Image Quality Comparison
First of, let's examine texture filtering. Below you'll see screenshots of D3D AF tester with the Radeon X1900. The screenshots are arranged in this order: 1x, 2x, 4x, 8x and 16x. In case you're wondering, the number of AF samples is forced from the driver panel.
They're not that much different from the previous generation, the X800. However there is one major difference. ATI took a lot of flak with AF in X800 because it is only applied to the first texture stage (when forced from the driver panel), so the X800 is pretty much only doing bilinear filtering to the other stages. Below you can see that with the Radeon X1900 (and X1800 too), that's not the case anymore. Every texture stage is now correctly anisotropically filtered, even when AF is forced from the control panel. Theoretically this gives us a much higher quality image than on the X800 (under the same settings).
Next up are the application controlled AF screenshots. Just like before, they are arranged in this order: 1x, 2x, 4x, 8x, and 16x. They're pretty much the same thing really, we can see that there are no visible compromises here, except maybe for angle optimization.
Starting with the Radeon X1800, a new high quality anisotropic filtering option is now available. When this option is enabled, angle optimizations are turned off. Below are the MIP filter screenshots with HQ AF enabled (1x. 2x. 4x. 8x and 16x). There's definitely a significant difference between the two, although it may not always be noticeable in gameplay. The most intriguing thing about this HQ AF is that it can be used with both application controlled and driver forced anisotropic filtering levels. But even more so, ATI claims this filtering is essentially free with virtually no performance hit whatsoever.
With the previous generation, we really couldn't say that ATI have the best filtering, although it did provide the better image quality even with optimizations enabled. With the X1800 and X1900, that's simply not true anymore. With the X1800 and X1900 series, ATI does not only offer the best filtering available, but have taken it to a higher level with HQ AF. They are also claiming that the new series have a much more faster 6x anti aliasing performance, nearly close to 4x AA levels. These two improvements should be very welcomed by gamers wanting a higher quality image. We'll take a later look at these performance claims to see if they are true or not. For now, let's take a look at what these image quality improvements offer in real games.
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