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NVidia Fight Back Against ATI At Editor's Day
Thanks to FiringSquad for their feature covering NVidia's recent editor's day, discussed in context of the graphics card company's continuing rivalry with ATI. The writer suggests: "It's become rather trendy to bash NVIDIA lately. People like winners and people love underdogs. ATI is both right now - they've climbed their way out of the abyss and even disregarding the NV30 production delays, their timetable was catching up to NVIDIA's." But, after an interview with Tim Little at Ion Storm Austin and technical questions answered by Tim Sweeney of Epic, the writer concludes: "What the benchmarks have proven is that NVIDIA's hardware is as fast as ATI's, depending on the game. Yes, it does take more work - NVIDIA admitted as much. The NV3X platform isn't as easy to program fast as R300 and R350 are."
Does anyone really have a justification for more than 50fps?
50 is sort of a silly number - most people have their refresh at 60 or 72. To a seasoned FPS gamer, 60 is distinguishable from 50. Whether 130 is distinguishable from 120 is another question - the answer to which is definitely no, even if you had a monitor capable of such silliness.
However, these numbers are really not what we're worried about a lot of the time - we're worried about absolute minimum framerate. Often a game will be chugging along at 51, then hit 11 right when the player wants fine control. It sometimes takes a rather large average framerate score to yield a game that plays smoothly at all times.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
To be fair, it was their turn I guess. Next year it will be NVidia's turn no doubt. The person that busted them this time was Tom at Tom's Hardware Guide.
The accusations leveled against ATi at NVIDIA's Editors' Day two days ago thus become that much more serious. Epic's Mark Rein confirmed that in some cases, high-res detail textures were not displayed in some areas by ATis drivers and that standard, lower-res textures are used instead. Randy Pitchford of the Halo development team also mentioned that there were optimizations present in ATi's drivers which are detrimental to Halo's image quality.
The relevant link is here.
Now that NVidia seems to be the image quality kings and owning the mid-range card market again with the FX5700 Ultra, It makes me wonder how the ATI performance would measure up if they didn't cheat.
For every annoying gentoo user, are three even more annoying anti-gentoo crybabies. Take Yosh from #Gimp for example.
As I recall, visual research indicates that humans can successfully discern fluid motion from frame based motion up until about 400fps. Of course, no one has a monitor that goes up that high, but still, the point stands.
I did try to find a cite, the closest I could find was this page which notes that framerates of 220fps have been proven distinguishable.
An excerpt from ATI's Response to recent allegations of benchmark cheating
AquaMark3: We are currently investigating our rendering in AquaMark3. We have identified that we are rendering an image that is slightly different than the reference rasterizer, but at this point in time we are unable to identify why that is. We believe that this does not have any impact on our performance. Our investigation will continue to identify the cause and resolve it as soon as possible. One point to note is that we render the same image using our latest driver (CATALYST 3.8) as we do with a driver that pre-dates the release of Aquamark3 by almost six months (CATALYST 3.2). Also, in all of our dealings with the developer of Aquamark3, at no point have they advised us that they are unsatisfied with the images that we are rendering. We do not have any application specific optimizations in our driver and we are not cheating in this application.
As many are aware of, Tomshardware is the "Weekly World News" of the computer world. The only consistent factor in their reporting is the misleading nature of their articles. Furthermore, describing any Geforce FX as an "image quality king" is an outright lie, as image quality is noticeably worse than a Radeon even on the games that ATI supposedly "cheats" at. Go look at some screenshots for yourself if you doubt this. nVidia has still not stopped cheating, as their cards still will not enable Trilinear filtering, even when requested by the game and enabled in the drivers. nVidia's recent driver upgrades that purported to increase Pixel Shader 2.0 performance merely drastically reduced image quality, still failing to achieve performance parity with ATI products.
Nice try, though.