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Radeon vs. GeForce GTS image quality

R

Robor

Elite Member
There's an article on Planethardware comparing the two cards image quality. I couldn't see much of a difference between them myself except for this shot:

http://www.planethardware.com/features/radeon_screenshots/image_dm13_1.shtml

What's with the sky on the GeForce shot? Other than that, does anyone see an advantage for either card that I'm missing? The reason I'm asking is I ordered a Radeon for myself a couple of days ago. The GeForce seems a little faster except in extremely high resolutions but the Radeon is close and has some nice features (DVD & VIVO).

Is the Radeon a good buy? If you were buying a new card today and had $300 to spend, what would you get?

Rob

Edit: Sorry for the underline instead of link! DUH!! 😛
 
Sky on the GeForce looks that bad because Quake III uses card driver to compress textures on level load - Nvidia's drivers have a less-than-perfect S3TC compression algorithm built into them.
 
If I was going for a new card right now it would definetly be the Radeon. I am trusting ATI to have good drivers support this time.
 
trust has nothing to do with it. you cannot trust someone to do something that they have never done (and ATI has had more than one chance to do prove themselves)
 
I'm kinda confused here. By far the biggest complaint I hear (and rightly so I guess) is that ATI has had poor driver support in the past. With this new card the only complaint about the drivers so far has been 16-bit performance. In my case I don't play any games that don't support 32-bit color so I couldn't care less about 16-bit performance problems.

So what's so bad about the current drivers? Are the worries about future drivers? Supporting DX8? Future games? Future OS's? Honestly, if ATI is truely ready to make a serious impact in 3D gaming I'd think a company their size would be able to afford to hire the right programmers/engineers to do it right this time. I sure hope so! 😛

Rob

Edit: Looking at those shots again... I don't play Q3A but it's supposed to have an excellent engine. If that's the case then these shots don't do it justice. Why are they all brown, black, red, and orange?
 
The Doom and Quake games are reknowned for their drab "any color you want so long as it's a brown" look (to paraphrase Hank Ford).
 
People who have not owned an ATI card do not understand the driver situation well. The drivers are flat out horrible at times. Game X will run fast as hell but Game Y will look crappy and always be stuttering for no reason. ATI is the worst in the industry at driver updates. Commonly, drivers that fix problems will cause a measurable ammount of slowdown as well. Then in the next driver set they will bring the speed back up and cause more problems...
 
I've owned a few ATI cards, the last being a Rage Fury and had no serious driver issues, in fact, after replacing the Fury with an Asus V6600, over half the games I run that ran perfectly now had graphical glitches or wouldn't run at all. Of course after six or seven driver updates everything is fine but that?s my point - companies that issue regular driver updates(bug fixes) really needed to get it right the first or second time but why should they when they can hustle out product with half baked drivers to idiots who think getting "free" driver updates is a good thing.
As for certain games not working with certain drivers, the game developer bears equal responsibility to make sure their game engines comply with DX or OGL standards, card manufactures should not have to re-write drivers to comply with certain games peculiarities. - M.
 
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