Image Quality:
It is clear that the ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 256mb is a phenomenally fast card. Speed however is not the only factor you should take into account when deciding what you will spend your hard earned money on. ATI have been praised in the past for their very high quality of image and the very low level of performance hit that effects the card when AA or AF are applied. The purpose of this section is to illustrate to you the difference in quality you are receiving when moving up through the settings in the above benchmarks as well as to give you an idea of the overall image quality of the Radeon 9800 Pro.

For this test a frame from Game Test 1 and a frame from Game Test 4 in 3D Mark 03 are used, screenshots were then taken from these frames at 1024x768 using the same AA and AF settings used in our benchmark tests. The reasoning behind using 1024x768 is that the higher the resolution you use, the less need there is for AA/AF and so 1024x768 gives the best indication of the image changes made for the user.

Those on slower lines please be patient as flash file loads (just under 900k)

To download high resolution Game Test 1 and Game Test 4 BMP images click here (7.78mb rar)

In Game Test 1 the most noticeable differences can be seen if you look at the wings of the planes (specifically the bottom plane or the plane closest to the camera). With no AA or AF they are very jagged on the angles however as the AA and AF are increased the edges look much nicer and the image more realistic.

In Game Test 4 the changes are most noticeable on the blades of grass throughout the picture, with each increase in AA and AF they become more clear and defined. The flash demonstration above depicts this with zoomed in images on game test 4 (nature), to compare on your own machine with high resolution BMP files, download the RAR file.