nVidia vs ATi - Beyond the Benchmarks

[Shamrock]

The people there are bringing up valid points about ATI's drivers. Especially "Hat Monster". In ATI drivers you absolutely CANNOT disable optimizations? hmm...but according to BFG10K "AFIAK they can". But when you do this supposed disabling the optimizations, the reduction in performance and IQ is "negligable" IMO, even if you are disabling them in Direct3d, they arent being disabled.

So, at least in nV hardware they CAN be turned off, while in ATI's case, you "think" they are? very skewed results, but no fault of your's BFG, good read.

BTW, the HQ setting on nV's drivers reduse the shimmering upto 80%, not totally though (I cant remember where I read that)...I ALWAYS use HQ, never Q settings. But then again, I also use a CRT, and cant see the shimmering at all. It's been said on here that alot of the shimmering is due to LCD's?

 

[Munky]

I've seen plenty of shimmering on a 7800gt using a CRT. I've even seen the x1900xtx shimmer in some cases, also on a CRT. It's pathetic how even cards costing $500+ with all the latest and greatest features still have IQ that's in some ways inferior to my old 9800p.

But I would like to see some evidence of optimizations in Ati drivers that can't be disabled.

 

[Tig Ol Bitties]

Wow, thanks for the read, had been using quality settings for Oblivion for quite some time and the shimmering was certainly noticeable. Turned to HQ and I'm quite happy with the results, don't notice it much if at all, and the performance hit was actually marginal, not even 5 fps for me.

 

[hardwareking]

so basically what all this means is ati's driver support is way better than nvidia's.Like an old x800 xl is coming up to terms with a geforce 7800 gt.Kudos to ati for not forgetting their old cards.

 

[BFG10K]

In ATI drivers you absolutely CANNOT disable optimizations? hmm...but according to BFG10K "AFIAK they can".

Under OpenGL you can't disable ATi's optimizations - this is true (excluding of course AF angle dependency on the R5xx series that can be disabled with HQ AF).

However in Direct3D you can not only disable them, there's also a setting for full trilinear that you can enable through third party utilities.

My problem with trilinear optimizations on nVidia is that in order to enable them you also have to enable quality and like I said in the other thread, even if you disable the rest of the optimizations the simple act of enabling quality seems to do something to cause more texture wiggling than ATi cards. This is something different to shimmering but can still be just as noticeable.

The image quality ranking can be summarized as follows:

• nVidia's high quality setting with all optimizations off is slightly better than ATi with all optimizations on; however for practical purposes I am very satisfied with both vendors' image quality at those settings. And again the comparison excludes the R5xx's HQ AF which may change the picture.
  
• nVidia's quality with trilinear and anisotropic optimizations enabled is vastly inferior to ATi with all optimizations on. I don't mind the odd shimmer but this is something else entirely and is unusably bad in many games.

But when you do this supposed disabling the optimizations, the reduction in performance and IQ is "negligable" IMO, even if you are disabling them in Direct3d, they arent being disabled.

I'm not sure what you're saying here. Enabling ATi's trilinear and anisotropic optimizations under Direct3D does increase performance but the effect on image quality is negligible.

 

[Gstanfor]

My problem with trilinear optimizations on nVidia is that in order to enable them you also have to enable quality

No, you do not. As I have previously posted (in dug777's old shimmering thread), you can enable/disable any of the optimizations for any of the quality modes (high quality, quality, performance, high performance) using nHancer. This is no different to using 3rd party apps to enable/disable ATi optimizations.

It's been known and discussed on other forums that HQ mode will incur up to a 30% performance hit ever since the option first became available in the driver. BFG10K isn't telling any informed person anything they didn't alread know.

 

[Shamrock]

but by how much performance drop? if it's under 5% (the standard here on Anand), then it's not being disabled.

 

[josh6079]

Originally posted by: Gstanfor

My problem with trilinear optimizations on nVidia is that in order to enable them you also have to enable quality

It's been known and discussed on other forums that HQ mode will incur up to a 30% performance hit ever since the option first became available in the driver. BFG10K isn't telling any informed person anything they didn't alread know.

