NVIDIA GeForce FX 5800 Ultra: It's Here, but is it Good?

Anisotropic Filtering Quality Compared

Now that you've seen what each card can do, let's compare the two head-to-head. We spent a good amount of time comparing all of ATI's AF settings to NVIDIA's on the GeForce FX, but instead of showing you the conclusion we came to let's take a look at what NVIDIA recommends in their reviewer's guide for the GeForce FX:

So the first and most obvious test is to compare NVIDIA's Performance - Aggressive mode to ATI's Performance mode; the default screenshot is NVIDIA's Aggressive and mousing-over the image will swap to ATI's Performance mode.

Hold your mouse over the image to view ATI's Performance Mode

As you can see, ATI's Performance mode offers significantly better image quality than NVIDIA's Aggressive; the comparison is not as close as NVIDIA would like to suggest. So if NVIDIA's Aggressive mode doesn't look as good as ATI's Performance mode, what about NVIDIA's Balanced mode? That's the next thing we tested; this time around NVIDIA's Balanced mode is the default screenshot, but holding your mouse over the image will give you ATI's Performance mode once again:

Hold your mouse over the image to view ATI's Performance Mode

Here we have a much better comparison, ATI's Performance mode is virtually identical to NVIDIA's Balanced mode.

To finish off the comparison we have NVIDIA's Balanced mode vs. ATI's Quality mode:

Hold your mouse over the image to view ATI's Quality Mode

Since there is virtually no difference between ATI's Performance and Quality modes, we see that NVIDIA's Balanced mode is comparable to ATI's Quality mode as well as their Performance mode.

In the end, we see that it is a fair to compare NVIDIA's Balanced mode to either of ATI's AF modes, however you cannot compare NVIDIA's Aggressive mode to either of ATI's options as NVIDIA's image quality is significantly worse.