GeForce GTX260+ vs Radeon 4850 Part 2: Image Quality

TrAA/AAA (Call of Duty 2)

First we’ll start with Call of Duty 2, one of the titles where the 260+ was beaten by the 4850 with TrAA/AAA. The images are game screenshots of a tree relatively close to the player.

As a matter of interest, here are the reference images with AAA/TrAA disabled (so alpha textures are not receiving AA):

260+ (Off)

4850 (Off)

Straight away we can see some differences: the 4850 does a better job preserving some of the fine detail in the branches, especially the very thin stalks at the end. Looking at the leaves, both vendors have spots that have more detail than the other, so they’re probably even overall.

Now let’s enable TrAA/AAA (super-sampling) on both vendors:

4850 (4xAAA)

260+ (4xTrAA)

Compared to the reference images above, both vendors are clearly applying anti-aliasing to the branches and the leaves, which squashes my initial suspicion that ATi wasn’t actually applying AAA when requested in this title. But that’s where the similarities end. The 4850 seems to gain even more detail in the branches, especially the very fine sticks at the ends of the tree. The 4850 also “fattens” up the leaves, something the 260+ doesn’t do.

However the leaf edges are clearly smoother on the nVidia card, as are the edges of the larger branches. The 260+’s image is also blurrier overall, especially the interior of the leaves, indicating that nVidia is applying more anti-aliasing than ATi is. As a result, nVidia’s leaves will shimmer less during in-game movement because they’ll receive more anti-aliasing.