ATI Super AA vs. NVIDIA SLI Anti-Aliasing

[onethreehill]

Some cynics may wonder why the need for such insanely high AA modes. After all, when combined with a high screen resolution such as 1600x1200/2048x1536 for 20”+ LCD/CRT users, and 1680x1050 or 1920x1200 for widescreen LCDs, 4xAA looks pretty good already. But “pretty good” isn’t enough for some gamers. In addition, some games need all the help they can get to combat jaggies. Racing/sports titles for instance, as well as flight sims and some shooters where most of the combat takes place in brighter environments where jaggies are more apparent. Examples of this would include Counter-Strike: Source and Battlefield 2.

http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/...nvidia_sli_aa/

[Turok]

I say ATi wins with AA and most of the image quality.
Only one comparison bothered be, which was Quake4 in 14xAA/16xAF (ATi) vs 16xAA/16xAF (NV)



As you can see, ATi's side looks a lot more blurry.
Im thinking it could be the following:
1) The difference in AA mod makes nVidia's pic do better calculations without blurring the image too much, but I dont think this is true because on the left side of the original image the bars look a lot smoother on ATi all though it's a notch under in AA.
2) ATi's Crossfire solution has a bug at high AA which makes images more blurry. This could be possible, because the difference isnt so great at lower AA.
3) I noticed that ATi's Adaptive AA algorithm eats up the edges more than nVidia, but it looks more realistic and less blocky and bold than nVidia's AA, but at really high resolutions it eats up the edges on textures, making them blurry
4) When ATi's AA reaches really high resolutions, it could be that texture AA gets activated. When you force/hack texture AA on the ATi drivers, you can notice that the textures become smoother and stom flickering, but they also become verry blurry.

[Turok]

...5) Or they benchmarked that pic with ATi on High and nVidia on Ultra High

(Sry for the second post. I thought I was editing the last one, but I was really quoteing it )

[softpain]

Gamers looking for the best combination of image quality and performance though should definitely consider ATI’s CrossFire solution. Because as it stands now, ATI’s got the edge over NVIDIA when it comes to this.

Super ATI vs nVidia SLI Anti-Aliasing

[Cybercat]

notice when they supposedly show 8x versus 14/16x AA, they just show the same graphs as 4x versus 8x.

[afireinside]

I can't tell a difference... I know 16x aa MURDERS performance though.

[[XC] leviathan18]

I can't tell a difference... I know 16x aa MURDERS performance though.

me neither, i guess if you play @ 1600 x 1200 you dont need that kind of AA

[STEvil]

my games are usually too fast for AA.. Aniso helps some though. 2xAA if I can spare it but not often

[einCe]

i tried 14x aa, its nice, but you can get the same effect with 4x temporal aa

[SADS]

i tend to choose between high resolution or AA, i preffer to play at a higher res as it looks nicer

[MaxxxRacer]

let me count the number of users who play at those settings... oh wait.. there are none.

[ahmad]

I love how the 7800GTX 512MB gets served in all the benchmarks at > 4xAA except IL-2 (even Quake4!). Well, Nvidia gets served there too at the super AA modes . Go Crossfire!

This is interesting...



This one is simply amazing. Almost 100% improvement over the 7800GTX 512MB for ATI's x1800XT in the HL2 comparison.



And more than 135% improvement in BF2 (you can look at the image on FS's website, its 35.6FPS vs 84.1FPS).

Thats pretty impressive for ATI I say. I guess its now Crossfire for gaming and SLI for benching

[ahmad]

I'll keep this seperate...



(larger image:

)

One :banana::banana::banana::banana:pit is brighter than the other, thats not a big deal. Both look like they retain the same quality (depends if you like more transparent or more opaque glass I suppose). The more striking difference is the tail. The flaps are clearly much more noticable in one (the other just represents them as a line).

[alexio]

I'll keep this seperate...

The more striking difference is the tail. The flaps are clearly much more noticable in one as well the textures are rendered correctly. The other one just has werid lines for some reason (not the same texture on the plane like the other rendering). The tail definitely looks better on the first image.

They say it's an image capturing bug:

You'll also notice the banding on the tail of the F-15C (the swirly lines) this is another image capture bug that wasn't seen during actual gameplay.

[ahmad]

Ok my bad. I thought I read it all and I got the part about the heat waves not showing the distortion, but I missed that one.

The main thing is the tail flaps though. In one you can see the flaps, in the other they are just lines.