3D Image quality
Image qualityThere's little point in having a beefy graphics card if image quality isn't at least as good as the competition's. We're suitably impressed by the Volari Duo V8 Ultra on paper. Let's now see what kind if image quality the card produces via the latest Reactor drivers.. Comparison images are taken from a Radeon 9800 XT 256MB card. AquaMark3's in-built image capturing. Frame 4000 was used for comparison purposes.
Volari Duo V8 Ultra - No AA or AF
ATI Radeon 9800 XT 256MB - No AA or AF
Click on the images for png shots at 1024x768. We can immediately see a significant lack of detail on the Volari Duo V8 Ultra's shot. Also notice how the lights on the vehicle are more blurred in comparison with ATI's. Both cards' drivers were set to maximum quality. Benchmarks should compare like for like, this doesn't seem to be the case here.
Volari Duo V8 Ultra - 4X AA no AF
ATI Radeon 9800 XT 256MB - 4X AA no AF
XGI's drivers do remove most of the jaggies surround the central vehicle but do so by blurring the image greatly. There's no crispness whatsoever. It seems as if XGI still has significant driver work to do. ATI's shot, on the other hand, is clear and 4X AA does its job correctly. It's not looking good for XGI, unfortunately.
Volari Duo V8 Ultra - no AA 4X AF
ATI Radeon 9800 XT 256MB - no AA 4X AF
As expected, there'e more detail in the Volari's 4X AF shot than with no anisotropic filtering. However, the end result is still some way short of ATI's 4X AF. XGI's image still suffers from blurring and a general lack of clarity. It's more akin to ATI's default image quality (no AA or AF).
Volari Duo V8 Ultra - 4xAA 4X AF
ATI Radeon 9800 XT 256MB - 4X AA 4X AF
With bot AA and AF together, ATI's image quality is significantly better. XGI's can be characterised by a lack of detail and clarity, which isn't going to win the firm any new friends. The results were almost identical in a look at 3DMark03's image analysis.
A look at Splinter Cell, with XGI's output at the top and ATI's below, reaffirms our thoughts on default driver image quality. XGI's drivers just aren't outputting the kind of quality we expect. Incidentally, renaming the executable files to disable game optimising had no effect on any of our benchmarks. 2D quality, however, was pretty sharp up to 1600x1200.
