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IMAGE QUALITY:
There have
been countless image quality comparisons made between the
Radeon an GeForce series of video cards, and here's one
more! (albeit a very quick one!) Both of the screen
captures below were taken in Quake III, with all of the
"in-game" options set to the exact same levels. We
maxed out the texture and geometry sliders and enabled
tri-linear filtering.
RADEON
TI 4200
For the Radeon,
we enabled 4X "Quality Mode" AA, and set the Anisotropic
filtering level to the maximum, "16X", in the ATi
driver panel. On the GeForce 4 Ti 4200, we enabled
4X AA and set the Anisotropic filtering level to NVIDIA's
maximum setting of "8X". The screen resolution was
set to 1024x768, with 32-Bit color and textures.
Both images appear to be very similar, but personally I
give the image quality nod to the GeForce 4. There
seems to be more detail in floor and in Sarge's face on
the screenshot taken with the GeForce 4. At these
settings though, the Radeon's AA seems just a slightly
more effective, the difference is most visible in the
steps, where the gradients appear smoother, at least in
our opinion, on the Radeon. In a fast paced game
like Quake 3 however, picking out these minute differences
would be very difficult.
2D Image
quality was also very similar, whether we were using the
Radeons or the GeForce 4 Ti 4200. At desktop
resolutions all the way up to 1600x1200x32, it was next to
impossible to spot any quality differences between all of
the cards. NVIDIA was criticized for their 2D image
quality in the past, but their latest generation of
products seems to have cleared up any issues.
DVD playback,
surprisingly was also very similar on all of the cards.
Traditionally ATi's DVD playback quality had been
unrivaled but whether we used PowerDVD 4, or ATI's DVD
Player (on the Radeons), distinguishing playback
differences between the cards in most scenarios was very
difficult. The Radeon did seem to have less
"tearing" when watching high action sequences though, so
for DVD playback the Radeons still have a slight advantage
in our opinion. Let's find out how the each of these
cards perform in a 3D rendered world.
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Our Test System |
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Pentium 4 / i845 /
DDR SDRAM Platform |
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Common Hardware:
Intel Pentium 4 2.2GHz.
(2200MHz.) Processor
ECS P4IBAD (i845 DDR) S478
Pentium 4 Motherboard
256MB of Crucial DDR SDRAM
IBM DTLA307030 30GB. ATA/100
7200RPM HD
Pioneer 16X DVD-ROM
On-Board PC-97 Sound
Windows XP Professional with
Direct X 8.1
Intel chipset drivers, version
3.20
Video Cards:
Apollo Graphics Devil Monster
II Radeon 8500 LE (128MB DDR) 250MHz. Core / 230MHz.
Memory
ATI Radeon 8500LE (128MB DDR)
250MHz. Core / 250MHz. Memory
NVIDIA GeForce 4 Ti 4200
Reference Card (64MB DDR) 250MHz. Core / 250MHz. Memory
Driver
Revisions:
ATI Reference drivers,
v7.67 - 6.13.10.6037
NVIDIA Detonator XP v28.32
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DirectX 8 - Remedy's Max Payne |
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No Payne, No Gain... |
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