On the whole, we can note that optimizations usually make a greater difference in performance and quality on GPUs from NVIDIA than from ATI. But the most important thing that attracts our attention is excessively aggressive (in our opinion) optimizations of trilinear and anisotropic texture filtering in the default mode. Settings offered by NVIDIA result in visible artifacts, like texture noise, in many games. Of course, we deliberately drew our readers' attention to the most illustrative fragments. They do not happen everywhere in real life, and not full screen. Besides, similar artifacts (noise or "sand" in textures) sometimes appear in ATI video cards in the default mode. But they are much more rare there.
What concerns NVIDIA's optimizations of trilinear and anisotropic filtering, they often result in noticeable texture noise even in the default mode. Such noise has a negative effect on the general rendering quality in some games. Small performance gains cannot always justify such a drop in image quality. So we can say that optimal settings for NVIDIA cards these days are the Quality mode and Default mode in rare cases. In case of ATI it's the Default mode and the Quality mode in some cases. But these conclusions are subjective. It's wrong to compare performance of video cards with different quality settings. In our opinion, the optimal solution is to compare performance with default driver settings (maximum quality in some cases) and to provide several screenshots for our readers to evaluate rendering quality on their own.
cheers. That cleared a few things up.
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