Image Quality Comparison

In order to make sure that performance benefits supposedly brought by more advanced rendering mechanisms are not achieved by sacrificing image quality, a number of screenshots made in different modes with different hardware were compared.

As previously, we used 5 scenes from “Training”, “Pier”, “Catacombs”, “Archive” and “Volcano” levels, as shown below. Game quality settings were set to the maximum level, anisotropic and trilinear optimizations were enabled for NVIDIA-based graphics cards.

Quick look on the images and their comparison revealed that there is no degradation in the quality as a result of render path transition to shaders 2.0b. The only difference between Shader Model 2.0b and Shader Model 2.0 render paths can be seen on the screenshots is a slightly different lighting on the “Catacombs” level, however, it does not look like a glitch and may be a result of a very slight mouse move during the capture.

We also see almost no differences between NVIDIA’s and ATI’s image quality, except the “shadow issue” we discussed previously and some other minor things we are working on at this moment. While there are talks that NVIDIA encourages game developers to use 16-bit arithmetic precision instead of 32-bit precision (or 24-bit precision, like ATI) in order to improve performance, but possibly degrade image quality, we see no issues with NVIDIA’s quality under brief investigation.