Image quality is one spot where ATI has totally dominated nVIDIA the last couple of years, but with the release of the NV40, things are much closer. We're going to compare the AA and AF quality of an Asus AX800XT/TVD to an Albatron GeForce 6800GT.

Click on each image to see the full size image quality comparisons.
X800XT PE - 4x AA vs. 6800GT - 4x AA
X800XT PE - 16x AF vs. 6800GT - 16x AF
X800XT PE - 4x AA, 16x AF vs. 6800GT - 4xAA, 16x AF

Things are definitely a lot closer than they were in the last generation. Overall I would still give the edge to ATI as their AA seems a bit cleaner at the edges. However, AF from both cards is still spectacular! Either way you go you're going to have a very pretty image when playing games...

Pushing ATI to the limits!

Even though the Asus AX800XT/TVD is already a fast videocard, we're still interested to see how much further it can go with a little overclocking. The ATI core is clocked at 500 MHz by default, which is quite high already, but let's see how high we can push this little bad boy.

I quickly raised the core speed to 540 MHz, but shortly afterwards saw a few problems going past 548 MHz. Anything higher and the core would lock up. Weird, since previous generations of Radeon GPUs would start to artifact when pushed too hard.

The memory is clocked at 560 MHz by default on the AX800XT/TVD, so I immediately pushed the memory frequency to 600 MHz. While the AX800XT/TVD could handle that in 2D mode, 3D benchmarks were totally out of the question. A bit disappointing but not unsurprising. I slowly raised the memory frequency and it seemed to top out around 584 MHz.

Unfortunately were not able to run the core and memory at their maximum frequencies, we had to lower the core speed to 542 MHz and the memory to 580 MHz to get the Asus AX800XT/TVD videocard to run properly while overclocked.