3D Image Quality

3D gaming image quality has never been a problem with past ATI cards, and trend continues for the AIW 9600 Pro. I do play a fair amount of 3D shooters, and although speed is important to me, I don't play with bitmaps turned off, and contrast set to maximum. the whole point is to become immersed in the experience, so here's some screenshots of the more popular titles.

Call of Duty

No AA/AF	4xAA/16xAF	6xAA/16xAF

Unreal Tournament 2003

9600 Pro No AA/AF	FX 5600 No AA/AF	9600 Pro 4xAA/8xAF	FX 5600 4xAA/8xAF

There's quite an improvement in image quality as you jump up in AA levels. There is a hit in performance, but 4xAA/8xAF is still playable at 1024x768 in most cases. Between the FX and the 9600 Pro, I found image quality to be quite similar.

2D Image Quality

We loaded up a 1600x1200 image David and I normarlly use in our video card reviews. I also pulled up an HTML document with various sized fonts to judge the text rendering. The document used white text on a black background, and vice versa. The screen resolution for all tests was 1600x1200 @ 85Hz on a Dell rebranded 21" Trinitron.

Scores are subjective, but having worked with many video cards the last few years, I got a pretty firm grasp on what card renders 2D better than the others. The scores will be out of 10, with 10 being excellent.

All the ATI cards looked pretty much the same to me with the bitmap file, but there is an obvious quality drop when moving to the FX5900 when it comes to reading small text. The FX5900 rendered white text on a dark background horribly, and in order not to lose my eyesight, I had to use the mouse to select blocks of text I wanted to read.

TV-Tuner Playback

A TV-Tuner wouldn't be much good if the image quality is weak, so we decided to test the TV-Tuner's capture and playback quality compared to other TV-Tuners and video cards.

Our first test is the AIW 9600 Pro's TV capture quality compared to that of the MSI TV@nywhere. The original stream was a five minute clip captured in MPEG-2 format using the AIW 9600 Pro. This file was then burned to CD in SVCD format, then re-captured via composite cables for both TV cards.

ATI	MSI

I specifically chose hockey highlights as I felt that the fast paced action would make it easier to catch framerate loss. The ATI card dropped about 2% of the frames over five minutes, whereas the MSI card dropped about 4%. In each case, the loss wasn't noticable while paying attention to the clip, though the picture was a little more grainy on the MSI card.

Next up was a test of the XFX FX5600 Ultra vs the AIW 9600 Pro in video playback. I captured a stream from Zoolander to MPEG-2, and snagged identical screenshots to compare the quality.

ATI	XFX

Both cards do a fine job in playing back the file, though like I've seen in the past, there seems to be a slightly darker image on the nVidia based cards. There wasn't any noticable noise that I could notice. How about cartoons?

ATI	XFX

Again, there doesn't seem to be much difference between the two, but upon close examination, there was a little bit of colour banding on the FX 5600, and colours seem better saturated on the AIW.

I should point out that by adjusting nVidia's colour properties, I was able to bring the image quality very close to ATI's levels. The point I'm making though is out of the box, and with default driver settings, the AIW was near perfect.

DVD Playback

Though they are still being sold, PCI based DVD players isn't something I'd imagine many people would use given that software based players are being given away for free in most video card packages. To test DVD playback, we used Cyberlink's PowerDVD, which is my personal favorite, and captured stills from Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines.

AIW 9600 Pro	XFX

Of the video cards tested here, overall, I've found the 9800 Pro to display the best quality when playing back DVDs. The AIW 9600, which is everything the AIW 9800 Pro is, except for the VPU, displays very strong image quality, with no noticable pixelation or framerate loss. Colours were well saturated, and image banding wasn't present.

The FX5600 also managed to output a very nice image, with no loss in framerates. There is a slight amount of pixel noise in the FX based cards, and picture was slightly darker as well. Granted, it's tough to tell the two apart unless you watch the movie side-by-side on each card, but I will give the nod to ATI here.