Video Card Roundup - DVD Quality, Features & Performance - October 2000

ATI, NVIDIA and Matrox (only for the G400) show that they use a higher quality upscale filter as the upscaled test image was not nearly as jaggy in any of those three cases when compared to the test image on all of the cards that failed the test.

The 3dfx cards, the Matrox G200 and the Savage 2000 all seemed to do nothing more than reproduce the low resolution pixels at the higher, nonnative upscaled resolution in the test.

Only the Savage 2000 with its 16-tap x 16-tap filter was able to pass this very difficult test. The rest of the cards produced an undesirable moiré pattern on the test image.

According to MadOnion, only the highest order filters with between 8 and 16 taps will be able to pass this test.

Even the ATI Radeon only features a 4-tap x 3-tap filter which prevents it from passing any of the 8 tests in this category. Luckily for the rest of the manufacturers, this test only accounts for 3.3% of the total quality score, so while S3 may have passed with flying colors, it doesn't buy the Savage 2000 much of a lead.

All of the solutions emerged victorious here.

Not even the Savage 2000 is able to pass a single part of this last upscale quality test, illustrating that there is still room to improve, even among the latest graphics accelerators.