Originally posted by: kami
FSAA visual quality- ATi.
FSAA performance- nVidia
I think I have to disagree with this. Did you read Anand's smoothvision article? nVidia matches ATI's quality and obviously surpasses it performance wise. You just have to enable the anisotropic filtering to match the quality (and it still beats it with aniso on)
The simple fact that you have to enable anisotropic filtering along with FSAA on nVidia boards to match the bare FSAA of ATi's boards should make it clear that ATi's implementation offers superior visual quality.
Yes, that brings nVidia's quality up to the level of ATi's. But what if we were to enable anisotropic filtering on ATi's board?
Presto, ATi has the advantage again... and with virtually no performance hit for enabling anisotropic.
Not that's I'm particularly fond of ATi's anisotropic filtering, but i does boost image quality somewhat, at a performance hit that is in most cases near non-existant.
This is without touching upon the fact that ATi's implementation has no issues with antialiasing Alpha textures and other such items that nVidia's implementation cannot antialias.
Also, ATI has a bad rep for their drivers. They already made a promise to keep up with their drivers, only to flatly drop their promise to their users (early last year). Now, they dicided to give the same promise to their users again. I don't trust them. And they always had problems with keeping up with drivers. Their software suite also has it's fair share of compability problems.
Indeed, they do have a bad repuation. Their initial attempts with the Rage IIC was a joke, the Rage 128 was nearly as bad. The original Radeon was bearly passable, and the initial R8500 drivers stank.
Their poor repuation is for the most part deserved.
Putting all that aside though, the R8500 drivers have had quite a long time to mature by now and are pretty decent at this point in time.
If you look around, you'll find remarkably few people have had any complaints with the more recent drivers, and ATi's .6071 and their latest 'Catalyst' drivers seem to have gained a respectable amount of popularity for being solid drivers.
ATi's been releasing drivers quite a bit more rapidly then they once were and they've been improving quickly. At the present time I'd have absolutely no qualms with trusting my system to an ATi Radeon graphics card.
Oh, forgot to mention, the 2D quality is very on par with ATi. Unless you're some sort of freak with hawk precision eyes, it would not bother most of the human race.
Then I presume a remarkable number of people on this forum are freaks with hawk eyes
2D visual quality has been debated on the forums in-depth a hundred times over, and it's clear it tends to be extremely dependent upon the individual persons eyesight, individual graphics cards within any given model, monitor, resolution, and refresh rate utilized, cabling used, etc etc.
The end fact is you'll find precious few people that disagree that ATi offers superior 2D visual quality though.
I myself am using an nVidia graphics card in my present system, and while I'm pretty satisfied with it and have no particular desire to replace it at the moment I can only honestly say that the 2D visual quality is only 'satisfactory'. I can most clearly see a difference between it and ATi.
And this coming from a Gainward board that is generally considered to have among the best 2D quality of nVidia board manufacturers.
As for disagreeing with the bolded items, it would be hekpful if you were to present your reasoning for your disagreement. If I knew why you disagreed I could more easily formulate a reply that would perhaps address your comments.