Anisotropic Filtering Performance - Half Life 2: Lost Coast

We evaluate per-level filtering costs for aniso using Lost Coast, the game requesting the level rather than us forcing it for all surface filtering via the control panel. We test at 1280x1024 and 1920x1200.

1280x1024

1920x1200

We mentioned in our initial look at the architecture, a full G80 can perform 32 pixels per clock of filter setup (addressing being the main component of that) and 64 INT8 bilerps per clock for the filtering component. Therefore the basic filtering architecture lends itself to high performance, something witnessed in the performance testing results at both resolutions.

That the default out-of-the-box mode for G80 is a high quality one, where texels are receiving a proportionally higher tap count across the screen than on any other consumer hardware shipping today (out of the box of course, AMD's high-quality mode is similar but must be user selected), means the performance is even more impressive than at first glance.

The sampler hardware -- and remember it's fully threaded, independantly of shading threads -- is a serious G80 architecture strong point, and thus a competing architecture in the same space will have to do something similarly strong in terms of performance to keep up or best what NVIDIA have managed to build.