In this section of 3Digest we control changes in rendering quality in selected applications after drivers updates.

Contents

1. What's new
2. Graphics cards
3. Galleries

What was new this month

• NVIDIA released the new reference drivers which we used for comparison with the previous reference drivers.

Graphics cards

The following graphics cards were used to make the Quality Control section:

• ATI Radeon X850 Pro PCIE (Sapphire RADEON X850 PRO)
• ATI Radeon X1800 XL (ATI Reference Card)
• NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT PCIE (ASUS Extreme N6800GT)
• NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GTX (NVIDIA Reference Card)

Besides, the following cards have been tested before:

• ATI Radeon X800 Pro (PowerColor RADEON X800 PRO LE) (until 07.2005)
• NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra (NVIDIA Reference) (until 07.2005)

Galleries

Galleries are updated a) in case of new patches introducing noticeable changes to rendering quality; and b) accordingly with new drivers releases. In the first case we remake the gallery for all drivers anew.

Considering that ATI releases new, but rather similar drivers every month, we perform quality control for ATI graphics cards on each first month of the quarter (January, April, July and October).

In case of NVIDIA we examine just new official drivers which also happens about once in three months.

Anyway, we reserve the right to examine drivers, official or leaked, out of turn, if we are just interested in it.

1. Doom 3 v1.3
   • GeForce 6800
   • GeForce 7800
   • Radeon X800/X850
   • Radeon X1800

2. Far Cry v1.33
   • GeForce 6800
   • GeForce 7800
   • Radeon X800/X850
   • Radeon X1800

3. Half-Life 2 (the latest version)
   • GeForce 6800
   • GeForce 7800
   • Radeon X800/X850
   • Radeon X1800

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