Aquamark3: Accurate Benchmarking for Old and New (DirectX9) Apps?

NVIDIA's Statement On The Low Filtering Quality With V51.75

We asked NVIDIA about the low filtering quality with v51.75, and they explained a bug in the driver causes it. It does not filter correctly when anisotropic is requested by an application. Forcing the filtering in the driver control solves the problem.

So we made additional screenshots to verify NVIDIA's information. We compared the results of the quality forced by the drivers with v51.75 with the quality of v45.23 (Application):

(Frame 3600) The image shown here is compressed and therefore somewhat misleading. Click on the image in order to get an lossless PNG image.

Here's the Flash animation:

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The second situation:

(Frame 2450) The image shown here is compressed and therefore somewhat misleading. Click on the image in order to get an lossless PNG image.

Here's the Flash animation:

(Macromedia Flash needed)

We can confirm NVIDIA's statement. The v51.75 filters far better when the filtering is forced in the drivers. But as you can see in the quality comparisons, it's still not as good compared to previous drivers. The problem is that AquaMark's important Triscore test always runs with 4x anisotropic filtering so lowering the filter quality results in better scores.