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Image Quality

If there is one major thing that ATI constantly touts, its their image quality. It's true that in past generations, ATI have definitely ruled the roost as far as clarity and color reproduction goes, and they have a much cleaner track record (though still blackened) than Nvidia as far as unfair optimizations through the driver go, but Nvidia has certainly stepped up the quality with their 7800 cards. Once again though, ATI with their X1000 cards are pushing heavily their superior image quality. We will get to the trivial quality comparison tests, but first we want to make a point of highlighting the important IQ advancements ATI have made with the X1000 series.

One of the big things ATI have pushed with this line is their tag "Shader Model 3.0 Done Right!". This mantra extends from their architectural changes through to their image quality improvements, and part of this is their implementation of HDR. ATI have developed the X1000 Series to run at a (relative) minor performance cost with not only full 64 bit HDR enabled, but also multisampled Anti Aliasing turned on, or their new Adaptive AA. This means that you no longer will have to sacrifice HDR for Anti Aliasing or vice versa. This will surely be a selling point for the new cards whether they clobber Nvidia's offerings in raw performance or not.

In general terms, ATI's new Adaptive AA performs the same function as Nvidia's Transparency AA. It clears 2D sprites of their usual jagged edges by blending the sprite with its background, creating a much smoother look over the usual rough appearance that fences and foliage often give.

As far as actual texture quality goes, the new cards come packed with marketing fluff, boasting the usual night and day difference between their solution and Nvidia's, but really, when you are engrossed in a game, your eye won't notice the subtle differences that the 'revolutionary enhancements' actually bring (which isn't a whole lot realistically). We have done some basic image quality comparison tests using the snapshot feature in 3DMark 2005 to display what you can expect from each board.

We took multiple shots at different quality and resolution settings, but we recieved some strange color artifacting at the lower quality levels on both the 7800 GTX and the X1800 XT, so we have excluded those results.

ATI Balanced at 1600 x 1200, 4x AA, 4x AF

Nvidia Quality at 1600 x 1200, 4x AA 4x AF

ATI High Quality at 1600 x 1200 4x AA 16x AF

Nvidia High Quality at 1600 x 1200 4x AA 16x AF

As is apparent from these shots, ATI's textures certainly have a marked sharpness and contrast improvement over Nvidia's, but this also appears to increase the noticeablity of some of the colur artifacts that are present in the test. Also, look at the un-softened shadows on the left side of the ATI shots, this is nowhere near as nice as Nvidia's shadowing work. As far as texture fidelity goes, both are about equal, with ATI taking a small lead in some areas. The color quality of the ATI renderings is significantly better than Nvidia's, and all of ATI's tones come across much fuller than Nvidia's.

Regardless of what minute image comparison studying brings though, both offer image quality that is strong enough that you won't be able to tell the difference when a game is in full motion. Neither has significantly poorer image quality, with each presenting different strengths.

When testing initially to determine the quality setting we would use for the benchmarking, we determined that ATI's 'balanced' setting was equal to Nvidia's 'Quality' setting in the driver menu. All of the benchmarks were taken at these respective settings, and we have noted this in the Test Setup section.