NVIDIA's GeForce FX 5600/5200 Ultra Performance Review

Anisotropic Filtering - Shame on NVIDIA

When we reviewed the GeForce FX 5800 Ultra we came to the conclusion that NVIDIA's anisotropic filtering quality was significantly degraded in the FX line of GPUs. What we were worried about however was that the derivatives of the NV30 would also suffer the same fate because, after all, they all use the same anisotropic filtering and AA engines. When we went to test the NV31/34, we quickly realized that our worst nightmares had come true and that the anisotropic filtering was still as poor quality as we saw with the first FX and it continued to not properly work in a number of games.

We asked NVIDIA about the issues and they insist that they are driver related and that by the launch of NV35, they will be fixed. Unfortunately until then, we are left with a half- working anisotropic filtering setting with all FX derived cards, and a performance-aggressive mode that is completely useless (click here to get more information on what we're talking about).

Until NVIDIA fixes the driver issues, we're forced to use the settings we agreed upon in our GeForce FX 5800 Ultra review:

• 8X Performance - Balanced Anisotropic Filtering
• 4X Anti-Aliasing

• 2X Performance - Balanced Anisotropic Filtering
• 4X Anti-Aliasing

The Radeon 9x00 Pro were run with the following enabled:

• 8X Performance Anisotropic Filtering
• 4X Anti-Aliasing