ATi & Nvidia Video Card Roundup #2

Anisotropic Filtering Performance

This content was originally featured on Amdmb.com and has been converted to PC Perspective’s website. Some color changes and flaws may appear.

Here we’ll take a look at the different cards’ ability to sharpen textures as it recedes into the distance. We are using Morrowind again (this time using Fort Ebonheart) to compare the effectiveness of each level of filtering. Below are restuls of anisotropic filtering cropped from the original 1024×768 image.

Setup:

	Radeon 9500/9700	GeForce FX Series	GeForce 4 Ti Series
0xAF
2xAF
4xAF
8xAF

Click the cropped images to view the full picture.

Admittedly, there isn’t much we can say about anisotropic filtering. The results from each card is comparable and it’s difficult to say if there are any substantial differences in quality. If there are any major differences to spot, it’d be even harder to notice them when you’re actually playing a game.

What is interesting however are the performance numbers from going to 0xAF to 8xAF. We see that the Radeon and the FX series cards only lose a little in the frame rate, whereas the Ti4800SE loses a whopping 16 fps (but still remains faster than the FX5600). It’s clear that the newer generation hardware does anisotropic filtering more efficiently.