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Written By:
Date Posted: October 2 , 2002
3D Quality
One thing that has increased immensely since the days of the Voodoo 1 apart from the obvious increase in speed, is the quality of the pictures drawn onto the screen. Matrox has always been a leader in providing quality 3D visuals with their cards, but is the Parhelia any different? As we have seen with technologies such as displacement mapping providing the option for more realistic landscapes, as well as the many other features included in the Parhelia and most other video cards, this card can give your eyes a visual 'feast'. Lets see how or if the quality changes if we add both FAA and ansiotropic filtering as options which can be used to enhance any game. Let us look at how these two features improve the level of detail/quality of the image using Villagemark. I will compare the Parhelia to the Kyro II which is the only other card that I have that supports both ansiotropic filtering and anti-aliasing.
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Parhelia No AA or Ansiotropic filtering
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Kyro II No AA or Ansiotropic filtering
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Parhelia 16X FAA and 2X Ansiotropic filtering
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Kyro II 4X FSAA and 2X Ansiotropic filtering
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Parhelia 4X FSAA and 2X Ansiotropic filtering
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Let us compare the two images. The images without anti-aliasing and only trilinear filtering are very hard to tell apart, in fact I couldn't tell them apart. When we get to the anti-aliased images with ansiotropic filtering we see a difference between the two cards. The Kyro II card seems to have the superior ansiotropic filtering, with more samples being used as we can see from about the middle left part of the grass. When we look at the anti-aliasing of both cards we see the Parhelia comes out on top. If we look at the hill in the background of the image there is a definite difference (at least in the uncompressed image found here). The quality of the 16X FAA is something that you can see as an improvement over the 4X SuperSampling of the Kyro II. However the ansiotropic filtering is something that should be improved as the current maximum setting is only 2X where 4-8X is much more common and usable.
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