So you are in the market for the crème de la crème of video cards. You want a card that will knock your socks off and leave you breathless. However, 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.

First off, you will notice that we have not included the Voodoo5 6000. Since the card is not yet ready and still lacks a release date, we decided not to include it in the comparison (plus we don't actually have one). That said, we expect the quality to be pretty much identical to what we saw in the High-End Video Card Shootout.

The best way to differentiate between these images is to open them all in different instances of Microsoft Paint. By switching between the pictures, a few discrepancies 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 renderer) looks washed out.

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. We consider the color vibrancy of the Radeon to be the best, but the GeForce 2 does follow what 3DMark is looking out for in a more precise manner.