Smoothvision - FSAA

FSAA or Full Scene Anti-Aliasing has always been a big selling point for ATI. The quality of the image that an ATI provides has for many years been superior. The ATI chips support FSAA sampling rates of up to 6x which is currently the best image smoothing that you can get at current times.

The introduction of the X800 series has brought a new FSAA technology into ATI's cards. This is called "Temporal FSAA". The idea of Temporal FSAA is that it uses a different sampling pattern for odd and even frames. The positives to this technology is that because of the high frames rates that this card provides the human eye is not quick enough to spot the switch between one frame and the next. Because of this the images merge. So as the X800 only has to use FSAA at half the sampling rate it effectively doubles its performance. The idea is the 2x Temporal Anti Aliasing will be as effective as 4x standard Anti Aliasing.

On the other hand if you kept the same performance you could have twice the size of sampling pattern giving you an even sharper image. There are just a couple of downsides though. Firstly the frames rates have to be high. If your computer is bottlenecked in any way this technology switches itself off. This is because, it has to fool the human eye. At slower frame rates the images to not appear to blend together and so you would be able to see the different sampling patterns on your images. This would be an annoyance at best. Secondly V-sync is always switched on when Temporal AA is on. This is not always a problem when actually using games as it stops your card from drawing unnecessary frames when your monitor is not able to refresh them. It does however seriously hurt your benchmark scores.

Smoothvision - Anisotropic Filtering

The X800 chip supports anisotropic filtering at 2, 4, 8 and 16 textures per pixel. Plus through the driver you can set either bi-linear filtering for best performance or tri-linear filtering for best image quality. Now the Driver can match Nvidia's capability on this driver by allowing a mixed mode which will strike up the best balance between image quality and performance.

Conclusion

No doubt that the X800 has taken the crown for being the sped king of graphics cards now. However its still based on very valid but older technology. So in a way it has fell a little way short to Nvidia's superior card in terms of future features. However these two cards, the X800 and the Geforce 6800 are so far in front of anything else that the differences between them seem negligible in today's market. If your one of those buyers that only buys a new card every 3 or so years then the Geforce 6800 may well have a better life on it that the X800. However if your often buying new graphics cards and computer equipment then the X800 from ATI plays anything that is out today and is likely to be out soon. Also the X800 is certainly the fastest out of the two in terms of raw power.

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