The mail of the species is duller than the femail
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AMD is cooking the books
GRAPHICS CHIP DESIGNER Nvidia has been using its blog to slam its rival AMD lately.
Nick Stam, the technical marketing director at Nvidia charged that AMD seems to be making too many compromises. He claims that there are shedloads of unbiased reviews that back him up.
He said that he wanted to bring attention to some very important image quality findings uncovered recently by technology webites including ComputerBase, PC Games Hardware, TweakPC, and 3DCenter.org.
"They all found that changes introduced in AMD's Catalyst 10.10 default driver settings caused an increase in performance and a decrease in image quality," he claimed.
To make matters worse, these changes in AMD's default settings do not permit a fair apples-to-apples comparison to the Green Goblin's default driver settings, Stam slammed.
"Nvidia GPUs provide higher image quality at default driver settings, which means comparative AMD [versus] Nvidia testing methods need to be adjusted to compensate for the image quality differences," he insisted.
German technology websites Computerbase and PC Games Hardware have reported that they must use the "high" Catalyst AI texture filtering setting for AMD 6000 series GPUs instead of the default "quality" setting in order to provide image quality that comes close to Nvidia's default texture filtering setting.
3DCenter.org has a similar story, as does TweakPC. The behaviour was verified in many game scenarios, Stam asserted.
All up he thinks that AMD obtains up to a 10 per cent performance advantage by lowering their default texture filtering quality according to Computerbase.
AMD's optimizations weren't limited to the Radeon 6800 series. AMD also lowered the default AF quality of the HD 5800 series when using the Catalyst 10.10 drivers, such that users must disable Catalyst AI altogether to get default image quality closer to Nvidia's "default" driver settings.
Apparently Nvidia had an internal meeting to discuss whether it should go down the same route. But of course, it was a morally upright Green Goblin and would not dream of it, Stam indicated. µ
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Have they no better argument than "driver optimizations" ?
We're back to that old chestnut ?
Like Nvidia has never been guilty of that kind of thing.
Any exec that resorts to that kind of argument should be taken out back and shot without trial.
NOW THAT THE AMD/ATI "APU" IS OUT, WHO CARES ABOUT VIDEO CARDS ANY MORE?
THIS IS YESTERDAY'S STORY.
Nvidia has got to be commend for finally releasing a card that "can" actually compete with the ATI cards; this has got to be the first time in 6years or so that nV's cards are complaint with the current DX edition, and supports the full feature set(and for not convincing Microsoft to nerf the standard, like with whole dx10 fiasco).
Just a shame that nV can be a bit more humble...
"Stay classy New Vegas" =D
I havent noticed any image quality setting issues with my Xfire 5770 setup. But then I run everything at max quality cos my AMD cards let me do that.
I've seen a few articles on this and looked at some migraine inducing moir images that supposedly show something vaguely different but who knows?
All I summise from all of this is that this industry has a lot people in it that seriously need a good blow job.
This is not an important issue right now.
I remember a few years ago a big hoo-haa about nVidia doing the exact same thing with "Driver Optimisations" targeted almost entirely on certain synthetic benchmarketing programs.
When they were caught out Ati (at the time they still were as it was pre Daamit) did not crow about their superior quality or complain about nVidia cheating, they just got on with making their own GPU's and trying to get better performance / cost ratios.
nVidia have been the source of questionable business pratice for a very long time - such as brining court action against 3Dfx (a financially small company at the time) about supposed intellectual property rights that they themselves had copied from 3Dfx (admitted later) and kept the case in court long enough for 3Dfx to go essentially bankrupt and then bought out what was essentially their only competitor at the time.
Rant Over
I always disable AI. Since it was released. I prefer to do the manual settings all they way to get most performance, or at least best balance. I always used ATI cards but I admit Nvidia always had good cards, so I consider myself unbiased. And I believe that Nick Stam is wrong, and even if the catalyst thingy was "tweaked" to take some advantage, PEOPLE KNOWS WHAT ATI CARDS REALLY ARE, AND WILL BUY THEM ANYWAY. THEY JUST KICK.
While I'm not a GPU designer I am a system builder and general repairman and noticed some changes with my AMD card (in my case an HD4650 1GB) over the past few drivers. Previous to 10.8 I noticed I was getting low Aero scores and would find little errors under performance when it came to the AMD driver. After 10.8 the errors went away and at 10.10 my Aero score went up and my desktop is smoother now.
So I wouldn't be so quick to say it is some sort of "cheat" as it may simply be a side effect of optimizing for Aero. I didn't see which OSes they tested on but one would assume they used Vista or 7 which means Aero. Personally I'll take a slightly lower setting in return for increased Aero performance, thanks anyway Nvidia.
This behavior is very typical of ENvydia when their chips are down (pun intended) instead of fixing all their internal problems they resort to trying to tarnish the reputation of their competitor AMD who BTW is whooping their ass in the graphic dept.lately by trying to focus on quality issues on the competitors graphic cards instead of thier own which proves how stupid and out of focus the green (envy) Team Nvidia really are. Very Sad indeed.
Nvidia should be addressing the driver problems they're having with Autodesk and they're Quadro range of cards instead of trying to start a bitchfight.
ATI cards may be default to lower quality setting but at least they're not crashing Autocad MEP whenever you try and render animations.
Get your own house in order Nvidia.
FFS....ShouldaboughtaFireGL.
I'd always favour higher performance over quality if that means the game runs better. Whats the point of having high quality choppy graphics if the game is unplayable.
When I used to like Nvidia.
Nvidia would do better in their internal meetings by talking about providing Optimus support for Linux (at least the ability to turn off the nvidia chip in order to stop power draw in notebooks).
Wonder if they had such a meeting before shipping millions of known defective GPUs? Moral choice indeed. Karma will fix this abberation of a marketing company.
LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL