In many games, image quality is paramount over performance. There is no substitute for realism, and today's video accelerators are helping developers deliver increasingly picturesque gaming. So which card delivers the most realism? How about vibrancy and color depth? Using 3Dmark 2000, we are able to compare the image quality of today's high-end cards.

Armed with MadOnion.com's Result Browser, we can capture the exact same image on different cards, simultaneously viewing the same area of the saved picture. In order to ensure the best quality on each card, we've run the test at 1024x768x32 using 32-bit textures and a 24-bit Z-Buffer.

The best way to differentiate between these images is to open them all in different instances of Microsoft Paint. By switching between the images, a few differences become apparent. NVIDIA's GeForce2 renders the image nearest to the reference; however, we must say that the Radeon manages to look better due to what appears to be cleaner filtering. An example of this is the mountain to the far right of the screen. Even the reference image (which is rendered with Microsoft's software render) looks washed out. 3dfx's Voodoo5 deviates the furthest from the software renderer but manages to improve on the image's accuracy. You'll see that the tents in the Voodoo5 capture have all of their legs, whereas the software capture omits a couple of them.

The XOR shots are basically comparisons to the reference image. All pixels that match are blacked out, while those that don't are colored. As you can see, the GeForce2 most accurately reproduces the image, with the Radeon coming in a close second. 3dfx's Voodoo5 has really done an interesting job at rendering, and hardly conforms to the reference image at all. We consider the color vibrancy of the Radeon to be the best, but the GeForce2 follows what 3DMark is looking out for in a more precise manner.