X-bit labs

Club3D Volari Duo V8 Ultra Review: XGI Volari Family Coming to Graphics Market (page 17)

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin , Anton Shilov , Tim Tscheblockov

[ 01/15/2004 | 01:47 PM ]

2x anisotropic filtering + tri-linear filtering

No surprises here. This is true tri-linear filtering with higher level of detail at the foot of the player. No anisotropy whatsoever.

4x anisotropic filtering + tri-linear filtering

Well, anisotropic filtering by Volari has nothing to do with real anisotropic filtering, but is just a simple change of the level of detail (LOD). We can prove it very easily. Take a look at the pics showing the pixel-by-pixel difference between the images obtained as a result of bilinear filtering and 4x anisotropic filtering performed by Volari (on the left) and GeForce FX (on the right):

The comparison of these images produced by Volari shows that the difference exists only in those places where MIP-level borders have been moved. In case of GeForce FX the difference can be seen in the entire scene.

What was that? Unfinished drivers or “XGI’s vision of anisotropic filtering”? I would prefer to believe in the first, rather than the second. But is we remember how big the performance drop is when we enable tri-linear filtering, then we can actually imagine how dramatic the situation will turn if we enable “true” anisotropic filtering. Therefore, the only possible conclusion will sound as follows: Volari doesn’t know to perform “true” anisotropic filtering at all, or performs it with such awful performance losses that the software developers simply had to disable this option in the drivers.