NVIDIA's GeForce 7 Update: Introducing the 7900 GTX, 7900 GT & 7600 GT

With this next set of screen shots, we followed a similar procedure outlined on the previous page to evaluate the effect of the anisotropic filtering techniques on a given scene. The screen shots below are from Half-Life 2's "background 4" map. We've again compared similar settings using the GeForce 7900 GTX, a GeForce 7800 GTX and a Radeon X1900 XTX. For this set of screen shots, anti-aliasing was disabled to isolate the effect each card's respective anisotropic filtering algorithms had on the images. Pay no mind to all those nasty jaggies!

Image Quality Analysis: Anisotropic Filtering Standard Quality Aniso

GeForce 7900 GTX 1280x1024 - No Aniso

GeForce 7900 GTX 1280x1024 - 4x Aniso

GeForce 7900 GTX 1280x1024 - 8x Aniso

GeForce 7900 GTX 1280x1024 - 16x Aniso

GeForce 7800 GTX 1280x1024 - No Aniso

GeForce 7800 GTX 1280x1024 - 4x Aniso

GeForce 7800 GTX 1280x1024 - 8x Aniso

GeForce 7800 GTX 1280x1024 - 16x Aniso

Radeon X1900 XTX 1280x1024 - No Aniso

Radeon X1900 XTX 1280x1024 - 4x HQ Aniso

Radeon X1800 X1900 XTX 1280x1024 - 8x HQ Aniso

Radeon X1900 XTX 1280x1024 - 16x HQ Aniso

When perusing the images above, pay special attention to the road and the hill to the lower right, as these areas are where anisotropic filtering has the most impact on in-game image quality. In the first row of screenshots labeled "No Aniso", only trilinear filtering is enabled, which results in the ugly blurring in the road and on the hill. With each successive level of anisotropic filtering applied though, the blurring goes away, and more detail is visible in the textures. Again, there is no perceptible difference between the images produced on the GeForce 7900 GTX and GeForce 7800 GTX because of the similarities in the architecture, but there are some subtle differences between NVIDIA's and ATI's output. The differences are visible at the furthest point in the road at about in the middle of the slope in the hill. Saying which one is "better" is a difficult, but we'd give an edge to ATI here. We should also note that ATI offers a High-Quality aniso mode that is not angular dependant, which offers even better quality than the images shown here.