ATI's Radeon 8500 & 7500: A Preview

SMOOTHVISION: Finally, something good to say

Earlier on in this review we mentioned that SMOOTHVISION (ATI's Anti Aliasing function) would reduce some of the blurring artifacts associated with other multi sampling based AA algorithms such as NVIDIA's Quincunx.  We managed to run a quick benchmark (although it was very difficult to get it to complete properly) under Need for Speed: Porsche Unleashed using fraps to measure the average frame rate over a quick demo replay.

Before we get to the results let's have a look at the image quality first, does SMOOTHVISION's random AA sampling pattern truly offer a noticeable improvement in image quality?

First we have the original shot (taken on a GeForce3) of our white 911 Turbo during the night. This was take at 640 x 480 x 32.

Zooming in a bit we get this picture:

The areas that are numbered 1 - 5 are where we want you to pay close attention to. Below we have NVIDIA's GeForce3 with Quincunx enabled.

The following shot is from the Radeon 8500 with 2-sample SMOOTHVISION enabled.

Can you tell any differences between the Radeon 8500 shot and the GeForce3 shot? We couldn't; now let's have a look at how the two perform:

Here's something interesting. The Radeon 8500 outperforms the GeForce3 by 15% when both are using their 2-sample multisampling AA algorithms (Quncunx vs. SMOOTHVISION) at 640 x 480 x 32. When the resolution is increased to 1024 x 768 x 32 the performance delta increases to 30% in favor of the Radeon 8500 once again. Potential is the word here; keep this in mind.