Conclusion

Writing this article, we couldn't help thinking much the same concluding thoughts as we did when we took a look at G80's image quality back in December 2006.

R6-series hardware brings orthogonality to its ROP and sampler hardware, in the sense that all filters and levels are available to almost all surface and framebuffer formats. Application developers targetting R6-series can AA and AF pretty much any format they care to feed the ROP or sampler array, so we can't take issue with what R6-series chips are capable of there.

Just like we took issue with CSAA, however, we take issue with CFAA. For those that skipped the big subsection of this article that talks about the AA down-filter choices available to R6-series hardware owners, we believe that while the basic premise behind CFAA is sound, where the chip feeds the shader core with MS information in an efficient manner for a custom non-box filter, we're not so convinced about the current filter choices that work on that sample information.

The inherent blurring properties of the filters AMD give the user access to in the control panel, mean they don't raise the IQ game overall. However, AMD have the luxury of changing those filters going forward (and we hope they do), and the basic box filter is still available for quality we really enjoy at the 8x setting.

MSAA down-filter choices aren't easy ones to make though, with the best ones computationally expensive, so we definitely look forward to seeing what AMD can do with the silicon and performance budget that they've got available, should they decide to change the filters in the future. The current tent filters are a step in the right direction overall, they just have some unwanted properties.

We don't check out motion video quality here (NVIDIA need slapped wrists for some odd driver choices here which we'll clear up soon, with AMD's motion video playback quality generally just fine), but we want to mention again that performance with UVD has settled down in recent drivers.

To finish, AMD have some IQ work to do, with both surface and AA filtering. The former lags behind NVIDIA in absolute IQ levels, and the latter feels like a taster of things to come, rather than a truly polished implementation of what's possible with non-box filtered MSAA quality in a modern graphics architecture.

That's not to say the final pixels out of R6-series parts are visually objectionable. Far from it of course, with only IQ connoisseurs likely to tell the absolute difference between R6 and other hardware when playing games in motion at common settings (so no CFAA). But we always ask the IHVs to up the absolute quality when they can, and we hope AMD make some extra forward progress there for their next generation products.

Join us in the forums to discuss the R6 family's image quality.