[Sabastian]

Funny we see these drivers made available for the launch of the 9800XT. Seems like old tricks are hard to break for Nvidia. Yawn, it seems this driver cheat stuff is getting par for the course... pathetic.

The picture quality in UT2003 has been the reason for some of the criticism against nVidia recently. nVidia has chose to lower the picture quality in this game when it concerns anisotropic filtering. Most clear we see nVidia's lower picture quality in the 51.75-driver when AF is activated in the control panel.

The major difference in picture quality in WC3 is the anti aliasing. Due to some reason it seems like nVidia's cards have problems with horizontal edges in this game above anything else. Check i.e. the large log in the fire; it looks like it is principally without AA.

It maybe gets rather boring to hear (read), but we can not lie; ATi's high quality FSAA win over nVidia once more. As we can see Detonator 51.75 is totally out of the game when it seems like AF is being disabled.

Once more ATi takes the lead, 9800 Pro gets along this time too. Detonator 51.75 lowers (once more) the quality of texture filtering.

Radeon kicks some ass in BF1942, nVidia doesn't stand a chance. Once again, Detonator 51.75 lowers the texture quality so much that we don't find the results comparable.

ATi rips nVidia into pieces in Tomb Raider. If this is an indication of upcoming DirectX9 performance (and it seems like that when looking at Half Life 2 tests) nVidia won't have a lot to say the coming 6 months. Detonator 51.75 increases performance, but also causes some strange bugs.

nVidia's present drivers doesn't allow for floating point precision for render targets etc. resulting in lower quality. Detonator 51.75 also makes the Depth Of Field effect to run amok. The main character is repeatedly erased, despite the fact that the effect is supposed to erase things the longer away they are, for example. As expected, AA works better with ATi's card. Anisotropic filtering also looks better on ATi's card, since this kind of filtering causes ""texture aliasing" (floating pixels) on nVidia's cards.

Subjective analysis: There's no question about it, nVidia's card isn't even close to being playable. Despite that, ironically, Tomb Raider is part of nVidia's so called "The Way It's Meant To Be Played" program. I noticed no differences between XT and Pro when playing the game.

It's a bit strange to see that ATi's image quality and performance increases when we apply AF through the application instead of from the control panel. On the mountain in the very middle of the picture it's clear that the image quality once again is better with ATi's card.

Subjective analysis: I am very confused with the test results from Jedi Academy. The strange thing is that the game runs a lot better (and looks better) on the ATi card, but in the performance tests it seems like if nVidia beat the 9800 Pro, which doesn't reflect the impression we got when actually playing the game.

If we take a look at the 3DMark03 performance with Detonator 51.75 we can see that it has been given a good increase. Although we have great suspicions that these optimizations are more or less exclusively application specific, and that it might be optimizations that is by a nature that is not applicable on a real game. Therefore we have chosen to give 51.75 a gray pillar because we don´t believe it is giving an accurate result.

With Detonator 44.03 that is "approved" by Futuremark you can see that nVidia really has not got a chance against ATi's cards. As said: nVidia says it is misleading, but all of the DX9 games so far shows that Futuremark actually succeeded in creating a pretty good prophecy with their 3DMark03.

If we take a closer look at the even more synthetic Pixel Shader 2.0-test we see that the FX-card's weak spot is DX9.

We got very weird results in Aquamark 3. nVidia's Detonator 44.03 shows a very low performance, but the driver generates an output that is completely approved Detonator 51.75 on the other hand has noticeable losses of picture quality on a couple of areas: Mist/smoke has been heavily reduced in at least one scene, texture filtering is a lot worse, some things look like the are rendered with lower precision, and finally many lightning effects are a little suspect or not even there. Right now under these circumstances we can only point away from the results from detonator 50. And under those circumstances ATi has an unbelievable lead ahead nVidia.

http://www.nordichardware.com/review.../Radeon9800XT/

[Pr( )ZaC]

...and I see your true nVColors shining through...

[Sabastian]

Originally Posted by Pr( )ZaC

...and I see your true nVColors shining through...

heh, I read the review, what am I supposed to think then?

[WaltC]

Originally Posted by Sabastian

Funny we see these drivers made available for the launch of the 9800XT. Seems like old tricks are hard to break for Nvidia. Yawn, it seems this driver cheat stuff is getting par for the course... pathetic.

nVidia has gone far beyond what I ever expected to see a company its position do. It's really sad--the damage they are inflicting on the gaming community at large merely to push an underperforming, non-competitive product line into the market is incredible.

