Performance Leap: NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra

Image Quality - Anisotropic

As mentioned further up in the article in the driver section, NVIDIA's anisotropic filtering implementation has seen several changes. Listing and testing all available modes would go beyond the scope of this article, though.

Since we were unable for the most part to make out any differences between the Quality and High-Quality modes of the GeForce 6800 U, we will limit our tests here to a comparison between the Quality mode with and without the trilinear filtering optimizations.

Texture Filter TestApp V1.2

Click on the thumbnails to get a larger, uncompressed image (.png). The angle optimization implemented in the GeForce 6800 U corresponds to the pattern used by the Radeon 9800XT. As our comparison shows, NVIDIA's Standard mode still uses a strongly reduced trilinear filter- When this option is deactivated in the driver, the card performs real trilinear filtering. The pattern of the 6800 U seems much clearer than that of the 9800XT then.