Image Quality

Intellisample Control Options

Over the course of the GeForce FX series so far the "Intellisample" image quality control panel options have gone through numerous name changes, though the actual functionality remained the same for each of the settings up until the "Detonator FX" driver series starting with the 44.03 driver set.

42.68 Intellisample Settings

43.28 Intellisample Settings

44.03 (Detonator FX) Intellisample Settings

With the DetonatorFX series NVIDIA's focus was on IQ and performance. With the previous driver set they found themselves being compared to ATI's texture filtering quality in still screenshots and were loosing out, despite NVIDIA arguably supporting a more accurate filtering method in their hardware, albeit limited to an 8x maximum Anisotropy level. So they have attempted to better emulate the output of ATI, and exceed it where their hardware allows it. The other issue with the previous options was that the only mode that offered full Trilinear filtering was their "Application" mode, which performed very poorly. NVIDIA state that the Application mode contains some debug code that dragged the performance down, so with DetonatorFX this has been replaced with a "Quality" option that provides full Trilinear quality, but without the overhead of the debug mode.

So, let's take a look at the FSAA and Texture filtering options available under the new Intellisample modes

Texture Filtering

As mentioned above, the Intellisample setting names, and in some cases the functionality, have been changed in the DetonatorFX driver series; here are the example outputs of the types of texture filtering these should enable.

On the far left is the sample output from OpenGL SamX's Texture Filtering application, in the middle is an image from Serious Sam, and on the right is the same Serious Sam image with the mip-map level colouring enabled.

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Quality Texture Filtering
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Quality Texture Filtering, 8x Anisotropic Filtering
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Performance Texture Filtering
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Performance Texture Filtering, 8x Anisotropic Filtering
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High Performance Texture Filtering
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High Performance Texture Filtering, 8x Anisotropic Filtering

The mixed Bilinear and Trilinear modes still exist under these new Intellisample settings, in both the Performance and High Performance modes. However, as we can see from these images, both the High Performance and Performance settings are very aggressive in their usage, to the point where they are both very close to straight Bilinear - the level of Bilinear / Trilinear blend that used to exist in the older drivers middle setting (old "Quality" or "Balanced") now no longer appears to be available.

The Anisotropic Filter Kernel's under each of the modes are unchanged from the previous respective settings, with the Quality mode offering the most amount of screen with high quality filtering, and the High Performance mode the least.