ATI's SMOOTHVISION - The key to its "success"

The second clue

The Radeon 8500 performed very well with 2X AA enabled in our previous review and in many cases it was able to outperform the GeForce3 Ti 500 with Quincunx enabled. Yet for some reason, the Radeon 8500's performance was killed when SMOOTHVISION was set to its 4X mode. Enabling 4X AA on the GeForce3 Ti 500 resulted in a performance hit that was noticeable but no where near the drops we saw on the Radeon 8500.

Take this performance comparison below to illustrate exactly what we're talking about:

Quake III Arena High Quality 1024x768x32 ATI Radeon 8500 (2X Performance AA) ATI Radeon 8500 (2X Quality AA) ATI Radeon 8500 (AA + Aniso) ATI Radeon 8500 (4X Performance AA) ATI Radeon 8500 (4X Quality AA) NVIDIA GeForce3 Ti 500 (Quincunx AA) NVIDIA GeForce3 Ti 500 (AA + Aniso) NVIDIA GeForce3 Ti 500 (4X AA) 107 95 89 50 39 100 91 82 | 0 | 21 | 43 | 64 | 86 | 107 | 128

While the Radeon 8500 is very competitive in all of its 2X modes, enabling 4X cuts the frame rate in half while the the Ti 500 takes only a 9 fps hit; both cards were originally running at close to 100 fps.

With these questions in hand as well as issues with the edge anti-aliasing quality of SMOOTHVISION's performance mode that we brought up in the original article, we went to ATI at Comdex and discussed what we saw.