ATI X1000 Series Video Card Roundup

Features

Anti-Aliasing: Ah, the jaggies. We all love them..right? The days of having the little buggers all over your screen have been over for a good while now but it has always come with a performance penalty. With this new generation ATI sought to give us not only great Anti-Aliasing but a minimal performance hit when enabled. How much you ask? Well it’s always going to depend on what game you play but if we are talking Half Life 2, the custom time demo we recorded showed less than 7 fps difference going from 0xAA to 4xAA at 1600×1200. In Serious Sam 2 we see about a 12 fps difference. We’ll get a bit more into the numbers later.

Take a look below and see what kind of difference Adaptive AA can make to your gaming experience.

High Dynamic Range (HDR)

Dynamic Range defines the ratio between highest and lowest value that can be represented. More bits of data = greater dynamic range. Floating point has a much greater range than interger.

Dynamic range examples:

• 8-bit integer – 256:1
• 10-bit integer – 1,024:1
• 16-bit integer – 65,536:1
• 16-bit floating point – 2.2 trillion:1

Most displays can only recorgnize values between 0 and 255 (i.e. 8 bits per color component)

• Requires tone mapping to preserve detail
• Light bloom and lens flare effects can help conver a sense of high brightness

HDR rednering rakes advantage of color formats with greater dynamic range, which produces more realistic images.

High Quality Anisotropic Filtering

ATI has added a new AF mode as well named simply “High Quality” in the Catalyst Control Panel. This new mode has increased trilinear filtering precision which produces sharper, clearer textures. With this mode you will have no angle dependant filtering and won’t see the “shimmer” effect on ground and wall textures as you’re walking around.