X-bit labs

ATI RADEON X800 XL 512MB Graphics Card Review. 512MB: Today’s Need or Reserve for the Future? (page 8)

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin , Anton Shilov

[ 05/05/2005 | 02:10 PM ]

It’s hard to tell between 4x and 6x/8xS FSAA modes in Far Cry, but it’s clear that enabled antialiasing improves the image considerably.

Colin McRae Rally 05 also benefits from using full-screen antialiasing. It’s again difficult to catch the difference between ATI’s and NVIDIA’s antialiasing, but we think NVIDIA’s algorithms work better on slanting edges, while there’s some jaggedness visible in the 4x FSAA mode on the RADEON X800. Like in the rest of the cases, it is even harder to see the difference during the actual play. The FSAA 8xS mode brings you the best quality, but also a terrible performance hit: high resolutions cease to be comfortably playable.

It’s possible to improve the image quality in modern strategy games using full-screen antialiasing. In games of this genre you usually see numerous buildings and units with complex geometry on the screen, and antialiasing comes in most helpful. It’s harder to see the difference between 4x FSAA and 6x/8xS FSAA since the objects are relatively small, but the difference between disabled antialiasing and 4x antialiasing is very conspicuous. Note that in case of Warhammer 40.000 game the quality of NVIDIA GeForce 6800-series antialiasing is much worse compared to that of ATI RADEON X800 hardware.

So, it is really possible to improve the image quality by enabling full-screen antialiasing, but extreme modes like 6x and 8xS can hardly be recommended for use since they bring just a minor quality improvement over 4x FSAA but at a tremendous performance hit.

Such extreme antialiasing modes can hardly be playable in resolutions above 1024x768, but if this is the optimal resolution of your monitor (e.g. if you own a 15” TFT panel), you can try to improve the quality by turning on 6x/8xS FSAA. The latter mode ensures the best image quality, but is resource-consuming and only available to owners of NVIDIA GeForce 6x00 graphics cards. The 6x FSAA mode, available with all modern RADEONs, doesn’t improve the quality much over 4x FSAA, the latter less affecting the speed of the card.

The next section of our review is all about the performance of graphics cards with extreme full-screen antialiasing modes enabled.