![[H]ardOCP](/images/blank.gif){kind=small}
- 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.
Anti-Aliasing Continued...
Quake3
Quake3 version 1.30 was used for these quality tests. All OpenGL settings in Quake3 were set to their maximum settings. For these shots I downloaded a map called “Obelisk” which had a set of stairs located in it. From looking at them at a distance in 800x600x32 I saw quite a bit of aliasing, so I decided to use that for my AA tests.
I think these pictures pretty much speak for themselves. The Radeon 9700 Pro’s 4X anti-aliasing is better than the Radeon 8500 and the GeForce4. At 6X it’s just incredible. Also note the frame rates at 6X AA. Yes, it's really getting 400fps at 6X AA. Of course, this is a small room and not much to render, but notice the drop in FPS on the Radeon 8500 and GeForce4; the Radeon 9700 Pro doesn’t lose any.
Unreal Tournement 2003
In build 927 of Unreal Tournament 2003 under Video Settings I chose 800x600 resolution with Trilinear Filtering and a Triple Buffer. Under Detail Settings Min Frame Rate was at 30 and every other setting was either on or at its highest detail level. I chose a spot in the Antalus map for my Anti-Aliasing comparisons.
Again, if you look closely at 4X anti-aliasing, the Radeon 9700 Pro edges out on top for best anti-aliasing. And just by glancing over to the FPS counter you will definitely see who the clear winner is.
Serious Sam 2
For Serious Sam 2 we chose the OpenGL API and set Preferences to default Quality setting at 800x600x32 resolution. I also went into Advanced Display Settings and disabled anisotropic filtering for these anti-aliasing shots. I chose a spot in the Sierra de Chiapas map that showed aliasing on the foliage. Our point here is to see if it does indeed anti-alias alpha textures.
MSAA by nature only anti-aliases polygon edges, therefore things like point sprites and alpha textures do not get anti-aliased. This is in comparison to Super-Sampling which basically takes the whole screen image and FSAA’s it. SMOOTHVISION 2.0, however, claims that it can anti-alias alpha textures with a technique that ATI has come up with. This comes straight from their whitepaper on SMOOTHVISION 2.0:
“SMOOTHVISION 2.0 employs another new feature that addresses the multi-sample quality issue with alpha blended (i.e. transparent and translucent) textures. Existing multi-sample implementations can only assign one of two values to each sample – 1 (Foreground) or 0 (Background). Samples falling on alpha blended areas of a texture are always assigned a value of 1, and therefore these parts of the image don’t get anti-aliased. SMOOTHVISION 2.0 has the unique ability to store any value between 0 and 1 for each sample, so it can store alpha values sampled at multiple locations within a pixel along with color values. The alpha values are then blended along with the color values, providing anti-aliasing within alpha blended textures as well as on polygon edges.”
OK, that all sounds fine and dandy, however in our screenshots you can clearly see that the foliage, which has been zoomed in 200%, has no anti-aliasing done to it at all on the Radeon 9700 Pro currently. So while the Radeon 9700 Pro has the ability to anti-alias alpha textures, it's not currently implemented. I do hope ATI can get this working with a driver release, as this will definitely help image quality in those outdoor scenes in current games.
*Update
9/10/02
I have just recieved some info from Dave Baumann of Beyond3D fame regarding an article they did with a paragraph on AA'ing with alpha-textures.
"It transpires that R300 supports the OpenGL 1.2 alpha coverage mask call, which can be used to convert Pixel Shader output to anti-aliased coverage. If this were forced on then there could be some issues with older titles, such as Half Life, which already use this function for different purposes. At the moment ATI have not included an option to force this via the driver but may still at some point. There is presently no DirectX equivalent as yet so this would be specific to OpenGL titles at the moment anyway."
So there you have it, even if it does get forced on older titles may or may not experience problems, and it would only work in OpenGL at this time anyway.