GeForce GTX260+ vs Radeon 4850 Part 1: Performance

Direct3D (16xS AA)

The last two sets of benchmarks will cover combined AA modes which are available exclusively on nVidia’s cards. Their notable advantage is their ability to offer full screen super-sampling, which anti-aliases all screen content.

The performance hit can be quite steep but then that’s the whole point of getting a muscled card like the GTX260+, right? Image quality in older games is impeccable when using these modes and I love using them whenever I can, plus they’re very useful for testing new video cards.

I’ll go straight for the throat and benchmark at my top resolution of 1920×1440 along with 16xS AA and super-sampling TrAA (Descent 3 used multi-sampling as super-sampling has excessively poor performance in that game).

Here are the Direct3D games that post respectable results at the settings I described above:

It’s amazing to see games almost ten years old like 1999’s Descent 3 running so well at settings far in excess of the developers’ wildest dreams at the time they were programmed. This is truly one of the strengths of gaming on the PC platform.