NVIDIA GeForce FX 5800 Ultra: It's Here, but is it Good?

Anti-Aliasing Quality Compared

This comparison works the same way our ATI vs. NVIDIA AF comparisons worked, by default NVIDIA's 2X is showing in the image below but all you have to do is hold your mouse over the image and you'll see ATI's 2X AA:

Hold your mouse over the image to view ATI's 2X AA

With this comparison you can get a good idea of exactly how little NVIDIA's 2X AA is doing. Looking at the ATI screenshot you can see that there are now intermediate steps between the jaggies, whereas that's completely absent from NVIDIA's 2X screenshot.

So what about NVIDIA's 4X mode? We've already established that it's doing considerably more than their 2X mode, but how does it compare to ATI's 4X AA? You know the drill:

Hold your mouse over the image to view ATI's 4X AA

This is a much closer competition now, but you can still see a slight advantage in ATI's 4X mode. The AA samples in the ATI screenshot seem to be blended together better than what we see in the screenshot produced by the GeForce FX; it's not a huge deal, and no where near as dramatic as the 2X comparison, but it's still worth noting.

So what do we compare? Since we've established that NVIDIA's 2X setting needs some work, it looks like we'll be pitting ATI's 4X up against NVIDIA's 4X