ATi & nVidia Anti-Aliasing Performance
Anti-Aliasing quality and performance compared while using anisotropic filtering

Dezember 10, 2003 / by Leonidas / page 4 of 10 / translated by 3DCenter Translation Team

   Performance Comparison  (cont'd)

This is what we got in 1024x768:

This chart should be obvious enough to almost ignore the (following) single performance figures. Anti-aliasing performance characteristics clearly differ between the ATi and nVidia graphics chips: while all ATi chips - including the comparatively modestly clocked Radeon 9700 128MB - stand their ground and lose very little performance even with 6x anti-aliasing, the nVidia chips can only keep pace up to a maximum setting of 4x anti-aliasing.

With higer anti-aliasing modes the nVidia cards take a real dive - certainly a hint towards the bad "effect to cost ratio" of nVidia's hybrid modes incorporating supersampling when compared to the pure multisampling modes (up to 4x on nVidia chips). This is where nVidia's chances are getting slim. When put up against the higher 4xS, 12x and 8xS modes, ATi's comparable 4x and 6x modes are in places significantly faster than the GeforceFX 5900 Ultra 256MB - even a GeforceFX 5950 Ultra 256MB won't be able to change that.

Ø of all games	without AA	ATi 2x nVidia 2x	nVidia 4x	nVidia 4xS	ATi 4x nVidia 12x	nVidia 8xS	ATi 6x
Radeon 9800 Pro 256MB	59,5	58,1	-	-	55,2	-	49,6
GeForceFX 5900 Ultra 256MB	58,1	53,4	50,9	43,1	35,2	26,8	-
Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB	59,6	57,2	-	-	53,0	-	47,1
GeForceFX 5900 128MB	56,2	51,1	47,4	37,9	30,3	21,2	-
Radeon 9700 128MB	55,3	52,2	-	-	47,1	-	40,5
GeForceFX 5800 128MB	54,8	49,0	45,1	35,3	25,6	20,5	-

While comparing graphics cards with 128MB vs 256MB we couldn't find anything of substance, the average performance of the respective contenders didn't deviate much at all. The only thing that reacted to more memory in a meaningful way was Unreal Tournament 2003 in higher modes of anti-aliasing, both on ATi and nVidia hardware:

UT2003	without AA	ATi 2x nVidia 2x	nVidia 4x	nVidia 4xS	ATi 4x nVidia 12x	nVidia 8xS	ATi 6x
Radeon 9800 Pro 256MB	43,9	42,6	-	-	41,0	-	37,2
Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB	44,0	37,5	-	-	24,9	-	18,9
GeForceFX 5900 Ultra 256MB	44,1	43,4	43,1	36,8	27,4	21,8	-
GeForceFX 5900 128MB	44,3	41,4	33,3	25,1	19,1	14,6	-

The clock speed differences between cards should be taken into account for this comparison: the Radeon 9800 Pro 256MB's memory clocked is higher by 10MHz than on the Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB (we can probably safely disregard this), while the GeForceFX 5900 Ultra 256MB at 450/425MHz has a 50MHz higher core clock than the GeForceFX 5900 128MB at 400/425MHz. This obviously doesn't explain the differences in performance we observe here - this must surely be the larger memory on the 256MB models. As we noted, this only happened with Unreal Tournament 2003, in 1024x768 to boot.