ATI Radeon X1900 XTX And CrossFire: R580 Is Here

Name: ATI Radeon X1900 XTX And CrossFire: R580 Is Here - Page 9
Brand: ATI

by Marco Chiappetta — Tuesday, January 24, 2006, 08:00 AM EDT

When testing the performance of ATI's different Super-AA modes a couple of pages back, we stepped through each successive level of AA while benchmarking FarCry and Half Life 2 at a resolution of 1280x1024. The results on this page were attained using a similar methodology, but we altered the level of anisotropic filtering being applied to the images instead and used FarCry and F.E.A.R running at a much higher resolution. Anti-aliasing was disabled throughout this batch of tests to isolate the effect anisotropic filtering alone was having on performance.

ATI Anisotropic Filtering Performance: FarCry & F.E.A.R.

Sharpening Up Those Textures

As we demonstrated on the previous page, ATI's high-quality anisotropic filtering modes offer arguably the best anisotropic filtering available in a consumer level graphics card. And the performance data on this page shows that there is virtually no reason to have it disabled and use the lower quality setting. ATI's high-quality aniso modes perform just barely below the comparable "standard" modes in both games, and have a minimal impact on performance versus just using trilinear filtering.

Tags: ATI, Radeon, Fire, CrossFire, SSF, x1, OS, r580, ATI Radeon, 580, OSS, XT, here, R5, and

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com