Ask the nVidia card for HIGHEST QUALITY and you get 48fps

When you force it to use 4xFSAA and 8xAF you get a drop off in performance of 30%

In any real world test - hwo can 'HIGHEST QUALITY' give you faster results than 4x/8x ?

Surely 'HIGHEST QUALITY' means 8x/16x ?

NVIDIA can do maximum FSAA 8x and Anisotropic Filtering 8x.
ATI can do maximum 16x Anisotropic Filtering and 6x FSAA.

Even though NVIDIA's 8x FSAA is not really better than ATI's 6x FSAA, it still exists and hits performance very tangibly. That is why we stick to 4x - available both on NVIDIA and ATI hardware. The same applies to anisotropic filtering.

Maybe, we will benchmark NVIDIA's 8x FSAA and 8x AF, but I am not sure when if we do.

Oh... I am sorry. I commented on another thing :)

Highest Quality means we enable all 3D features in the software, except FSAA and Anisotropic Filtering.

Nice review! Thanks for the write-up.

I have two quibbles, minor though they are:

1. You seem to have been looking at the wrong graphs when writing certain benchmark summaries. The first graph on page 11, for instance, says:

"In the mainstream graphics cards class, NVIDIA is also on the winning side with its GeForce FX 5700 Ultra, and this time NVIDIA’s creation is substantially faster than ATI’s."

Yet the 9600XT performs virtually on par with the 5700U in that case (and far outperforms it when AA+AF are applied). I believe you did the same once or twice elsewhere, though I'm not sure of it.

2. You analyzed both cards' AF implementations, but didn't do the same for AA. I'd also have appreciated if you had mentioned texture shimmering/aliasing with both cards' AF, as the related topic ("LOD fractions") was just written up at 3DCenter (http://3dcenter.org/artikel/2003/11-21_a_english.php).

Is there anybody running High-end graphics card without using FSAA and Anisotropic Filtering?
High-end cards are here to give the customer the highest quality of the picture, which of course means using FSAA and Anisotropic Filtering during playing.
Tell me now, who is the king on gamers throne?

Hi I have a hercules 3d prophet radeon 9800 xt, i was not going after this card, in the first pllace i wanted asus Radeon xt but at the time they was out of stock everywhere and because i rushed it i now end up with hercules.
Hercules is the cheapest of the lot it's normally Asus most expensive then sapphire then hercules. what i would like to know is what is the perfomance difference between hercules Rxt and Asus Rxt apart from it's accesories and extra software, does the card it self perform better, and how much better, I need to know is it worth me selling my hercules and getting an asus instead, I'm not too worried about throwing away money just to get the better in the end.. i like to spend alot anyway, I would be happy if you could send me a graph or bar chart comparing the difference between the hercules 9800xt and Asus 9800 xt in performance thank you.

I also have the hercules version and it runs nicely. It even overclocks like mad and has the "overdrive" option.