Anisotropic Filtering

The NVIDIA 6xxx series uses a different algorithm for Anisotropic Filtering. AF on the 6xxx cards appears to be working fine. There is a clear difference between each setting.

AF Setting Image
(click to enlarge)
Difference Map
(click to enlarge)
No AF -
2X AF
4X AF
8X AF
16X AF

Below, you can see the image quality difference between the image with no AF, the image with 2X AF, and the image with 16X AF.



No AF. Hold your mouse over image to see 2X AF.




2X AF. Hold your mouse over image to see 16X AF.




No AF. Hold your mouse over image ti see 16X AF.


There is a very clear difference here between the various AF levels, unlike on the 5xxx series cards. We have a chart indicating the various frames per second for each AF setting under the GeForce 6800 in 1280x1024 mode.

Linux AF Scaling - GeForce 6800

Performance drops as much as 25% moving from 1X (No) AF to 16X AF. There does not appear to be a definitive sweet spot, since the graph scales very linearly.

Image Quality, AF, Trial 1 Final Thoughts
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  • jediknight - Wednesday, October 13, 2004 - link

    #15 - My bad to make such generalizations..

    but the fact that you can't even use an ATI card to play D3 doesn't bode well for Linux gaming...
  • jensend - Wednesday, October 13, 2004 - link

    #14- bunk. All you can take away from this review is that Windows "owns Linux for" D3 1.1 performance. You can't generalize this for game performance in general. Most games show a less than 5% difference.

    BTW, another article on the same topic with more detail is at http://www.linuxhardware.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/...
  • jediknight - Wednesday, October 13, 2004 - link

    I like the difference pictures.. although when you get up to 8x and 16x, they're probably unnecessary.

    But the thing to take away from this review is that Windows owns Linux for gaming performance.
  • icehot - Wednesday, October 13, 2004 - link

    Interesting article. Was it just me or are the difference maps just pure black? Also I dont think things like 16xAA are really needed, after 2x or 4x the differences between anything higher and the original image is negligable, and definately not noticeable when playing, maybe if you really take the time to admire the scenary, but who does that when fighting monsters??
  • Lwood - Wednesday, October 13, 2004 - link

    According to an article over at LinuxHardware.org, the Linux build of Doom 3 is currently less optimized than the Windows build.
    Most notably SSE2 code is missing (but will be added later) and GCC does not optimize as good as VC.net.
    Details here:
    http://www.linuxhardware.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/...
    I guess we can expect the gap to get smaller in later Doom 3 builds, but not to disappear entirely.
  • ViRGE - Wednesday, October 13, 2004 - link

    Kris, odd, I swear that I was only getting 2 graphs per page when I read the article. I don't know if Firefox is bugging out on me or what.
  • reljam - Wednesday, October 13, 2004 - link

    Kris, please put Windows and Linux numbers on the same graph, you know that people will want to see how they stack up against each other.

    Not clear on why you wouldn't want to do that.
  • jensend - Wednesday, October 13, 2004 - link

    Neither NV nor id has much of a reason to optimize heavily for linux, and it's entirely unsurprising that the windows version performs better. Nevertheless, I expect that the gap will close considerably as the Doom 3 engine matures.
  • Myrandex - Wednesday, October 13, 2004 - link

    The AA pictures won't work for me. When I click on them, I get a new window w/ the alert 'hold your mouse over the picture' and then the page doesn't load. When I hold my mouse over the original image, nothing happens. Also, the black pictures to the right of those are way to black to tell a thing about them. Interesting article though. I wonder if 16X AA would be playable in a lower resolution.
    Jason
  • Lwood - Wednesday, October 13, 2004 - link

    That bit about the 16x AA you can enable in Linux is surely interesting. Maybe you can try this on a less performance-demanding game than Doom 3.
    I'd love to see UT 2004 and Enemy Territory benchmarks for this mode... :-)

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