Image Quality

As we mentioned earlier in the article AMD’s AA on this card varies when compared to older Radeon hardware. To look at the effects we have taken two approaches, the first is to review the performance hit which occurs when changing between AA modes and the second is the quality of the images produced by the card with each setting.

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Using Need for Speed Carbon with maximum settings we see that the traditional box AA method provides us with some playable framerates which are in excess of the GTS. The game looks great on these settings and plays flawlessly. Enabling Wide Tent mode results in a 40% drop in performance on average and takes the game into unplayable territory.

Screenshots

So there is a reasonable hit in performance from the use of Tent AA however what effect does it have on the image? Shown below are a selection of screenshots taken in Oblivion. For this test we have all in-game settings at their maximum quality and a resolution of 1024x768 to ensure a large number of “jaggies". Please note the high resolution images are in lossless BMP format for maximum viewable quality. They are considerably larger than normal JPEGS to download, so those on slower lines may wish to skip this section. These screen grabs are not protected so you can download them to your desktop and study further in an image editing program if you so desire.

0AA

4AA

8AA BOX

8AA NARROW

8AA WIDE TENT

Clearly there are changes in the IQ from 0xAA to 4xAA and the move to 8xAA (box) also brings IQ benefits which are easily noticeable (look at the highest part of the tower for example). Beyond this on the Narrow Tent and Wide Tent look very similar to us and we would prefer to stick with box mode due to its considerably higher performance.

Of course the card really isn’t aimed at those using 1024x768 so here are a few screenshots to compare the IQ at 1920x1200. In these the differences in AA become even harder to notice due to the high detail levels provided by the resolution. Again 8xAA seems the best mix of AA and performance however it could be argued that the 4xAA mode looks very similar.

0AA

4AA

8AA BOX

8AA WIDE TENT

Finally we have a selection of screenshots taken to show overall image quality of the HD 2900 XT. The Oblivion and HL2 screenshots were taken at 1920x1200 with 8xAA and 16xAF. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. was tested at 1920x1200 with all ingame settings set to their highest levels.