Part 4: Rendering Quality, New Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering Modes
(Continuation, Far Cry)

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• Part 1. Theory and architecture
• Part 2: Practical examination
  • Video cards' features
  • Testbed configurations, benchmarks
  • Synthetic test results
• Part 3: Game test results (performance)
• Part 4: Render quality comparison in games
  • Synthetics: D3DAFTester and DX9FSAAViewer
  • Far Cry
  • Doom 3
  • Half-Life 2
  • Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory
  • F.E.A.R. SP Demo
  • Serious Sam 2 Demo
  • Conclusions on Part IV

Settings and conventional signs

• AA and AF control was done from the game.
• Drivers were configured by default, except for those modified to analyze the quality in various AA and AF modes.

• 4x/16x = MSAA 4x, AF 16x
• 4x+TA/16x = MSAA 4x + Transparency/Adaptive AA, AF 16x
• 4x+TA/16x+HQ = MSAA 4x + Transparency/Adaptive AA, AF 16x High Quality (HQ AF and Catalyst A.I. Off in R520, Catalyst A.I. Off in R480 and HQ mode in G70)

Far Cry

Let's start in chronological order from Far Cry, released in spring, 2004. Far Cry looks good even today (even though a year and a half passed since its release!) and supports all possible technologies, including SM3 and FP16 rendering. Besides, Far Cry uses a lot of semitransparent textures, which forces even the most stubborn skeptics feel the huge value of TAA/AAA.

The game started well in SM3 mode on the Radeon X1800, but it did not allow to activate HDR: according to the log, HDR rendering had been blocked, probably, by the results of VendorID request of the video card.

	Radeon X1800	GeForce 7800
4x/16x	JPEG (~500 KB) | PNG (~2.7 MB)	JPEG (~500 KB) | PNG (~2.7 MB)
4x+TA/16x	JPEG (~500 KB) | PNG (~2.7 MB)	JPEG (~500 KB) | PNG (~2.7 MB)
4x+TA/16x+HQ	JPEG (~500 KB) | PNG (~2.7 MB)	JPEG (~500 KB) | PNG (~2.7 MB)

	Radeon X850
4x/16x	JPEG (~500 KB) | PNG (~2.7 MB)
4x+TA/16x	-
4x+TA/16x+HQ	JPEG (~500 KB) | PNG (~2.7 MB)

Amazing unanimity, don't you agree? Except the GF7800 rendered the foliage differently — the effect of a different MIP mapping algorithm. Besides, you may notice a noise strip on the sand on the first two screenshots from the GF7800, taken in Quality mode instead of High Quality.

We would risk stating that the transparent texture AA quality in the X1800 and the GF7800 is identical in this scene.

But the first surprise is hidden in this very scene: we noticed no special signs of the new anisotropic filtering algorithm. Perhaps the sand under a palm shadow on the left has become more detailed. Will you notice this difference in a game, not when you compare two static screenshots? We doubt it very much...

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