The new image quality enhancing features have been lumped together with a new NVIDIA trademark called Lumenex. Lumenex offers up to 16XQ anti-aliasing, 16x anisotropic filtering that is almost perfect and of higher quality than ATI’s AF, and support for up to 128-bit HDR. Image quality is important to me as a reviewer, and the 8800GTS and GTX deliver the highest possible IQ on the market today.

NVIDIA has introduced a new method of anti-aliasing called Coverage Sample Anti-Aliasing. This differs from the traditional Multi-Sample AA by taking samples from a coverage area instead of subsamples from a pixel. There are several new AA modes. 2X AA is 2 sample MSAA. 4x AA is 4 sample multisample anti-aliasing. This is simple enough to understand right? NVIDIA has deviated from their previous practice of mixing Multi-Sample AA+ Super Sample AA.

In point of fact, 8XS and 4XS modes no longer exist in the NVIDIA drivers. 8x AA is really 4x multisample Antialiasing with 4 additional coverage samples. 8xQ AA is true 8 sample multisample anti-aliasing. 16x AA is 4x AA+8 coverage samples. This mode provides the best performance in most applications+ image quality as performance is just a little less than the 4x mode. 16xQ AA is 4x multisample anti-aliasing+12 coverage samples. This is the highest quality mode of anti-aliasing available on the GeForce 8 series.

Here’s a scene from Oblivion magnified. Note that no AA shows jaggies throughout the scene. 2x AA shows a limited smoothing of the jaggies. 4x AA shows much cleaner lines for the chapel. 8x AA looks like 4x AA but look closely at the lines, see how they blur. 8xS looks about how 8 samples should look, looking at 2x 4x 8xQ you can see the progression from step to step. 16x looks like 4x+cleaner lines on the chapel. 16xQ looks the cleanest of all the modes, but is also the most expensive in terms of performance.

NVIDIA totally redid their Anisotropic Filtering with the 8800 series cards. GeForce 3 cards had mostly angle-independent anisotropic filtering. What this means is that the GeForce 3 and 4 had the best looking anisotropic filtering. NVIDIA decided to change their AF to a more angle-dependent algorithm with the GeForce 5 series. This caused the AF to look worse than the competition by default. With the 8800, the AF pendulum has swung back in NVIDIA’s favor. Here’s a series of pictures of the AFTester. Note how NV’s 16x AF looks almost perfect, ATI’s 16x AF has a bunch of spikes.