|
3D Quality
Ansiotropic filtering and anti-aliasing are standard parts of the quality picture currently. All companies that make video cards have implemented higher quality levels of either ansiotropic filtering (ATi - 16X), or higher levels of anti-aliasing (nVidia - 8X). So lets see the level of quality of the image that is being shown on the screen. We will use PowerVR's Villiage Mark test, that we have used previously. Lets look at two specific areas that show a difference in AA and ansio.
Looking first at the AA test we see that there is very little difference between the three cards without AA enabled. With the various levels of AA enabled (16,8,4) we see that the Parhelia comes out on top but only by a slim margin. If you look at the landscape in the background on the 5900 Ultra and the Parhelia, you can notice that the Parhelia has just a smoother image. The Radeon 9000 is in last place in this test with its maximum of 4X AA.
Moving to the ansiotropic filtering of the cards, with it disabled the Parhelia has better filtering. You can notice that the ground seems 'bumpier' on the Parhelia without ansiotropic filtering even enabled, otherwise both of the other cards look very similar. With ansiotropic filtering enabled, we see that in this part of the image the Radeon doesn't really do much if any filtering, due to its adaptive design. The Parhelia's 2X ansio looks slightly better than its trilinear filtering. The FX5900 has the best ansiotropic filtering of any of the cards tested here, with the the image looking much better than the other two cards. Overall MSI's FX5900 Ultra has very nice image quality, especially with the ansiotropic filtering settings, but now lets look at the TV capture quality. TV In/Out Quality
TV quality has come a long way in the past few years. Older nVidia based cards didn't provide a decent video output, while other cards were pretty nice. Currently my personal favorite for video out is the Matrox Parhelia, which in my opinion provides some of the best TV-Out there is. Using the reference video that we have used before, that of Chicken Run DVD, lets see how well the TV out quality to an ATi All-In-Wonder 9000 Pro.
Reference Image
|
MSI GF4MX 8888
|
|
MSI GF4MX 8888
|
Hercules Radeon 8500LE
|
ATi AiW 9000 Pro
|
Matrox Parhelia
|
MSI GeForce 4 Ti4800
|
MSI FX5900 Ultra
|
The TV out of the FX5900 Ultra suffers from a distorted image, that has a border on either side of the picture, and a fuzzy picture. There also seems to be a pronounced checker pattern on solid colors and also on the text, something we don't see with some of the other cards notably the Parhelia. While the text on the reference image is sharp and aliased, the Parhelia does a good job of antialiasing the text, while not overdoing it. The two ATi based cards do fairly bad with the text, as it is very blurry, with the AiW 9000 having a slightly worse text image here. The image itself is nothing great with the ATi cards as there is the blurring again with the eyebrow, as well as some of the wire fence missing with the images from the AiW 9000 especially, but also with the 8500LE and the Ti4600-8X. A decent TV-out but no where near the top cards here. How about TV-In, does the FX 5900 fair better?
| |
Reference Image
|
|
MSI GeForce 4 Ti4800
|
Radeon AiW 9000 Pro
|
MSI FX5900 Ultra
|
What do we see here? The Ti4800 is the worst of the cards tested here, with over saturation in all areas which leads to missing elements in the video. The text of this card is aliased which is nice as it provides crisp lines, but it would have been a good idea to have some sort of antialiasing on the text. The ATi AiW looks very nice, and is nicely saturated, with decent quality images though the image isn't perfect as it is missing some of the video, as again can be seen in the top right corner. The text on the AiW is good, not to antialiased but also it isn't too crisp. As for the MSI FX5900 Ultra the image is plagued by some of the same problems as the MSI Ti4800 card, with the text having absolutely no aliasing, which doesn't look good for the text. The image has the same honeycomb type structure that the TV-Out of this card also suffered from. Overall the Radeon AiW 9000 Pro provides the best picture apart from the reference image. Now lets take a look at the benchmarks.
|
