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Image Quality Continued
........the
problem is that unless you really dial up the image
quality options what you get is a final rendered screen
that just plain sucks I'm afraid to say. Take a look
at the image below, taken using the "Aggressive"
performance setting and "Best Performance"
Mipmap detail setting and you'll get an idea what
I mean.
Image is Clickable
Now I'm not ruling out a driver glitch here but in
testing with the supplied 42.69 "shipping"
drivers things were far from great. To begin with,
in a lot of cases using the lowest quality but highest
performing"aggressive" setting gave a quality
of image that was simply awful, and depending on the
particular game it wasn't always easy to see any visible
improvement when moving the slider up a notch to "Balanced".
In
the UT 2003 screenshot below you can see how the difference
between the "Aggressive" and "Balanced"
setting is very minimal. Also worth remembering is
that most reviewers will by default benchmark the
FX using one of these two settings.
On the other hand below is an example of the Radeon
9700's lowest available image quality setting compared
NVIDIA's "Balanced" setting.
Image is Clickable
And
perhaps it's even more obvious if you look at the
two images below taken from the opening animation
in Microsoft's Combat Flight Sim 3.
Combat Flight Sim 3, GeForceFX Screenshot ~ Image
is Clickable
Image is Clickable
Luckily
you can force an improvement in the FX's image quality
but it means dropping the "Aggressive" performance
option, applying anistropic filtering and turning
up the Mipmap detail level setting to at least its
"Blend" setting. For this reason, and because
getting an exact match in IQ between the Radeon 9700
Pro and the FX varied from game to game, I pretty
much gave up on all hopes of doing a like for like
comparison between the two cards. That didn't stop
me drawing a conclusion on the matter though but that's
for later.
Image is Clickable
Image is Clickable
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