UT2003 Image Quality

When benchmarking any of the game titles here we look to benchmark with full Trilinear filtering enabled, which should correspond to the "Quality" Intellisample driver setting detailed earlier. It was a little known fact that UT2003 has mip-map colouring functionality, much like the Quake3 engine and Serious Sam (as seen earlier) - it was little known because it really wasn't all that useful until the 2225 patch release. However, once we started to utilise the new patch it soon became apparent that the full level of Trilinear filtering that should be enabled in the quality settings wasn't being utilised.

Using the custom level we employed in our recent Radeon review, which uses UT's "default" textures on the left half of the screen and the default textures with a detail texture layer on the right hand side of the screen, we'll take a look at the output under the 44.03 drivers. We'll also use RivaTuners "Anti Detect" to remove any specific optimisations for UT2003 and compare the IQ.

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44.03 "Quality" Settings under UT2003
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44.03 "Quality" Settings under UT2003 with AntiDetect

The AntiDetect image clearly shows that there is less Trilinear filtering occurring in the scene than you would expect for the "full" Trilinear filtering apparently offered by the Quality setting in the 44.03 drivers. It also appears that in the normal 44.03 driver image there is more Trilinear filtering occurring on the left side of the screen than there is on the right, where the detail textures cover the default textures.

In the earlier Image Quality section we used an OpenGL filtering test application to display the expected output of the Intellisample texture filtering options, and there is a DirectX version of this application as well.

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Direct3D Filtering Tester

The image on the left shows the filtering quality when the Direct3D version of the Filtering Test application is executed with Quality Intellisample settings - we get full Trilinear as we would expect. However, if we rerun the application, but have it renamed to "ut2003.exe" (the same name as UT2003's executable) we can see that the level of Trilinear filtering output drops quite dramatically^[*] - not what we would expect from the Quality Intellisample setting. So, it appears that any application with the name ut2003.exe will automatically be dropped down to a lower level of filtering quality if the Quality setting was selected by the user - in fact the level of Trilinear filtering applied here seems more akin to the older "Quality"/"Balanced" (middle position) setting now curiously absent from the 44.03 drivers.

* Note: We've noted that this particular behaviour with the test application is not evident on later driver revisions, such as the 45.20's, however the same full Trilinear filtering is still not available in the UT2003 application itself.

Below is the output from a couple of standard game maps, one of which being the Antalus map that is used in the standard UT2003 benchmark. Again, we've taken shots with the standard driver (left) and also with drivers altered via AntiDetect (right).

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Coloured Mip Maps	Coloured Mip Maps
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Coloured Mip Maps	Coloured Mip Maps

In these shots the grass or rocky surfaces are covered with a detail map, and you can notice that with the 44.03 drivers there are areas where a transitions between one mip level to the next are evident by the detail texture being quite detailed on one point, and then blurred at the next because its using a different mip map level. Because of the nature of full Trilinear this is not noticeable in any one area since the two mip map levels are blended across the surface making it difficult to notice any one area of transition.

Close up - without and with AntiDetect
Animated GIF (Detail will be lost from the GIF Format)

Following on from this, 3Dcenter.de did some further investigation and noticed that the effects applied relate to specific texture layers, and the Anisotropic Filtering behaviour also alters dependant on the texture layer in use.

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Stage 1-7 Filtering	Stage 1-7 Anisotropic Filtering

We noted before that when you alter the Direct3D Filtering Test application name to "ut2003.exe" the level of Trilinear displayed drops down, though this applies only to texture stage 0 (the base texture layer). Any other texture stage receives very close to Bilinear filtering, or the equivalent of the Higher Performance Intellisample mode. Beyond that, if Anisotropic Filtering is enabled then only texture stage 0 receives the level that is selected, and any other level has a maximum level of 2x Anisotropic Filtering.

Although we are not doing a competitive comparison here, this does highlight that there are considerable differences when comparing UT2003 on the GeForce FX to any other boards. Although we highlighted that the Radeon 9800 control panel Anisotropic filtering only applies Trilinear filtering on texture stage 0, and Bilinear on the other stages, there are two key differences. The first difference is that the Radeon is always performing Full Trilinear Filtering, and the second difference is that you can enable full Anisotropic Filtering via the application. With this optimisation on the GeForce FX the level of control is removed from the user and this is the maximum quality available.

We will not provide performance numbers of the game utilising full Trilinear and Anisotropic Filtering via the use of AntiDetect since we have no way of knowing what legitimate optimisations are being disabled. We would say that a visual inspection notes no rendering errors with the use of AntiDetect - quite the opposite in fact!