Umm...those pictures.
WTH?
Are they simply incompetent, or downright lying? I've never seen anyone claim a non-anisotropic filtered image looked like that before. Does it even look like that with high texture LOD? Even if it does, it seems to require either incompetence or downright dishonesty to not mention it.
Perhaps there is some driver version for one of the cards that has default settings that could do that...anyone?
What convinces me of dishonesty is the other games they mention that would clearly show the fallacy of their conclusion and statements, yet they use the SS screenshots, exclusively and without specifying anything else about game settings for example, to excuse not showing any other game shots. They also just ignore what the "ATi provided" shots show, and they warrant narry a mention at all, and picked the other sample contrast picture with an apparently ridiculously low maximum sampling level.
Really, could anyone be that
honestly incompetent? Even if their particular driver version does look like that all of a sudden, with Serious Sam (though I'm more inclined to believe they used max detail settings for SS and "didn't realize" it overrode the driver settings
), are we to believe that the writer has never used anisotropic filtering before now?
I'm sorry for yet another "conspiracy theory" but the source of the technical info for the article seems pretty clear to me. Also, a rather interesting timing of the article when some new parts happen to come out from a certain vendor that just don't compete very well with a certain other vendor's recent part, especially when the topic being discussed by the article is applied.
The "coincidences", and my general impression of commercial "technology journalism" over a long period, make this conclusion pretty solid to me. Feel free to disagree, but I reserve to believe you're silly if your reasons are based on
assumed (as opposed to demonstrated and earned) journalistic integrity, ignoring the rather interesting set of market circumstances that exist when this article "coincidentally" appeared, and the source of all the quoted comments and explanations given in the article.
I'm not saying ATi wasn't contacted, but I am saying that ATi's pictures were shown once and then ignored in the main point. I'm not saying they didn't get info from ATi, but I am saying it looks like that info was used only to back off from the nVidia statements, which we've seen elsewhere, that seem to be inaccurate, to only a point far enough away to begin to give the appearance of impartiality. I'm not saying there isn't new info in the article, but I am saying there is an absence of connecting what seems to be interesting technical info in any reasonable way to any conclusions or implications of the text of the article, and a complete lack of information concerning anything else about driver settings or even game settings.
Anyone know an applicable variation of the phrase "You aren't paranoid if they really ARE out to get you?" And no, I don't intend to repeat versions of this same text throughout the thread, it serves no real point. But please, accurately represent my given statements if you disagree, so we can both just let the statements stand.
