Anisotropic Filtering
ATI plays its trump card in anisotropic filtering. As opposed to NVIDIA, ATI does not filter all textures with the set filter levels, and instead, decides on how thoroughly each texture is filtered depending on the user's viewing angle to the texture. NVIDIA claims that ATI gains in performance at the cost of quality. In practice, however, hardly any difference can be noticed. Interestingly enough, ATI has recently begun calling its filtering technique "adaptive," or "adaptive anisotropic filtering."
