Tomb Raider LegendLara Croft Tomb Raider: Legend is the seventh game in the Tomb Raider series. Published by Eidos Interactive, this is the first game in the series not to be handled by British-based Core Design, developed instead by British-owned U.S. studio Crystal Dynamics. The PS2, Windows, Xbox, and Xbox 360 versions were released in Europe on April 7, 2006 and in North America on April 11, 2006.
When the game was released, only the highest end systems could run it with “next-gen visuals” options enabled. Since then more cards are able to run this game properly at the highest quality settings.
The game poses no problems for the GTX 280 which pushes 100+ fps avg even with 16xQAA enabled, going from XP to Vista boosts performance by ~2%.
The Radeon HD 4870 X2 has a more difficult time with this “
TWIMTBP” NVIDIA title, under XP Crossfire fails completely and the game is running at 58-56fps no matter what the AA level. When going to Vista CF is working better this time around as the X2 catches up with the GTX, only at 16xAA level the performance drops off sharply again…
For a detail view of the results, with AA scaling and XP -> Vista Scaling see
this table
...8xAA on ATI should be compared to 8xQAA on nV, not the 8xAA which is 4xMSAA based CSAA mode
...16xAA on ATI effectively turn the card into single chip card which can do 16xMSAA, since both chips render the same frame with different AA patterns
...16xAA on nV is 4xMSAA based CSAA mode and 16xQAA on nV is 8xMSAA based CSAA mode
So 16x and 8x comparisons in your graphs are far from being 'fair' or 'apples-to-apples', the 8xAA should have ATI 8xAA vs nV 8xQAA (8xQAA = 8xMSAA) and 16xAA shouldn't even exist since the GTX280 can't do 16xMSAA which is (practicly) what the HD4870X2 is doing by blending the same frame rendered twice with different AA patterns.