Many months have passed since we wrote the review for the Geforce FX 5800 Ultra card. In that review we were nagging about how nVidia had lowered the image quality of textures since they released the GeForce 4 card. Personally I am convinced that the graphics card not only should increase the performance of its predecessor, but also that they should have higher image quality.
Now with the Detonator 52.16 driver, nVidia have taken a step further to its lowering of the image quality. But, do you really need to care? In the Detonator 4x.xx driver, optimisations for UT2003 lowered the quality of the texture filtering. With Detonator 5x.xx, they have been “kind enough” to add this optimisation on all the 3D graphics.
“The FX series are, however, pushed ? by means of forced worse image quality, which the user can not deactivate, even if he wished to. It is somehow paradox that Nvidia advertises the new drivers with the release highlight “enhanced image quality for both anisotropic filtering and anti-aliasing”.”
3D-Center has written an article about the subject here.
Personally, I have a little hard time with accepting their comparison between texture filtering and FSAA, but except for that it is a well-written article, even though it would have been a great idea to illustrate the differences by showing screenshots from a couple of different games.
