Anand Compares NV38/R360 IQ

not trying to show off here (not english native) but that would not be forcing AF in 100 apps, that would be requesting it.

and I would rather have that on a low/mid end card than playing with options in the CP and trying to remember WTF worked decent for every god damned game i decide to try.

and, yes, the CP thing is forcing. ever tried to play Splinter Cell with a certain CP setting?

but i agree that we should have aniso+tri as an option even if it is buried "very" deep.

 

Zero. But we dont talk about IQ issues, we talk about max IQ.


The problem with the current ATi/NV drivers: You cannot play 80% of games with a full trilinear/anisotropic filter. A 500-$-gfx cant do a full trilinear/anisotropic filter in 80% of games. Mmh, incorrect: The hardware can do this, but ATI/NV doesnt want you to use this potential.

 

[3dc]Leonidas, Absolutely not true. With the ATI drivers and a registry setting, you can force max AF for all texture stages.

 

As Dave mentioned before this is done for competitive reasons. Look at how your site somewhat misrepresented the abilities of ATI's cards (WRT their being able to full trilinear when selected in game). In this same vain how many sites would just set the slider on max quality and then bench without looking at the difference in filtering quality? If I am not mistaken two of the top three sites have already done this (AT and [H]).

 

If... and who makes that decision? Some people are more sensitive to mipmap banding than others.

Which quite underlines Leonidas' point that ATI/NV don't want you to use this potential (for benchmarking purposes, I should add). Else it would be in the driver panel, not some undocumented registry setting.

At least 3DCenter made an update to the article saying that applications can enable full trilinear on ATI cards. Maybe if ATI added some switch to the driver panel enabling users to select full trilinear, some review sites would actually come to realize that there are differences to filtering quality that turn any comparison into green apples vs. green oranges.

 

Actually, the problem seems to be more with modern games, most of which still don't have the ability to set anisotropic filtering within the application. Halo is the most recent one I noticed problems with on certain textures when AF is forced via the control panel - A quick trip into rTool fixed the problem.

 

Hmm, is now the right time to mention that those kindly folks who run proper and extensive benchmarking and publish them are EXACTLY the folks who know about these settings? Plus, while it would be nice for the IHV's to compensate, I think it's MORE important for the game developers themselves to be the ones putting in the full-fledged controls THEY want in a game, so selecting "Application" in the video driver's control panel is all that's needed ever.

 

I doubt that. Look at AT latest article on the 9800XT vs 5950. Anand didn’t even mention that trilinear filtering doesn't work with the 52.xx drivers on the 5950. He missed AA issues on the 5950 as well. And that was supposedly an IQ article. ATI should not put themselves at a greater competitive disadvantage so they can have the even higher moral high ground.