3D Quality Tests
All video cards these days have
some form of Antialiasing and ansiotropic filtering, but some
can do some interesting 'optimizations' to improve performance
while lowering the quality of the displayed image. So what
kind of quality does the ATi card give, have they improved anything
in the current generation from the x800xl cards?
First looking at the ansiotropic
filtering image tests, we see that there weren't really any
improvement in the quality of trilinear filtering. The
x1800XL card might be slightly sharper, but that is a very small
difference if there is any at all. Moving to 16X ansiotropic
filtering the AX800XL looks to be ever so slightly sharper in
the upper right corner, but like the previous result the difference
is insignificant.
Moving on to the anti-aliasing,
what are the differences? Like the ansiotropic filtering
tests, there really aren't any. The one interesting point
is that in this test the bottom right corner shows better ansiotropic
filtering on the x1800XL than the AX800XL, with a slightly more
detailed image being drawn at this angle. Lets see if there
is any difference in the video quality of this card.
Video Quality (In/Out)
Quite a few cards are beginning
to come with a video in component to them. This Gigabyte
card is one of those cards, which thanks to the Rage Theater chip
makes quality a decent proposition. So what kind of quality
do we get from this card? We will be using a clip from a
claymation movie "Chicken Run" as it shows great detail
and variety of color. For our tests we have a reference
image ripped directly from the DVD, an image from another Rage
Theater chip based card, the Asus AX800XL, and an image from a
Rage Theater 200 based card, the AIW 9000Pro. So lets see
the results.
|
Reference Image
|
|
Radeon AX800XL
|
AIW 9000Pro
|
Gigabyte x1800XL
|
Looking at these pictures shows
us what differences? Looking at the top right of the picture
we see the x800 card seems to get the background color slightly
off, with most of the background detail being somewhat blurry.
The x1800 is closer to the reference image than the other Rage
Theater based card, which means Gigabyte must have done some
slight tweaking to achieve this. Facial detail is good
on the x1800, but is too blurry compared to the reference image,
and especially compared to the AIW 9000. Moving to the
text portion of the test image, we see that the Rage Theater
based cards smooth the text quite a bit, which some may like.
The AIW 9000, goes the other way, sharpening the detail of the
text. Overall the Gigabyte x1800XL does better than a
similarly equipped card, but worse than the actual image, and
far worse than the image from a Rage Theater 200 based card.
What about the TV-Out quality,
this is something that is controlled by the actual video card,
so is there a difference between these different cards?
Has ATi improved its image quality here? Lets use the same
video with the Rage Theater 200 based AIW 9600 being the base
capture card.
|
Reference Image
|
|
Radeon AX800XL
|
Matrox Parhelia
|
Gigabyte x1800XL
|
Albatron GeForce 6200TC
|
We can see quite a difference
between the four test cards. Starting from the left to
right, we see the AX800XL and basically all ATi cards prior
to it has some serious quality issues. Looking from the
top right we see the image is very blurry, and the image has
been cut down in width somewhat. The text also suffers
from this same blurriness making the image appear worse.
Moving to the Matrox card we an image that is even better than
the reference image, with the clarity being spot on and the
text appearing crisper. Next is our review card, the Gigabyte
x1800XL. The image of this card is markedly better than
that of the AX800XL, as the image is almost as crisp and clear
as the reference image. Text is slightly blurrier than
the reference image, but again immensly better than the AX800XL.
Lastly the only nVidia card we had as a comparison, the 6200.
This card has a blurrier image than the x1800XL but not by that
much. Text quality is poor, but better than the AX800XL,
but no where near the x1800XL. Overall the Gigabyte card
does very well here, only slightly worse than the reference
image, which is a very nice improvement over previous ATi cards.
2D Quality
As with any video card, the vast
majority of your time spent with it will be in the form of a 2D
display, whether you are browsing the web, reading e-mail or anything
else, the quality of the 2D display of a video card is vital.
These days most manufacturers have gotten the hang of providing
good quality text/image quality from the video card. Lets
see how this card does when its compared to the Matrox Parhelia,
which is still one of the very best 2D quality video cards I've
used, and the AX800XL from Asus. The test will consist of
regular 10 point text with both black text on a white background,
and white text on a black background, there also will be an image
that provides quite a variation in color. The monitor used
is a 21" Dell Trinitron based monitor, yes it is still a
CRT. So lets see the results.
|
Matrox
Parhelia |
Asus
AX800XL |
Gigabyte
x1800XL |
| Black
Text: |
8 |
7.5 |
7 |
| White
Text: |
8 |
7.5 |
8.5 |
| Image: |
8 |
7 |
7.5 |
| Score: |
8 |
7.25 |
7.5 |
The Gigabyte x1800XL we see
a image that was overall very close to the Parhelia. The
Black text test was lighter in density while looking less crisp.
The white text image was actually better than the Parhelia,
with the whites looking cleaner and crisper. The image
test provided a slightly washed out image, but nothing too bad.
Looking at the AX800XL we see that compared to the Matrox Parhelia
it was somewhat brighter in all three tests, with this washing
out the color slightly in the image test, but still making it
better than most of the rest of the cards we have tested.
Text was still good but the higher brightness, which most likely
could be changed somewhat, caused the text to be a bit harder
to read. The Gigabyte card gets a slight nod ahead of
the Asus card, with the better white text on black giving it
the lead. Both of these cards, and most ATi based cards
it seems, have very good 2D quality, just slightly below the
Matrox Parhelia, in my book anyway.
Overclocking
Now lets look at the performance
portion of this review, first by looking at the overclocking ability
of our sample. Obviously your results may vary, but this
is an indication of what we were able to get. So how high
did it overclock?
We see that the overclock was
rather disappointing, as only the core increased by about 10%
to 558MHz, while the memory would not let you overclock it at
all. This was rather sad as the memory is rated at 700MHz
instead of the 495MHz it was running at. While the heatsink
was using thermal paste on the GPU, it might have been the fact
that it is a single slot cooler that hampered our overclocking
or simply the fact that the part we received wasn't that overclockable.
As a side note, the only program that would overclock our card
at the time was the built-in ATi Overdrive software.
NEXT
