RADEON X800 XL 512MB: Does More Memory Mean Better Quality?

If you are well versed in modern 3D graphics, you should already know that larger amounts of graphics memory make higher resolutions and higher levels of full-screen antialiasing possible in games. This should theoretically improve the image quality. We decided to check if the image quality was really improved with the maximum possible FSAA levels – 6x and 8xS – on ATI’s RADEON and NVIDIA’s GeForce6 cards, respectively. So we took a number of screenshots and compared them assiduously. The games were the popular shooters Doom 3, Half-Life 2 and Far Cry as well as the strategy game Warhammer 40.000: Dawn of War and the rally simulator Colin McRae Rally 05. The screenshots were all made in 1600x1200 with 16x anisotropic filtering enabled.

Doom 3 is a rather dark game and does not generally show the advantages of full-screen antialiasing well. Yet we found one level where one could feel the difference. The antialiasing algorithms from NVIDIA work obviously better in Doom 3 than ATI’s ones. The slanting edges of polygons look less jagged on the GeForce 6800 Ultra than on the RADEON X800 XL 512MB. As for the difference between 4x and 6x/8xS antialiasing modes, it’s hard to see any, but the performance degenerates dramatically.

Half-Life 2 looks obviously different without FSAA and with 4x FSAA since the game’s scenes are generally brighter than Doom 3’s dark corridors of the UAC station. We think the FSAA 6x mode available with modern RADEONs gives a better antialiasing quality than NVIDIA’s FSAA 4x, but it’s not so easy to see that, especially during the play. The FSAA 8xS mode brings you the best quality, just like in the previous case, but it is hardly playable due to the very low frame rates. You can only play comfortably in 1024x768 with this mode enabled. But here, it would be better to use a higher resolution and a less resource-consuming FSAA mode – you’ll have a higher image quality in this case.