It just really boggles the mind how nVidia can consistently ignore the bad press it's gotten all year about image quality--I mean, the company seems in a total state of shock and denial about what's important these days to gamers--it's IQ, stupid, not just framerate. People have been telling them that over and over again all year long--and they just keep right on cutting IQ corners, thinking most people are just too dumb to know what they are doing. I have never seen a company so disconnected from its market as nVidia has proven itself to be. The irony is that I think even with much slower frame-rate performance it would be going *much better* for nVidia now, PR wise, if they sacrificed benchmark frame rates for a return to the level of IQ people want and expect.

Doing things like removing full trilinear filtering and monkeying around with AF, just to get frame rates in benchmarks--it's just incredible. They are selling products which dishonestly state the feature support they are providing to their customers (who can't get full trilinear regardless of how they set the control panel OR the game they're playing)--and nVidia justs shrugs it off and marches ahead--with all the sensitivity to what this is doing to them of a bull headed to slaughter. I mean--how many reviews like this does nVidia have to read before the lightbulb goes on upstairs?

I don't know what it is--I can only imagine that things there are much more desperate than is publicly apparent, and that things are quite out of control. The company looks rudderless, to me.

[digitalwanderer]

Now that was a fun read! Thanks for posting it up.

[Sabastian]

Here is another review that takes nvidias degraded IQ to hand..

http://www.hothardware.com/hh_files/...n_9800xt.shtml

It's interesting to see how the 9800 XT is neck and neck with the 5900 Ultra, at default settings and beats the 5900 Ultra with AA enabled. Yet, when we have Aniso Filtering enabled, the all the Radeons fall behind the GFFX 5900U. Why is this? Historically, with previous version drivers, we've seen exactly the opposite, with the performance advantage going to ATi. Again, if you take a look at the image quality shots for AquaMark3 above, here in this page, you'll notice that the ATi images do look significantly better, so take these scores with a grain of salt.

The Radeon 9800 XT is able to best the GeForce FX 5900 Ultra with 4X AA enabled but when we enable 8X AF, the GFFX takes the lead handily. Again, this doesn't correlate to what we've seen in the past here and as a few other sites around the net have noted recently, NVIDIA's image quality doesn't exactly stack up versus ATi's in Aniso Filtering with UT2003.

Surprisingly, the depth of field effect seems to be not functioning properly with NVIDIA's Detonator 51.75 drivers currently, as the DOF blur effect ends up bluring the entire scene and produces a very undesirable effect. However, enable PS1.4 mode and things look a lot better on the NVIDIA card. Although, you then lose that impressive looking DOF effect, that runs so well on the ATi card.

http://www.hothardware.com/reviews/images/r9800xt/ps20effects/pixelshader20(2).htm

http://www.hothardware.com/reviews/images/r9800xt/ps20effects/pixelsahder14(2).htm

http://www.hothardware.com/reviews/images/r9800xt/ps20effects/pixelshader20(1).htm

http://www.hothardware.com/reviews/images/r9800xt/ps20effects/pixelshader20nv(1).htm

http://www.hothardware.com/reviews/images/r9800xt/ps20effects/pixelshader14(1).htm

[K.I.L.E.R]

The more nVIDIA go awry the less chance they have to compete with Ati over being king of the hill.
I would prefer aggressive competition between competitors but not at the expense of people's hard earned cash or at the expense of ethics.

Business ethics is very subjective these days.

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

Nvidia are really painting themselves into a corner. If every reviewer does his comparison and ends it with "but the Nvidia cards have broken IQ" what is everyone going to come away with after reading a review? No one will remember the benchmark framerates, but they will remember "the Nvidia card is faulty".

Looks like people are finally realising that the emperor has no clothes.

[Quitch]

I just find it amazing how obvious their cheats are becoming. I mean, it used to be the study of shots to see if the lines were being smoothed... now fog, lights, grass... nothing is safe from being removed.

[digitalwanderer]

Originally Posted by K.I.L.E.R

Business ethics is very subjective these days.

I don't agree with that. I think that nVidia's business ethics are quite subjective to non-existant lately, but I don't see it as an industry wide slippage-o-ethics.

[davepermen]

Originally Posted by Quitch

I just find it amazing how obvious their cheats are becoming. I mean, it used to be the study of shots to see if the lines were being smoothed... now fog, lights, grass... nothing is safe from being removed.

a bit more and future nvidia drivers get blocked from counterstrike because of "cheating".. this is near to wallhacks grasshacks, lighthacks, foghacks

btw, somehow your phrase reads so funny.. hehehe.. i love it

[Rodéric]

I remember a firm which was evangelising speed against image quality...

