Weighing in currently at a lardy 60MB, the new control panel is built in .NET using DirectX Graphics to allow realtime preview of applied card settings, so you can see immediately what effect your new settings have on the image quality in your games.

Speaking with ATI and NVIDIA at ECTS allowed us to confirm that after DX9.0, DirectX Graphics is no more. In name only. Microsoft's next set of core presentation and 3D APIs are now under the umbrella of Windows Graphics Foundation and Avalon.

Aged 23, Fatal1ty has been a pro-gamer for the last five years, having cut his teeth on the likes of Wolfenstein 3D on a 286 nearly 10 years ago. Between then and now he's played everything there has been and worked his way up local and state rankings, eventually through to national and then international finals.

Windows Graphics Foundation clearly defines, with literally no wiggle room, what the hardware and driver should do with regards to basic texture filtering, anisotropic filtering and texture and geometry antialiasing.

The result, after discussion with ATI and NVIDIA yesterday? Turn on trilinear anisotropic filtering at 16X and apply multi-sample anti-aliasing and both ATI and NVIDIA's hardware and driver will, via WGF's strict notions of what comprises correct filtering, render identical images, with only the smallest of mathematical differences tolerated.

ATI, while not wishing to say anything completely on the record, strongly hinted to me yesterday that they're on track to release a set of Shader Model 3.0 parts in the coming year. Somewhat acknowledging that they're a little behind the feature curve compared to their major rival...