what are best features? bump-mapping, anisotropic, ...?

[GrefMofovich]

I'm not really too interested in raw gpu power myself (it's all good as long as you got something non-super slow) as the rendering features that make games look really good. Can someone in the know summarize these features and which ones are most important? I know it depends on the software too. But is anisotropic filtering any good? I think environmental bump mapping might be pretty sweet, right?

I turned on AA when running a 3dmark, and aside from lowering the score by 1000, it actually made the images seem moreblurry! So I guess not all of the extras are necessarily good in every case either.

I'm curious what are the really good features essential in a card?

[jamil5454]

Most recent cards from Nvidia and ATI can do almost all those "cool" things. Nvidia might be a little ahead with SM3.0, but don't plan on seeing it's visual effects in games anytime soon.

[GrefMofovich]

Alright. How about anisotropic filtering and trilinear filtering? They're both related to image quality, right? Which one of them is better to turn on? (I understand AF is more of a burden on the card) I'm just trying to find out how to make my software look best while not running suckily on my GF4 Ti. Oh what's SMP3.0?

Can anyone list some games that use Environmental Bump Mapping?

[Magua]

SM 3.0 = Shader Model 3.0

Its a feature of Nvidias new card release and they are marketing SM 3.0 hard because its a feature the ATi X800 dosen't feature. However, the image quality boost over the 2.0 remains to be seen, and there are really no games that use it. For me right now its a non-issue.

[Cyan]

Far Cry either can or will use SM3.0

As for filtering

this article

http://www6.tomshardware.com/graphic...603/index.html

Goes over it very well.

[Magua]

Also it seems SM 3.0 primarily increases the efficency of shaders, and won't actually increase image quality much.