AA Comparison

And now the fun part: playing around with images. Certainly everyone has their own taste when it comes to AA, but we've cropped and blown up this 800x600 screenshot from Oblivion in order to better show what's really going on. As resolution increases and pixel size decreases, the impact of higher AA modes also decreases. This is useful to keep in mind here.

A few key points to check out: compare the interior of textures between either no AA image and any of AMD's tent filters. Notice how the detail on interior textures is significantly decreased. It can be quite frustrating to enable a high anisotropic filtering level to increase the detail of textures only to find them blurred by your AA mode. Also, note how NVIDIA's 8x CSAA and 16x CSAA modes only subtly change some of the pixels. This is because CSAA actually attempts to better understand the actual geometry that a pixel covers rather than going around looking for data outside the pixel to bring in.

These screenshots are with gamma correction enabled on NVIDIA hardware in order to give the best comparison with RV770 which does not allow us to disable gamma correction. We do prefer disabling gamma correction for the average case and especially for anti-aliasing thin lines.

Click the links in the table below to change the AA images displayed


AMD RV770 No AA

AMD RV770
NVIDIA GT200

Click here to download all the full resolution, uncompressed images used in this comparison

Fixing AMD's Poor AA Performance The Test
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  • Final Destination II - Wednesday, June 25, 2008 - link

    http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Powercolor/HD_4...">http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Powercolor/HD_4...

    Look! Compare the Powercolor vs. the MSI.
    Somehow MSI seems to have done a better job with 4dB less.
  • Final Destination II - Wednesday, June 25, 2008 - link

    Try ASUS, 7°C cooler.
  • Justin Case - Wednesday, June 25, 2008 - link

    I thought it was only Johan, and it was sort of understandable since he's not a native English speaker, but it seems most Anandtech writers don't know the difference between "its" and "it's".

    "It's" means "it is" or "it has" (just as "he's" or "she's"). When you're talking about something that belongs to something else, you use "its" (or "his" / "her").

    In a sentence such as "RV770 in all it's [sic] glory.", you're clearly not saying "in all it is glory" or "in all it has glory"; you sare saying "in all the glory that belongs to it". So you should use "its", not "it's".

    Even if you can't understand the difference (which seems pretty straightforward, but for some reason confuses some people), modern grammar checkers will pick this up 9 times out of 10.
  • CyberHawk - Thursday, June 26, 2008 - link

    I am not a native English speaker, but I am well aware of the difference. I am also sure that reviewers are also ... it's just that - with all this text, we can forgive them, can't we?

    I have a bachelor of computer science, studying for higher degree, but: I look at the technical side of the article, so I don't even notice the errors :D (although I can tell the difference I simply don't see it while reading)
  • CyberHawk - Thursday, June 26, 2008 - link

    Oh, I forgot: maybe I'm just being too enthusiastic ;)
  • JarredWalton - Wednesday, June 25, 2008 - link

    More likely is that with a 10000 word article and four lengthy GPU reviews in two weeks, errors slipped into the text. I know at one point I noticed Derek says "their" instead of "there" as well, and I can assure you that he knows the difference. I know I use Word's grammar checker, but I'm not sure Derek even uses Word sometimes. :)
  • araczynski - Wednesday, June 25, 2008 - link

    of the 4850's, slickdeals has posted a sale, between rebate and coupon off...$150 each. can't beat that bang/$ by anything from nvidia.

    first ati cards that will ever be in my computers since i've started with the voodoo/riva tnt :)
  • Denithor - Wednesday, June 25, 2008 - link

    Page 15: first reference to "GTX 280" should be "GTX 260" instead.

    Page 19: I think you meant "type" not "time" in this paragraph.
  • natty1 - Wednesday, June 25, 2008 - link

    This review is flawed. It shows greater than 100% scaling for Crossfire 4870 in Call of Duty 4. Why don't they just give us the raw numbers for both single and dual cards in the same scenario? Why use a method that will artificially inflate the Crossfire results?
  • Denithor - Wednesday, June 25, 2008 - link

    If you read the comments before yours, you'd see the answer.

    Experimental error and/or improved scaling for each card versus a single card. Read the earlier comment for more details.

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