Visual quality: ATI Radeon 9700 vs GF4 Ti4200. Ti4200 wins?

[Jeff7]

I thought ATi cards were supposed to have excellent quality? I get this in games now - gaps between some textures, and a few other visual anomalies. The card isn't overclocked yet; I wanted to get everything running smoothly before doing that.
This is on an 8RDA+ board, with the latest nForce Unified drivers installed, and the 3.2 Catalysts.

Oh, here's a screenshot from Giants; the LOD changing, or something like that, isn't too smooth. That area that's circled, where it changes from light to dark - that stays at a set distance. I think it's the LOD changing, or a new mipmap being generated; either way, there's several of those "steps," each is at a set distance. The Geforce4 had the option to remove something called "user mipmaps" - this would force the application to either use a set mipmap process in the drivers, or else use none at all, I don't remember. There was also a Level Of Detail slider; I don't see anything like that with the ATi drivers, even with the Rage3d tweaker installed.


And a minor note - with the GF4, if I enabled FSAA, my Folding@Home screensaver's molecule display would be antialiased. With the 9700, it just displays a mess of blocks all over the desktop instead.

 

[chizow]

Did you remove all traces of nVidia drivers prior to installing your 9700pro? Unfortunately, the only sure-fire method of a problem free transition from a GF to Radeon is a clean Windows installation.

But try this first. Did you go into the control panel and uncheck the application preference boxes? There are LoD sliders at the bottom, which are at default settings which might give you problems if you leave application preference on. If you change the top slider (performance vs. quality) and your AF settings, there should be new defaults that give higher IQ.

Chiz

 

[Brian48]

I don't think this is an issue of errant, left over drivers from one card to another. Recent nVidia cards have gotten a bad rap for poor image quality because the earlier generation of GeForce cards. Also, vendors using OEM parts from varying sources attributed to a lot of inconsistency from make to make as well.

The newer ones, starting with the GF3's (and especially with the Elsa/Visiontek ones) have steadily improved on their image quality. My old Visiontek ti4600 had very exceptional image quality. My R8500 and 9700 Pro is still better, but not by much. In some instances, you really have to look for the differences.

 

[VirginiaDonkey]

I bought one of the Best Buy $79 PNY 4200 specials to replace my aging 8500. I used it about 3 days and decided I like the image quality of the Radeon better. so, to Ebay the 4200 goes and I just placed an order to newegg for a 9500 red.

 

[Glitchny]

try ghoing back to the 3.1 drivers, from what i ahve seen the 3.2 drivers are shiet, they screwed up bf1942 for me and counterstriek wouldnt run properly

 

[BenSkywalker]

Both of those artifacts are normal for the R300 boards, although one you can get rid of.

The pixel pops on seems of objects appears quite frequently on the Quake3 powered games IME, nothing you can do about that that I am aware of.

The visible mip boundaries you can get rid of by running quality mode anisotropic. Despite the BS spread by some, there is a huge difference between performance and quality modes. Performance runs bilinear filtering which will always have those mip boundaries, quality will run trilinear and eliminate them.

 

[BFG10K]

Despite the BS spread by some, there is a huge difference between performance and quality modes.

It's not BS at all Ben. I've run nVidia boards at 8x for years across dozens of games so I'm used to having no mip-map transitions at all with anisotropic filtering. With the R1xx/R2xx I could certainly easily and visibly see them in quite a lot of games but with the R300 I rarely see them in any game and if I do, I usually only can see them if I explicitly stop to look for them. And even then 99% of the time they are totally invisible, even if I stop to look for them.

The Radeon 9700 Pro's 16x performance anisotropic filtering looks far better than any nVidia card out there except for the NV30 which I haven't tested so I can't directly comment, but from what I've seen it looks even worse than it's older brothers thanks to its cheating hack jobs.

 

[BenSkywalker]

With the R1xx/R2xx I could certainly easily and visibly see them in quite a lot of games but with the R300 I rarely see them in any game and if I do, I usually only can see them if I explicitly stop to look for them. And even then 99% of the time they are totally invisible, even if I stop to look for them.

I guess if your vision is such that you can't notice them then all the power to you. They scream out loud to me, same with the texture aliasing.

The Radeon 9700 Pro's 16x performance anisotropic filtering looks far better than any nVidia card out there except for the NV30 which I haven't tested so I can't directly comment, but from what I've seen it looks even worse than it's older brothers thanks to its cheating hack jobs.

