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Before we got down to the
nitty-gritty and benchmarked the new GeForce 6800 Ultra, we
fired up Unreal Tournament 2004 and Aquamark 3.0 to assess
its "in-game" image quality and to evaluate the quality if
its new (for NVIDIA at least) rotated-grid anti-aliasing
sampling algorithm and adaptive anisotropic filtering
technique...
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Anti-Aliased Image Quality Comparison |
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Whip Out That Magnifying Glass! |
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GeForce 6800 Ultra
No AA |
GeForce 6800 Ultra
2X AA |
GeForce 6800 Ultra
2XQ AA |
GeForce 6800 Ultra
4X AA |
GeForce 6800 Ultra
8X AA |
These first five screenshots
from Unreal Tournament 2004 illustrate the 4 different
levels of anti-aliasing available with the GeForce 6800
Ultra. As you can clearly see, with each successive
level of AA, the jaggies in the scene are considerably
reduced. Pay special attention to the stairs in the
distance, the plank leaning against the wall on the
platform, and the angled rafters at each corner above the
stairs. Sometimes it is tough to see the benefits of
anti-aliasing in a dark scene like this, so open a few of
the images in your browser and switch amongst them quickly.
The differences will be immediately apparent.
GeForce 6800 Ultra
No AA (400% Zoom) |
GeForce 6800 Ultra
2X AA (400% Zoom) |
GeForce 6800 Ultra
4X AA (400% Zoom) |
We also compared the GeForce
6800 Ultra to NVIDIA's previous flagship product, the
GeForce FX 5950 Ultra, and ATi's Radeon 9800 XT.
Products like the Radeon 9800 XT based on ATi's R3x0 series
of GPUs have been widely regarded as having the best AA in
the business, so we were anxious to see how NVIDIA's new
technique looked in a side-by-side comparison. We went
to the same spot in UT2004, and snapped off a few
screenshots using like AA settings with all three cards.
Then we zoomed into a portion of the screen to get a closer
look.
As expected, enabling AA with
the GeForce FX 5950 Ultra also significantly reduced the
appearance of "jaggies" on all of the angled edges within
the scene. While the 5950 Ultra does a well,
side-by-side comparisons, in our opinion, prove that the
6800 Ultra does a much better job. Open each zoomed
image taken with the 6800 Ultra, and do the same with the
shots taken with the 5950 Ultra. Then switch between
like settings, while focused on one of the angled edges.
The GeForce 6800 Ultra clearly does a better job at cleaning
up the edges. Pay special attention to the edges of
the plank, and the rafters at the upper-left corner and we
think you'll agree.
Things got a little more
interesting when we focused our attention to the Radeon 9800
XT. Follow the same procedure as above with these
enlarged Radeon screen shots, and compare them the GeForce
FX 5950 Ultra first. With each level of anti-aliasing,
we believe the Radeon produces better looking images.
Then close the 5950 shots, and open the GeForce 6800
Ultra's. The differences are very subtle, but again,
focus on the edges of the plank and the rafters. We're
of the opinion, that the GeForce 6800 Ultra does a slightly
better job.
As is the case with any image
quality comparison, one man's trash is another man's
treasure. The subjective nature of this process means
that you may not agree with what we deem as "better".
So spend some time evaluating the images for yourself and
come to your own conclusion. And keep this disclaimer
in mind as you move onto the next page! It's time to
see how the GeForce 6800 Ultra's anisotropic filtering looks
when compared to the competition...
Anisotropic
Filtering Quality |
