ATI cannot make working video drivers

[audiofreak]

Question is does this cause problems in today's games?

Of course it does, and it looks even worse in motion. Just try looking at detailed terrain textures.

EDIT:
Perhaps this will be a more convincing example

D3D AF-Tester settings for reproducing the following images:
- Use Checkerboard Texture (slider at 2)
- Mipmaps: Normal
- Objects: Plane, distance 3.0, angle 55.0°.

GTX 470:


HD 5870:


Note how with ATI 5xxx series there is a large X-shaped loss of detail on the center of the horizon (same would happen in any game with detailed terrain and that is the point where you would be looking at most of the time in FPS game), and how there is a ball-shaped geometric distortion up close (as if a sphere is protruding from below the terrain).

Don't forget to always look at the full-size samples.

We are talking about a very specific situation here.

"Very specific situation" has been constructed to make you notice how abrupt are the transitions between various filtering stages on latest ATI hardware. Not on all ATI hardware mind you -- you get smooth transitions between filtering stages on 4xxx series. Ironic, eh?

Yes, 5xxx has worse image quality than 4xxx. It's IQ has obviously been sacrificed for speed. Whether this has been done intentionally in driver code (i.e. cheating for FPS and benchmark scores), or is a genuine hardware limitation of 5xxx series which cannot be fixed without taking a performance hit which would bring performance to be in line with NVIDIA (or lower) it remains to be seen.

Luckily I won't have to look at it anymore.