Sapphire Toxic X800 Pro ViVo

In our recent review on the Asus AX800 Pro, we included a comprehensive overview of the differences in image quality between the GeForce 6800 GT and Radeon X800.  Not much has changed since then however, so since we were testing the Sapphire Toxic X800 Pro using the same quality settings, we've placed these images here for a quick review as well.  These screen shots were taken from AquaMark 3, using all four of the configurations we used while running our suite of benchmarks.

Screen Shot Comparisons Whip Out The Magnifying Glass!

6800GT No AA	6800GT 4X AA	6800GT 4X AA/8X Aniso	6800GT 4X AA/16X Aniso
X800 No AA	X800 4X AA	X800 4X AA/8X Aniso	X800 4X AA/16X Aniso

The screen shots above are of frame 5000 from the Aquamark 3 benchmark.  We set the resolution to 1024x768, and took these shots at the four different configurations we used for most of our testing (No AA, 4X AA, 4X AA + 8X Aniso and 4X AA + 16X Aniso).  If you open up multiple images and switch between them (pay attention to the file names in your browser's address bar to keep track of which shot you're looking at), you'll see very little variation from card to card.  However, if we zoom in a bit, some differences are revealed...

6800GT 4X AA (300%)	6800GT 4X AA/8X Aniso (300%)	6800GT 4X AA/16X Aniso (300%)
X800 4X AA (300%)	X800 4X AA/8X Aniso (300%)	X800 4X AA/16X Aniso (300%)

This group of screen shots represent a 300% zoom of the center of the full scene.  As you can see in each shot, with Anisotropic filtering enabled, much more detail is brought out in the hill at in the center.  It's nearly impossible to see any differences between the 8X and 16X aniso shots though.  And when comparing one card to another, the 6800 GT seems to reveal a bit more detail than the X800.

6800GT 4X AA Aniso (300%)	6800GT 4X AA/8X Aniso (300%)	6800GT 4X AA/16X Aniso (300%)
X800 4X AA (300%)	X800 4X AA/8X Aniso (300%)	X800 4X AA/16X Aniso (300%)

We also zoomed into a different portion of the screen to spotlight some differences in each card's anti-aliasing technique.  When we enabled 4X anti-aliasing, the antennas above the station and the edge of the track at the right are cleaned up considerably.  The X800 Pro seemed to do a slightly better job at cleaning the jaggies, but it's not a major difference by any means.  With both NVIDIA and ATi using adaptive trilinear filtering, and using similar anti-aliasing techniques with this generation, it's become much more difficult to say one card has better image quality than another.