HDR plus AA and Transparency Anti Aliasing
Another notable image quality improvement NVIDIA imbued the GeForce 8800 is the support for floating point HDR effects and AA together. Remember, AMD introduced this feature a long time ago with the X1800 series - almost two generations ago (counting the release of next generation cards this year). Two games that come to mind when talking about HDR and AA are Serious Sam II and Oblivion. However, Oblivion doesn't natively supports using HDR and AA on both NVIDIA and AMD graphics cards - you have to 'force' anti aliasing through their respective drivers. So, we're relying on Serious Sam II at the moment. First off, let's see how does 4x Transparency AA with Supersampling and Adaptive AA with Quality has to offer, image quality wise in Serious Sam II.Serious Sam II (Transparency AA)
GeForce 7950GT
Radeon X1950 Pro
GeForce 8800GTS
We think the GeForce 7950GT is more 'noisy' than the GeForce 8800 or Radeon X1950 Pro. GeForce 8800 transparency anti aliasing quality actually went 'back' to the level we originally saw with the GeForce 7800GTX and that's a good thing. Now, let's look at the HDR plus AA shots. Of course, this means we're only going to look at the Radeon X1950 Pro and GeForce 8800.
Serious Sam II (HDR plus AA)
Radeon X1950 Pro
GeForce 8800GTS
4x MSAA and 16x AF with HDR enabled looks better on the GeForce 8800 than on the Radeon X1950 Pro, at least if you're looking at the gun on the left. The gun on the right seem to favor Radeon X1950 Pro - differences due to different sample patterns perhaps? However, there's no denying textures are much sharper too with less artifacts on the GeForce 8800. Most likely the GeForce 8800 more angle independent anisotropic filtering is the cause.
While testing with HDR plus AA and transparency / adaptive AA, we noticed these cards and their respective drivers from both manufacturers will not enable transparency / adaptive AA in Oblivion if you try to force anti aliasing from the driver panel. So, users will have to trade off HDR or adaptive / transparency AA in Oblivion.
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