I knew there was a performance hit when enabling High Quality on the slider scale on some games, but I didn't know how much of a hit it did. That is what most others here are probably thanking him for. Its not that we didn't know it at all, we just weren't sure to what extent.

 

[BFG10K]

As I have previously posted (in dug777's old shimmering thread), you can enable/disable any of the optimizations for any of the quality modes (high quality, quality, performance, high performance) using nHancer.

This is false.

When the driver is set to high quality it ignores the three optimization settings and forces them off, regardless of whether a third party utility allows you to tick or untick them.

Both RivaTuner's and nHancer's documentation back my claims.

 

[Gstanfor]

Actually, BFG10K, what nHancer says is "The additional optimization settings below have no effect in the current drivers, if "High Quality" is selected." The drivers that were current when nHancer 1.2.2 was released are prehistoric nowadays.

nHancer is a little overdue for an update, happen when that happens is up to Grestorn.

A good place to check the differences the optimizations make is in 3dmark2000. The cobblestone road shows differences up quite nicely. Performance & High Performance will always have more pronounced mipmap transitions than Quality or Hiqh Quality. You'll notice that you can almost always see the mipmap "rings" on the ground in these modes.

 

[BFG10K]

The drivers that were current when nHancer 1.2.2 was released are prehistoric nowadays.

RivaTuner is kept fully up to date and it states exactly the same thing nHancer does which in turn confirms my own tests.

RivaTuner currently has the optimizations ticked (for whatever reason) but I can assure you they're most certainly not active in my games.

Again, whether a utility allows you to tick or untick the optimizations is irrelevant in the specific case of High Quality being used as in that case the driver ignores those settings and forces them off.

 

[merlocka]

Interesting & nice work BFG. :thumbsup:

 

[TanisHalfElven]

nice work. although i don't care about the 7800gt performance hit i learned about the optimization that were disabled on my card and also learned catalyst ai helps performance. thanks.

 

[RobertR1]

Originally posted by: Crusader

Every game is at a different resolution or AA setting. Does anyone actually play without AA anymore?

Yep. All those poor nivida users who want HDR but can't have AA with it

 

[RobertR1]

Nice work BFG but as usual the clue train will pass up many as they can't see past a "versus" battle.

 

[Sable]

Originally posted by: RobertR1

Originally posted by: Crusader

Every game is at a different resolution or AA setting. Does anyone actually play without AA anymore?

Yep. All those poor nivida users who want HDR but can't have AA with it

lol

 

[Acanthus]

Nice review, i would say the performance hits seem a little steep to me, but im on a 6800GT and havent personally tested the 7000 series for the performance hit.

I would also like to say that in certain titles ATi has texture shimmering and crawling as well...

Just being fair to both here.

It is also my understanding that anands reviews run at the absolute highest quality settings with all optomizations possible disabled.

 

[otispunkmeyer]

Originally posted by: dagabs
Very Interesting.

I didnt realize High Quality removed shimmering, I might give it ago.

The benchmarks are a little off, cause he has only chosen one specific resolution per game to prove 800XL can beat or be close to the 7800gt.

According to the recent Anandtech article about driver improvements, the 800XL which competed against the 6800gt has improved significantly with every catalyst driver released, compared to the 6800gt, which has barely increased. So the 800XL has improved so much that it reaches closer to the 7800gt.

i switched to HQ, and its a noticable improvement in IQ, and im on SLI with a rather small screen so the performance hit for me is pretty much a non issue anyway

 

[BFG10K]

I'm bumping this as there seems to be renewed interest in the topic lately.

 

[PingSpike]

Interesting. I don't really care about AA performance myself. It seems to have a pretty solid performance hit and I didn't mind jaggies when I played at 1024x768...at 1680x1050 its a nonissue to me. However, AF has a noticable impact on IQ to me and doesn't seem to have quite the hit.

I thought things looked a little crisper when I switched to the x850xt though.