I hate texture aliasing: Radeon 8500/GF 4?

[LardArse]

I hate texture aliasing and would like to get the card that can take care of it better. I used to have a Voodoo 5 which eliminates texture aliasing very well, but I got a Radeon 8500 for a few days but it broke down. Only got to play with it a bit but I encountered a lot of aliasing with it. So which card for me?

 

[Saem]

What method(s) do you want to use to get rid of anti-aliasing?

I'd think the Radeon 8500 would with 4X FSAA would be really good at this. Then again the GF4's ansiotropic filtering could help out here as well. If you can do a buy and return and have the cash, buy both, compare and return the one you don't want.

 

[Brent]

I think i know what you are talking about. With the V5 it not only aa'd the edges of textures but also got rid of that 'swimming' effect off in the distance, right?

No other card right now has that same effect unfortunetly. The best you could do is to turn LOD down, which would make it a little more blurry. In which case you could crank Anisotropy up, heh. ANd turn on 2X or 4X AA.

Just have to play around with the settings and see what works best for you in terms of IQ and Performance.

 

[Saem]

I'd have to disagree. I think people have elevated the V5500 far too much. ATI's implentation is equal or better, from what I've seen.

 

[Brent]

I'd have to disagree. I think people have elevated the V5500 far too much. ATI's implentation is equal or better, from what I've seen.

I think it has the potential to be better, but just isn't there yet.

3dfx's method seemed to not only AA the edges, but to also elminate that 'pixel popping' in certain distant objects

 

[Saem]

That is due to the blending effect of super sampling, the 8500 does super sampling, like the V5500 does SS. Yes the V5500 had a RG pattern, but the 8500 in quality mode has a varied pattern, instead of the straight up OG. I find the latter more prefferable, adds a bit of noise. nVidia uses MS and thus only provides edge AA.

 

[LardArse]

Ok, from the few hours playing with my 8500, I could not get rid of the annoying texture swimming with smoothvision/anisotropic filtering.
Now I need to know if the GF4 can eliminate texture popping better or worse than the 8500. Thanks,

 

[noko]

My Gf3 does render textures smoothly, it isn't perfect but I've found it to one of Nvidia assets compared to my old Radeon. Havn't seen a Radeon8500 to know of any improvements made.

 

[Martillo1]

Maybe you want to have a glance at this article; it explains the subject of texture aliasing quite well.
http://www.beyond3d.com/articles/gf4ti4600lodbias/index1.php

You can extract from the article that texture aliasing is caused by a 'too detailed' image because of an aggresive LOD bias.

Regards

 

[Sharkfood]

GF4 is about the same, unfortunately.

I'm also extremely anal about texture aliasing and have found it quite difficult to eliminate *all* of it on the 8500 or GF3/4.

I will also say it's very title specific. I can usually achieve superior results to an V5/5500 with AA+anisotropic filtering on the 8500 and GF3/4 in lots of games, but the few "problem children" titles just dont seem to be the case- quite specifically, Serious Sam/SS:SE, Quake3 on Q3DM15, CounterStrike (only a select few levels), NOLF, and SS2.

Also realize the 8500 is probably in it's worst iteration of Smoothvision at current. The 7206 driver level and previous had very clean, effective SV, especially at 4xQuality, but along with bug fixes, optimizations and newer drivers- SV has suffered lots of new bugs, including some angles that dont get AA'd at all and some other anomalies. It's been quite a few driver revs now that they haven't addressed this, so here's to hoping for the SV fixes (finally). The 7206's with 4xQ performed great and SV looked incredibly smooth- texture aliasing was near completely eliminated!

For Direct3D, the GF4 does a great job with 4x AF and 4xS AA. It's a really nice change for the NVIDIA cards to finally have some form of texture sampling with an AA mode. Here's to hoping for OGL inclusion.

Cheers,
-Shark

 

[Randell]

DAoC on the 8500 is pretty bad as well on stone textures, especially bridges and in Camelot. SV+AF does help, but not completely.

 

[Pete]

The analysis page Dave presents in this thread seems to show ATi's aniso as more prone to texture shimmer--the GF4 aniso seems to be a tad softer. I'm not sure if aniso is for you, though, if you prefer less shimmer and more shammy, so the pictures may not be entirely helpful.

I'll say this, though: CS 1.5 finally upped performance on my Xpert 128, returning it to the level of my creaky Voodoo 2. I'll take the former's sharp, colorful 32-bit textures over the latter's "Voodoo-blurred" 16-bit ones any day. Of course, my example may be a bit extreme. I may not get texture shimmer with my Voodoo 2, but I also don't get the full effect of the textures, either.

(De_piranesi may be the prettiest CS map I've seen--it's like a medieval theme park! )

 

[Randell]

well I will take CS with 2xQuality AA & 16x aniso over 4xFSAA anyday as the textures are so much sharper into the distance coupled with the performance of the 8500, I could only use 4xFSAA at 800x600.