When browsing through the screen shots above, pay special attention to the lower left portion of the scene. The detail in the road is affected most by enabling anisotropic filtering. In the "No Aniso" ...

It used to be that graphics manufacturers dedicated themselves to incorporating nifty features into their hardware, besting the competition from a specification point of view, at the very least.

Using MadOnion’s 3DMark 2001 SE benchmark (Build 330) and standard configurations (no anti-aliasing or anisotropic filtering), the GeForce4 Ti 4600 stands up reasonably well against the Radeon 9700 ...