Deeper with the Radeon X1900 series

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We've just uploaded part 2 of Deeper with the Radeon X1900 series. As promised, in this article we examine both adaptive antialiasing and HDR rendering on the Radeon X1900 series. We did find ATI's adaptive antialiasing image quality to be somewhat 'lacking', but in a way, that's to be expected. HDR rendering is stronger though. It's a shame than NVIDIA didn't take the time to beef up the GeForce 7900 with HDR and AA support.

ATI's latest offering, the Radeon X1900 XTX is strong, but it does have its weak points. We already covered the lack of performance with texture dependent games in our last article. Now we discovered that ATI's adaptive antialiasing is not as effective as NVIDIA's transparency anti aliasing. You don't really gain that much image quality improvement, even with Quality setting.

However, we also saw that ATI is putting the Radeon X1900 XTX as a forward looking part. HDR performance is way stronger than the GeForce 7800GTX, even in texture dependent games like Serious Sam II. In shader heavy games like Splinter Cell Chaos Theory, the Radeon X1900 XTX is simply on a higher level than the GeForce 7800GTX. Of course, the icing on the cake is the ability to use AA with HDR, something the GeForce 7800GTX lacks.

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