena, with all of the
different levels of Anisotropic filtering available with the
Radeon 9600 Pro. With Quake 3, you can enable a
feature that essentially color codes each mip-map level to
demonstrate the transition from one level to another..
To vastly
oversimplify what it happening here, think of each band of
color in the screenshots above as having a different level
of detail. The closer you are to the "front" of the
image, the higher the detail level. As you can see, as
the level of Anisotropic filtering is raised, the screen
area with the highest level of detail gets larger and larger
and extends further "back" into the image. Like the
UT2003 images, these were taken at a resolution of 1024x768,
but were using ATi's "Quality" Anisotropic filtering method.
We've included the un-banded screenshots also so you can see
exactly how the Anisotropic filtering is affecting the
clarity of the image. Pay attention to the center
portion of the floor as you browse through the different
screenshots. Overall, we were impressed with the
in-game image quality produced by the Radeon 9600 Pro.
We should also
mention that 2D image quality was quite good. ATi
historically has not had a problem with their 2D quality,
and with its dual 400MHz RAMDACs the Radeon 9600 Pro
continues that tradition. We tested the card over the
course of about 5 days using a Sony 17" Flat-CRT. At
every resolution, ranging from 800x600 to 1600x1200 the
image was crisp and clear, with smooth, even color levels.
Let's Look at Some Numbers
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