ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT - R600 Has Arrived

To see how the anti-aliasing modes available on the new Radeon HD 2000 series compared to ATI's previous flagship Radeon X1950 XTX and NVIDIA's GeForce 8800 GTS, we snapped a few screenshots using Half Life 2 at various settings with the game configured to run at a resolution of 1280x960 with 16x anisotropic filtering enabled.

Image Quality Analysis: Anti-Aliasing 2900 vs. x1950 vs. 8800

Radeon HD 2900 XT 2X AA	Radeon HD 2900 XT 4XAA	Radeon HD 2900 XT  8X AA	Radeon HD 2900 XT 16X (WT) AA	Radeon HD 2900 XT  24X (ED) AA
GeForce 8800 GTS 4X AA	GeForce 8800 GTS 8X AA	GeForce 8800 GTS 8xQ AA	GeForce 8800 GTS 16X AA	GeForce 8800 GTS 16xQ AA
Radeon X1950 XTX No AA	Radeon X1950 XTX 2X AA	Radeon X1950 XTX 4X AA	Radeon X1950 XTX 6X AA

When flipping through the screenshots above, please pay special attention to the labels and the file names listed in your browser's address bar, as this will help you keep track of the settings used to capture the image.  Also note that only the 4X anti-aliasing screenshots above will represent a true apples-to-apples-to-apples comparison between the three cards.

If you look through the shots, the first thing you're likely to notice is a slight rendering bug on the HD 2900 that causes a problem with the lighting on some of the buildings and trees. We're confident this will be fixed in a future driver release so we won't dwell on it. What's more important to focus on are the gradients on the cables that span the top of the screen, and the fine details in the antennas atop the buildings. As the AA levels are increased, the all of the cards do a great job of reducing the jaggies.  But if you focus your attention on the lower left portion of the screen you'll also see that ATI's new CFAA modes also blur the scene slightly.