Anisotropic Filtering: Performance

In order to estimate the per4rformance losses when anisotropic filtering is enabled, we tested our graphics cards in a few gaming applications. The anisotropic filtering image quality was set to the maximum, we enabled 4x, 8x and 16x anisotropic filtering:

We clearly see, that RADEON X800 suffers the lowest performance losses in case of enabled anisotropic filtering. However, I wouldn’t consider this an immediate victory of the updated anisotropic filtering algorithm from ATI: in Unreal Tournament 2004 we see that the performance of RADEON X800 XT/PRO appeared limited by the CPU, so that enabled AF didn’t have much influence on the results at all.

Call of Duty is the only game where the performance dropped significantly down once we enabled AF. RADEON X800 XT/PRO lost even more than other testing participants, as the CPU and the entire system didn’t tell that greatly on the results of this test.

It is interesting that enabled fully-fledged tri-linear filtering on NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra didn’t affect the results as greatly as we had expected it to: the graphics card slowed down by maximum 10%.