Anisotropic Filtering Quality

It has already become a tradition that before we get to test graphics cards performance we check the quality of anisotropic filtering and tri-linear filtering they provide. Especially since we have a very good reason to do it this time: ATI declared the new enhanced anisotropic filtering algorithm for its RADEON X1000 products family, which we simply cannot overlook.

As we see, there is not so much difference in quality compared with the tri-linear filtering by RADEON X850 XT. As for the tri-linear filtering by GeForce 7800 GTX, it reveals slightly harsher transitions between the mip-levels, although I wouldn’t regard it as something drastic, really.

As we see from these pictures, RADEON X1800 XT does boast somewhat better quality mode than any of its competitors or predecessors. However, you should keep in mind that this is not the default mode and it needs to be enabled specifically, so it can potentially slow down the performance.

I have to draw your attention to the fact that we haven’t found any real evidence pointing at the significant advantage of the enhanced AF mode over the standard AF mode. In other words, there is no big difference in the image quality of real games between the enhanced anisotropic filtering mode of the new RADEON X1800 XT and the standard anisotropic filtering of the new ATI solutions as well as of the other graphics cards.