Performance Leap: NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra

Image Quality - Anisotropic, Continued

In this scene in AquaMark3, we can see the heavy optimization present in the driver of the GeForce 5950 Ultra. Older driver versions offered a much higher visual quality here .

The GeForce 6800 Ultra renders the scene correctly, though, and even enjoys a slight advantage over the Radeon 9800XT (visible in the white stripes in the middle of the screen).

In this scene, there were no discernable differences between the Radeon 9800XT and the GeForce 6800 Ultra.

Once again, the 9800XT and the 6800 U offer virtually identical results. While the FX 5950 U does a good job of filtering the area in the foreground, we can see reduced filtering quality on the lid and the landscape in the background .

So we see that NVIDIA has come abreast of ATi where anisotropic filtering is concerned with the GeForce 6800 Ultra. By offering the option of disabling the "optimized" trilinear filtering, NVIDIA can even surpass ATI in this category.

It is nothing short of frightening, how far NVIDIA has reduced the filtering quality of the FX 5950 U over the past few months.

For comparison, here is a look at the GeForce 6800 Ultra's anisotropic filtering performance in UT 2004 at 1600x1200 for comparison: