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We followed a similar procedure
to evaluate the effect of the GeForce 6800 Ultra's
anisotropic filtering technique on a given scene. The
screenshots below are of frame 1300 of the Aquamark 3
benchmarking tool. We've again compared similar
settings using the 6800 Ultra, 5950 Ultra and the Radeon
9800 XT.
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Anisotropic Filtering With The GeForce 6800
Ultra |
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Clean Up Those Blurry Textures! |
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Enabling anisotropic
filtering with the GeForce 6800 Ultra changed the overall
look of the scene dramatically. In the "No Aniso"
shot, the textures on the pillar and on the ground along the
edge of the mountain show the characteristic blurring
associated with trilinear filtering. With 8X
anisotropic filtering enabled, however, almost all of the
blurring disappears. The ground, the mountain, and the
surface of the pillar all seem much sharper and more
defined. Cranking the aniso up to 16X further sharpens
the scene, but the difference is very subtle. The
sprouts on the ground are a touch clearer, as is the base of
the pillar. You'll only be able to see the differences if you switch
between the two images quickly...
We only took two screen shots
with the GeForce FX 5950 Ultra because the maximum
anisotropic filtering setting
available was only "8X". The "No Aniso" shot looks
much like the 6800 Ultra's and the Radeon 9800 XT's, except
that it is slightly sharper. The difference between
the 8X anisotropic settings with the 5950 Ultra and the
other cards is like night and day, however. The pillar
and sprouts along the ground get cleaned up quite a bit with
8X aniso enabled, but the ground and mountain hardly change
at all. We think this is an issue with the 5950 Ultra
and the new Forceware 60 drivers though, because anisotropic
filtering on the GeForce FX series of cards has been one its
strong suits.
Directly comparing the Radeon
9800 XT to the GeForce 6800 Ultra yields some interesting
results. Without any anisotropic filtering enabled,
we'd give a slight advantage to the Radeon - the image is
slightly less blurred (the differences are most visible on
the mountain). At the 8X and 16X aniso settings
though, the GeForce 6800 Ultra clearly does a better job at
sharpening the textures. This is especially noticeable
if you again pay special attention on the mountain when
switching between the shots. NVIDIA has definitely
made some progress with regard to their in-game image
quality. With anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering
enabled, we're of the opinion that NVIDIA has surpassed
ATi...at least for now...
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In-Game Screenshots With The GeForce 6800 Ultra |
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FarCry - The Tropical Shooter |
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GeForce 6800 Ultra |
1024x768 | 4XAA | 16X Anisotropic
Filtering
There are only so many enlarged
screen captures you can look at without going crazy, so once
we were done evaluating the GeForce 6800 Ultra's image
quality, we fired up a few games and unwound a bit.
We've only had the card for a short while, so we couldn't
spend too much time gaming and still get this article done,
but we were able to squeeze in a couple of hours of FarCry
and Unreal Tournament 2004. Multiplayer UT 2004 is
always fun, but FarCry is simply awesome. We had been
playing FarCry on a Radeon 9800 XT and found that cranking
up all of the in-game settings caused some slowdowns in
certain areas. The GeForce 6800 Ultra, however, had no
such problem. We patched FarCry so it would properly
support the NV40, and snapped off a few shots at 1024x768
with 4X AA and 16X anisotropic filtering enabled to give you
an idea as to what this game actually looks like with a
high-end piece of hardware like the 6800 Ultra. It
seemed like anti-aliasing wasn't being applied to every
surface, but the game still looked great. Once Direct
X 9.0c ships, we expect FarCry will look even better.
The current v1.1 patch already adds Pixel Shader 3.0 support
and fixed a few fog and lighting issues. NVIDIA tells
us a few other Shader Model 3.0 enabled titles are in the
works as well. Games like Lord of the Rings: Battle
For Middle-earth, STALKER: Shadows of Chernobyl, Vampire:
Bloodlines, Splinter Cell X, Tiger Woods 2005 and Madden
2005 to name a few...
The Test System &
Some Benchmarks
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