I wonder what it became...

[cthellis42]

Originally Posted by digitalwanderer

I don't agree with that. I think that nVidia's business ethics are quite subjective to non-existant lately, but I don't see it as an industry wide slippage-o-ethics.

Indeed. Certainly no company is angelic, but all things considered, the 3dfx snipings when they were slipping amounted to little, and it's not like ATi years back was saying "if only developers would help us program our drivers, they wouldn't suck so much!" :P

Overall, we've seen quite a bit more than we're used to. -_-

[K.I.L.E.R]

Originally Posted by digitalwanderer

I don't agree with that. I think that nVidia's business ethics are quite subjective to non-existant lately, but I don't see it as an industry wide slippage-o-ethics.

I'm generalising.
I'm not talking about just the video card industry.
Nor am I saying that every single corporation/business is out to rip everyone off.

Then again you believe whatever the hell you want to believe.

[WaltC]

Originally Posted by Quitch

I just find it amazing how obvious their cheats are becoming. I mean, it used to be the study of shots to see if the lines were being smoothed... now fog, lights, grass... nothing is safe from being removed.

When your basic driver code becomes riddled with "optimizations" so that it starts resembling Swiss cheese, the domino effect for driver bugs in various games is bound to accelerate. Right now it seems like nVidia is locked in a cycle of optimizing then bug-fixing for individual games, optimize-bug fix, optimize-bug fix, over and over again. I can't see how this is going to change anytime soon, and I feel sorry for their driver guys--I really do. Good grief, you also have to wonder how many optimizations have to be reversed in order to implement the bug fixes required by the unforseen effects of the optimizations on other software...I think the pressure's all on them at the present from somebody in the company who has identified drivers as the variable to address--which is logical since there's little they can do with their hardware at present. But whomever that person is, I think he's failed to identify the core of nVidia's real problem--which is IQ much moreso than framerates.

I'm really surprised to see this, since the obvious trend in Internet review articles all year long has been to address IQ with as much gusto and interest as frame-rate performance. It's just inconceivable to me that the person calling these shots at nVidia has missed it, as widespread as interest in IQ has been all year. When I think of "corporate culture" at nVidia these days all I can think of is "turf wars" and "buck passing"...

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

Originally Posted by WaltC

When I think of "corporate culture" at nVidia these days all I can think of is "turf wars" and "buck passing"...

All I think of is "ostrich with it's head in the sand".

[mustrum]

The horrible thing is that people buy their products in masses still!
I mean, how STUPID can someone be?
Most of them read the reviews and then STILL buy the FX 5900 ULTRA for hell a lot of cash!
I allwas had nvidia and it allways worked great... HELLO?????? someone at home in your brain?

Those people will think twice before buy their next product at least since they start to see what they got now.
Can't wait to see detonator 55.xx without bilinear filtering.
Back to the roots baby!

Matrox Mystique: 25 FPS
Geforce FX 5900 ULTRA: 80 FPS !!!!

[jimbob0i0]

Originally Posted by WaltC

When your basic driver code becomes riddled with "optimizations" so that it starts resembling Swiss cheese, the domino effect for driver bugs in various games is bound to accelerate.

Walt,

Don't know if you've been reading a lot of nvnews stuff recently but a dev there by the name of 'Skuzzy' says that he is trying to write some code and he's spending a LOT of time trying to get the driver to do what he tells it.... everytime he puts something down the pipeline the drivers are altering the code in some way and producing unpredictable outputs completely different to that which he is trying to accomplish.

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

Originally Posted by mustrum

The horrible thing is that people buy their products in masses still!
I mean, how STUPID can someone be?
Most of them read the reviews and then STILL buy the FX 5900 ULTRA for hell a lot of cash!
I allwas had nvidia and it allways worked great... HELLO?????? someone at home in your brain?

Most people don't know about computers, and so get fooled by the marketing. What is more sad is the way they these people (who are ignorant of the facts) are being misled by the review sites, magazines, and salesmen in the large PC World type stores. And of course by all the dishonesty and lies that Nvidia are propogating about their products.

It's understandable that someone without the knowledge will try to find info from a web/magazine review, it's unforgivable that those reviewers are (for the most part) doing a very, very poor job at the moment, to the point where I believe they are either incompetent, or taking money (directly or indirectly) from Nvidia.