ATI's Radeon 8500 - New drivers expose potential

AA: Battle at 4X

Next up we compared ATI's 4X SMOOTHVISION to NVIDIA's 4X supersampled AA.

Radeon 8500 4X Performance AA	GeForce3 Ti 500 4X Supersampled AA	Radeon 8500 4X Quality AA

The first thing you'll notice again is that the random sampling nature of SMOOTHVISION eliminates the majority of the blurring you see in NVIDIA's 4X solution. However, you can also clearly see that NVIDIA's 4X solution is better at reducing the infamous "jaggies" than ATI's 4X performance solution. Again we run into the situation where ATI's 4X quality setting is unmatched by NVIDIA's 4X setting in both AA quality and in overall image clarity.

Quality Comparison Conclusion

In the end it's clear that out of the 2X AA settings, ATI's 2X performance AA mode offers better image clarity (less blurry images) and virtually identical AA quality to NVIDIA's Quincunx AA. The move to ATI's 2X quality AA mode improves the situation even more and enabling anisotropic filtering makes things even sharper although it will result in a decent memory bandwidth hit.

In the realm of 4X algorithms, while ATI's performance 4X AA settings were definitely clearer than NVIDIA's, NVIDIA's 4X implementation offered greater AA quality. Once again however, ATI's 4X SMOOTHVISION setting is without competition at this point.

With that said, let's have a look at performance under the various modes.