If you don't notice the texture aliasing problems, the mip boundary problems(they arc very badly), the off balanced filtering adaptation and in performance mode the mip boundaries then you will likely find the R300 to have far AF better then the NV2X. I notice all of them.

 

[Jeff7]

Did you remove all traces of nVidia drivers prior to installing your 9700pro? Unfortunately, the only sure-fire method of a problem free transition from a GF to Radeon is a clean Windows installation

Which is exactly what I did. 😉

I have all the settings to quality...at least for Quake III. I'll give it a go on Giants; don't know if I have or not. I didn't get a Radeon 9700 just so I could get 9 billion frames per second.🙂
I miss Rivatuner already! It was a well-done program I think; good interface, lots of options. Rage3d Tweaker's setup, I don't think it's quite as good. And the program I'm using to run specific presets with different programs (Radlinker) doesn't have all the advanced options that Rage3dTweak does have.
Edit: Ok, the transition is less noticable with the anisotropic Quality setting active. I can still see the transition, but that defined "line" isn't there anymore.

Originally posted by: BenSkywalker

With the R1xx/R2xx I could certainly easily and visibly see them in quite a lot of games but with the R300 I rarely see them in any game and if I do, I usually only can see them if I explicitly stop to look for them. And even then 99% of the time they are totally invisible, even if I stop to look for them.

I guess if your vision is such that you can't notice them then all the power to you. They scream out loud to me, same with the texture aliasing.

The Radeon 9700 Pro's 16x performance anisotropic filtering looks far better than any nVidia card out there except for the NV30 which I haven't tested so I can't directly comment, but from what I've seen it looks even worse than it's older brothers thanks to its cheating hack jobs.

If you don't notice the texture aliasing problems, the mip boundary problems(they arc very badly), the off balanced filtering adaptation and in performance mode the mip boundaries then you will likely find the R300 to have far AF better then the NV2X. I notice all of them.

I'm one with discerning vision too then it seems - I also run everything in 32-bit color; the artifacts and banding at 16-bit is distracting; even in 32-bit color, very gradual transitions don't quite look as gradual as they should. This mipmap boundry thing is fairly distracting; the ground is moving away from me as I walk forward it seems.

One other thing - in one level of Giants, I think it's called A Way to Sorcha Island or something like that - it's a large island with several structures; but the cliffs around it pop in and out of existance, maybe for only a single frame, and then stay for awhile; they almost shimmer at times. But only this one level; it could be a bug in the game too - it's not been updated for quite some time now, and I don't think there's any more patches on the way.🙁

Update:

Originally posted by: Glitchny
try ghoing back to the 3.1 drivers, from what i ahve seen the 3.2 drivers are shiet, they screwed up bf1942 for me and counterstriek wouldnt run properly

Thanks for the suggestion; testing out the 3.1's now. The Folding@Home problem is gone; the molecule diagrams are now very nicely antialiased. Let's try some games now though.🙂


Seems that Giants doesn't like the 3xFSAA setting - locks up at the menu.

 

[rogue1979]

I choose to give up some speed and the use of AA at 1600 x 1200. My Radeon 9700 Pro went off to e-bay and I am still enjoying glitch free operation and excellent 3D game image quality with my GF4.

 

[chizow]

I miss Rivatuner already! It was a well-done program I think; good interface, lots of options.

Rivatuner does work with the 9700pro 🙂 It also enables you to apply the 9800pro softmod. I'm also very picky with IQ, and much prefer 16x Quality over 16x Performance. The 9800pro softmod allows me to run 16X Quality in place of 16x Performance at the same performance level. Its great, you should check it out. 🙂

Chiz

 

[Jeff7]

Originally posted by: rogue1979
I choose to give up some speed and the use of AA at 1600 x 1200. My Radeon 9700 Pro went off to e-bay and I am still enjoying glitch free operation and excellent 3D game image quality with my GF4.

I might do that too, except my monitor only does 70Hz at 1600x1200, which flickers more than I can stand for anything over a minute or two.

Originally posted by: chizow

I miss Rivatuner already! It was a well-done program I think; good interface, lots of options.

Rivatuner does work with the 9700pro 🙂 It also enables you to apply the 9800pro softmod. I'm also very picky with IQ, and much prefer 16x Quality over 16x Performance. The 9800pro softmod allows me to run 16X Quality in place of 16x Performance at the same performance level. Its great, you should check it out. 🙂
Chiz

It works for overclocking, and the softmod (didn't hear anything about the latter; sounds cool). But it doesn't allow for the D3D and OpenGL tweaks that it did with nVidia cards.