Anti-aliasing: Okay, ATI has it too!
UPDATE 8/2/10
On Friday July 30th, ATI released a beta driver of Catalyst 10.7 that introduced a couple hotfixes, the most important of which for our discussion is the addition of antialiasing support in StarCraft II. Our review was originally published on the 19th and I think it is fair to say that AMD/ATI and its driver team was listening to what we had to say and has decided to enable the same kind of full-screen AA that NVIDIA had at the game’s launch to allow for more options for their customers.
On Friday July 30th, ATI released a beta driver of Catalyst 10.7 that introduced a couple hotfixes, the most important of which for our discussion is the addition of antialiasing support in StarCraft II. Our review was originally published on the 19th and I think it is fair to say that AMD/ATI and its driver team was listening to what we had to say and has decided to enable the same kind of full-screen AA that NVIDIA had at the game’s launch to allow for more options for their customers.
1920×1200 1xAA – Click to Enlarge
With the retail gaming not allowing us to open up our beta replays, we had to create a new benchmarking method that required a few additional games of StarCraft II under our belt. Oh the humanity. I ended with one VERY similar to our original in both unit counts and performance results but of course all of the data you see here was tested fresh to guarantee accuracy.
1920×1200 4xAA – Click to Enlarge
The two images above show ATI Catalyst 10.7 beta antialiasing enabled in the control panel at work. Let’s see the detail up close:
 |
 |
| 1920×1200 1xAA
|
1920×1200 4xAA
|
You can clearly see on the left that the Zerg have some jagged edges to them and that it is a much smoother image on the right with the 4xAA box AA enabled.
 |
 |
| 1920×1200 1xAA
|
1920×1200 4xAA
|
Zooming in shows us those details in greater contrast.
 |
 |
| 1920×1200 1xAA
|
1920×1200 4xAA
|
This is another zoomed in look at the difference enabling AA in StarCraft II can provide.
In my testing, comparing the ATI and NVIDIA results for image quality with control panel enabled AA resulted in nearly identical images. The Catalyst 10.7 beta driver might be later to the game than NVIDIA’s options but the results are right on par with what NVIDIA provided on day one.
For a quick update to performance testing of the ATI graphics cards with antialiasing enabled I looked at the Radeon HD 5870, HD 5830 and the GeForce GTX 460 1GB card and tossed them at our new SC2 benchmark.
Looking at the previous page you’ll remember that our AA results with the NVIDIA graphics cards showed a noticeable drop in performance when enabling it in the control panel. That continues to be the case for the GeForce GTX 460 1GB card in our retail release testing (40% slower with AA turned on) and the same is true of AMD’s implementation of AA in SC2. The Radeon HD 5870 goes from a solid 103 FPS to 64.1 average FPS, a drop of 38%, while the HD 5830 goes from 66 FPS to about 36 FPS, a drop of 46%.
The same pattern is repeated in our 2560×1600 resolution testing with very significant performance drops across the board; the HD 5870 does appear to be able to handle this resolution with 4xAA enabled though for a good gaming experience.
I do find it interesting, but not surprising, that AMD basically is eating crow when it comes to what they said in this public release about AA in StarCraft II the day the game launched. To quote from AMD’s PR: We are committed to making AA perform at an acceptable level before we release it to our customers. We will continue to work with Blizzard on this matter and hope to offer our customers an acceptable AA solution at a later date. Just three days later we see the Catalyst 10.7 beta that is experiencing the same dramatic performance hit that NVIDIA is seeing; obviously AMD decided it was better to appease complaining fans and journalists rather that actually have “AA perform at an acceptable level before we release it to our customers.”
Overall the new Catalyst 10.7 beta driver did exactly what we asked but no more: allow the gamer the CHOICE to enable AA in StarCraft II to find their best overall gaming experience. Non-AA-enabled performance hasn’t changed for the Radeon cards and they are still notably slower than their similarly priced NVIDIA counterparts and the same ~50% performance drop we saw by enabling AA on the GeForce cards was witnessed with the 10.7 beta driver for Radeon GPUs.
I definitely applaud AMD for stepping up to the plate and answering the call of their customers (and us!) so quickly but both they and NVIDIA (or hey, how about YOU Blizzard?) have some work to do to improve AA performance with what is likely the biggest selling PC game in years.
I do find it interesting, but not surprising, that AMD basically is eating crow when it comes to what they said in this public release about AA in StarCraft II the day the game launched. To quote from AMD’s PR: We are committed to making AA perform at an acceptable level before we release it to our customers. We will continue to work with Blizzard on this matter and hope to offer our customers an acceptable AA solution at a later date. Just three days later we see the Catalyst 10.7 beta that is experiencing the same dramatic performance hit that NVIDIA is seeing; obviously AMD decided it was better to appease complaining fans and journalists rather that actually have “AA perform at an acceptable level before we release it to our customers.”
Overall the new Catalyst 10.7 beta driver did exactly what we asked but no more: allow the gamer the CHOICE to enable AA in StarCraft II to find their best overall gaming experience. Non-AA-enabled performance hasn’t changed for the Radeon cards and they are still notably slower than their similarly priced NVIDIA counterparts and the same ~50% performance drop we saw by enabling AA on the GeForce cards was witnessed with the 10.7 beta driver for Radeon GPUs.
I definitely applaud AMD for stepping up to the plate and answering the call of their customers (and us!) so quickly but both they and NVIDIA (or hey, how about YOU Blizzard?) have some work to do to improve AA performance with what is likely the biggest selling PC game in years.
