Graphic Cards Nvidia at it again ! Caught "over optimising" !!

Blade_Runner

Skilled
Germans claim Nvidia caught "over optimising"


WE CALL IT optimisation these days, but what do you call it when a firm over optimises? We used to call it something different in the days of the NV30, when Nvidia had to do something to make its chip work better and do better in benchmarks but to our surprise it seems to have done it again. The chaps from 3D Center, a very talented in-depth site, spotted and tested and proved that Nvidia is using a lower anisotropic filtering quality than any other card available.

Those guys noticed a texture shimmering problem when you are using normal driver settings. This was the case with NV40 cards but you could resolve this flickering by using high quality driver settings. This won't work on G70 based cards, so the guys well known for its thorough benchmarks went digging a little deeper into the chip.

It turns out that Nvidia is not doing anisotropic filtering the way it should and that the picture quality is the one to suffer. You will get the shimmering effect on your textures whenever you are using Geforce 7800GTX cards but you won't see this using Radeon cards.

The guys claimed that all NV40 and G70 cards will suffer from the same flickering problem and that these cards have "by far worse AF quality". They also add that Nvidia got the flickering because it was using general under sampling and as a result is getting the flickers. It's interesting to note that older Geforce 5800 Ultra won't suffer from this, just the new cards that 6800 or 7800 based.

Another German web site Computerbase , went a step further. It made a custom driver by changing the inf, where the driver could not recognise 7800GTX and use its optimisations. The card was listed as unknown but was working just fine. But when the guys went testing they noticed a massive performance drop when using those drivers, close to 30 percent and related it to anisotropic filtering. Nvidia has a lot to explain.

3DCenter, for the original article, is here in English while the Computerbase German article is here. We will ask Nvidia what is going on but we think there's something up. At lease the guys proved it isn’t a hardware bug - it's a driver problem only but performance drops dramatically as soon as you resolve it. µ

Source

The article in english

Lol ! Nvidia has a lot of explaining to do......... :eek:hyeah: :eek:hyeah:
 
Yeah, if this is true.. Nice Going nVidia!...

Bah, but whatever happens, they do have the best card out there.
The texture Shimmering effect even ive noticed is not sooo great, if you compare 2 identical screenshots from the x850 xt pe and 7800 GTX, you will still see that the 7800 GTX has better pic quality.
 
heh, How many more times does this have to happen.
A fanboy nvnews moderator even banned one member over this same 3dc article some time ago.
 
goldenfrag said:
Yeah, if this is true.. Nice Going nVidia!...

Bah, but whatever happens, they do have the best card out there.
The texture Shimmering effect even ive noticed is not sooo great, if you compare 2 identical screenshots from the x850 xt pe and 7800 GTX, you will still see that the 7800 GTX has better pic quality.
Eh ! If there is shimmering then its pretty obvious that the quality isnt upto par and yeah shimmering wont b noticeable in screenies :cool2: only while watching a video(of the recorded game) or seeing the actual game. So as of now 7800GTX default image quality is really not upto the mark and also proves that most of the reviewers who reviewed the cards din't bother to report the issue.

But yeah the IQ quality will still be a bit superior in case of the 7800GTX since the x800 series doesnt support SM 3.0 and TAA. :)

Still its shameful that all this gfx card wars is leading to an degrade in IQ and more and more people are obsessed with FPS. One of the reason i'll stay with ATi ;) (unless it falls to such levels too :p)
 
Blade i am not an nvIDIOT or a atiFANATIC but i feel its no point sticking to any one of them. I would just rather buy the card which i feel is best bang for the buck... Weather it be 9800Pro,6600GT,6800GT or X800XL...
 
Switch said:
Blade i am not an nvIDIOT or a atiFANATIC but i feel its no point sticking to any one of them. I would just rather buy the card which i feel is best bang for the buck... Weather it be 9800Pro,6600GT,6800GT or X800XL...
Hehe that i guess nobody is(talking of sane people). I was until now contemplating on getting a 6800GT which i dropped due to some reason. But don't you think IQ is of paramount importance for any "hi-end" graphics card. And if a card like 7800GTX is being resorted to using such cheap tricks then i dunno what to say.

Say tomorrow no one says anything about such degradation of IQ, Nvidia and even ATi might continue doing this until the situation is way out of the hand. Think about it................

Also let me know what constitutes the best bang for buck for you. In high end card best bang for buck for me is simply 1) the best IQ + 2) performance to boot.
 
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