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- Date:
- Tuesday , September 03, 2002
- Author:
- Brent Justice
- Google +1
ATI Radeon 9700 Pro IQ Comparison
We’ve run hundreds of benchmarks on the Radeon 9700 Pro, and now it’s time to take an in-depth look into IQ, video, drivers, and even overclocking.
Test Setup
Gigabyte GA-8IHXP Motherboard, Pentium 4 2.53Ghz Northwood “B”, Stock Intel HSF, 512MB Kingston PC1066 RDRAM, Maxtor 40GB ATA/133 7200RPM Hard Drive, 3Com 3c905cx-txnm NIC, Intel Chipset Driver 4.00.1013, WinXP with all updates.
ATI Radeon 9700 Pro – Tested with Catalyst 2.2 driver version 6.13.10.6159 (Packaging Version 7.76) and control panel version 6.13.10.3019.
ATI Radeon 8500 LE 128MB – Tested with Catalyst 2.2 driver version 6.13.10.6118 and control panel version 6.13.10.3017.
Asus GeForce4 Ti 4600 Deluxe Ultra – Tested with NVIDIA Detonator driver version 30.82.
Control Panel Options
Under the Direct3D and OpenGL tabs in the drivers are many options to control image quality and performance in games. By default the “Main Settings” slider is positioned on “Balanced” for balanced image quality with performance. By moving this one slider, we can adjust the settings as a whole to pre-programmed positions. For example, under the Direct3D tab if we move the slider all the way to the Performance side, it moves the “Texture Preference” and “Mipmap Detail Level” sliders down two notches. However, if we move it all the way to the Quality side, it enables 4X Anti-Aliasing and 16X Anisotropic Filtering as well as moving the Texture Preferences and Mipmap Detail Level to their maximum settings. Under the OpenGL tab it does basically the same thing by moving the Texture Preference and Mipmap Detail Level two notches down in Performance and moves them to their maximum with 4X AA and Quality 16X AF in the Quality setting. For our testing, we are going to utilize the “Custom Settings” option to manually change sliders to compare image quality with.
The two main features we're going to look at now are Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering, which is all part of SMOOTHVISION II. For all quality tests, Texture Preference and Mipmap Detail level are at their maximum settings.
SMOOTHVISION 2.0
Anti-Aliasing:
SMOOTHVISION was first introduced with the Radeon 8500. In this first implementation of ATI’s new Anti-Aliasing method, they chose to go with a Super Sampling approach utilizing an OGSS by default sample pattern technique. They also furthered this by adding some programmability to alter the sample pattern to be rotated or jittered somewhat. Because of the way Super Sampling works at taking a pixel sample and a texture sample at each sample level, it's going to incur a substantial performance hit whenever used. This was very apparent on the Radeon 8500 with its Anti-Aliasing performance taking a pretty big performance hit. Thankfully with the Radeon 9700 Pro and SMOOTHVISION 2.0, ATI supports BOTH Super-Sample and Multi-Sample modes (or combinations of the two), as well as fixed RGMS by default sample pattern. There's even a programmable jitter table for custom sample patterns, PJMS as ATI calls it. As we've seen in the benchmarks, the Radeon 9700 Pro’s AA performance is very fast, allowing us to play at high resolutions with 4X AA. Using an RGMS pattern alone will improve AA image quality over the 8500’s default OGSS, so let’s take a look at how it all compares.
Flight Sim 2002
In Microsoft’s Flight Sim 2002 under Settings – Display - Scenery all options were set to their HIGHEST setting possible. Dynamic Scenery was enabled with the Extreme Dense option selected. All detail textures were set on max. Under Aircraft all options were also selected to max settings. Under Hardware the target frame rate was set to unlimited and max hardware lights set to 8. Transform and Lighting was enabled as well as MIP Mapping and multitexturing with trilinear Filtering. For our anti-aliasing shots the resolution used was 800x600x32 so aliasing would be more predominant. I simply took off from the default Meigs airport, and when the plane was in the air switched to an outside view, turned the plane and took the screenshot. In the pictures notice the aliasing on the plane itself and on the tops of the buildings in the shots.
With anti-aliasing disabled you can see how ugly that plane looks with all the aliasing. When 2X anti-aliasing is enabled the Radeon 9700 Pro and GeForce4 Ti 4600 clear right up. On the Radeon 8500 you can still see some aliasing in places where you cannot with the Radeon 9700 Pro and GeForce4 Ti 4600. At 4X anti-aliasing the Radeon 9700 Pro is just plain smooth. AT 6X the Radeon 9700 Pro is both very smooth and very playable. It seems though the sweet spot with Flight Sim 2002 with anti-aliasing is at 4X and a higher resolution for best AA image quality.
Need for Speed Porsche Unleashed
In Electronic Arts Need for Speed Porsche Unleashed under Options – Graphics all details were set to their highest settings available. Lens flare was on and sky rendering was high with a max view distance at 800x600x32. The track used was Schwarzwald. I simply found a spot that showed aliasing and used that for these screenshots. One thing to note about Need for Speed Porsche Unleashed is that it does use small texture sizes; therefore the textures are not very defined. It's easy to see though with the aliasing seen on the car, the top of the sign, and the walkway.
In a racing sim, anti-aliasing can help clear up those jaggies that just seem to hinder the fun factor in the game. Here we see that the Radeon 9700 Pro is able to pretty much make a big difference even at 2X anti-aliasing. During gameplay this game was smooth as butter even at 6X anti-aliasing, though it is an older game. The ability to crank up AA and resolution makes for very enjoyable gameplay.
Anti-Aliasing Up Close
It's always good with anti-aliasing tests to zoom in and see just exactly what it's doing to rid the edges of those jaggies. For this test I used Unreal Tournament 2003 build 927 and picked the map called Citadel. In this map there are some spiky orb things floating in the sky, I noticed that they had a great deal of edges on them and showed aliasing well. I took a screenshot at 800x600x32 of one and zoomed in at 400% to see the edges. I tried all levels of anti-aliasing so we could see up close what the Radeon 9700 Pro is doing.
At 2X anti-aliasing you can actually see how it's blending the color of the sample from light to dark if you look closely. This is ATI’s Gamma Correction technique in SMOOTHVISION 2.0’s Anti-Aliasing. At 4X if you count the color gradients you will see there are three. At 6X if you count them you will see five. Also note that every edge on the horizontal and vertical is also being anti-aliased. This is all indicative of a rotated grid method being used.