ATI 5xxx texture filtering problems

[annihilat0r]

flickering i see only in GRID and microstuttering i have only ever seen in Flatout: ultimate carnage

You do not "see" microstuttering. There's a reason it's called "micro" stuttering and not regular stuttering.

Microstuttering makes the game appear that its running at about half the FPS. I've experienced it in my 8800 GT SLI setup, and it really sucked. FRAPS numbers showed crazy FPS but the game wasn't really smooth.

It was only when I timedemoed and saw exactly which frame was rendered at which microsecond; that I was able to understand why my gaming experience wasn't what I was seeing at FRAPS.

Basically, if you render 5 frames at the same exact time but fail to render another frame in the next 20 milliseconds, you'll appear to have 250 FPS but will feel 50 FPS.

[STEvil]

annihilator - it is plainly visible in flatout ultimate carnage

[Sly Fox]

annihilator - it is plainly visible in flatout ultimate carnage

Same for Crysis.

8800 GTS = Low FPS but it feels fairly smooth

3870X2 = Higher FPS but it feels like a nightmare

Although I'm sure newer cards are better about it.

[Lightman]

Same for Crysis.

8800 GTS = Low FPS but it feels fairly smooth

3870X2 = Higher FPS but it feels like a nightmare

Although I'm sure newer cards are better about it.

I had 3870CF and 4870CF. There is BIG difference between the two in Crysis regarding micro sutter! Really HD4870CF was smooth while 3870CF was showing 25FPS+ and still game could be choppy ...

[saaya]

http://www.pcgameshardware.com/aid,6...eviews/?page=5

there we are, its improved in 5xxx but its still there...
and its still worse than in gt200!

so they did not only NOT fix it, they didnt even get it done better than nvidia... sigh...
so nvidia doesnt have a reason to improve it and they wont... great...

[zalbard]

http://www.pcgameshardware.com/aid,6...eviews/?page=5

there we are, its improved in 5xxx but its still there...
and its still worse than in gt200!

so they did not only NOT fix it, they didnt even get it done better than nvidia... sigh...
so nvidia doesnt have a reason to improve it and they wont... great...

Can be hopefully resolved via driver updates...

[Heinz68]

The Hard|OCP
In the second screenshot we have enabled 16X AF. Once again we find the Radeon HD 5870 produces the best 16X AF out of the bunch. It is a perfect circle, with no dependencies on angles like the Radeon HD 4890. I would say ATI has succeeded in providing the absolute best filtering
quality in a gaming graphics card.

[RaZz!]

mh, am i the only one who notices the pretty sharp-edged gradient in the grey area (respectively: there's no gradient at all)?

i don't know, but the gradient of the gtx285 in the grey area looks more appealing to me.
what's the way it's meant to be? i have no idea.

check the attachment for a quick comparison i did to illustrate what i mean:

[Manicdan]

i think ingame screenshots will be needed to determine whats really going on.
it could be ATI decided that those areas do not ever blend anyway, and designed it to ignore them completely.

[jmke]

I thought this was about the "flickering"

[Manicdan]

it seems the quality, flickering and performance all go together. to fix or perfect one, the other two may be sacrificed.

[Final8ty]

mh, am i the only one who notices the pretty sharp-edged gradient in the grey area (respectively: there's no gradient at all)?

i don't know, but the gradient of the gtx285 in the grey area looks more appealing to me.
what's the way it's meant to be? i have no idea.

check the attachment for a quick comparison i did to illustrate what i mean:

If you look at the 4980 shot there is even more detail in the grey area than the gtx285.

[Manicdan]

im not sure what the picture should look like, it could be that solid gray is perfect, and the details show where blending isnt exact. i think seeing a screenshot of a tile floor or brick walls, or something with a pattern that we can recognize would help understand what is happening. or i just need to know more about the test and find where it says what should and shouldnt be seen

[Eastcoasthandle]

http://www.pcgameshardware.com/aid,6...eviews/?page=5

there we are, its improved in 5xxx but its still there...
and its still worse than in gt200!

so they did not only NOT fix it, they didnt even get it done better than nvidia... sigh...
so nvidia doesnt have a reason to improve it and they wont... great...

...
What looks sharp on the pictures, flickers in motion...

LOL, I hardly call that conclusive be it they think it's real or otherwise. I find it odd there is a lack of video showing what they are trying to claim. Coming from the same website that wanted to show video of what "they thought" was microstutter (I believe they've removed those videos). As the saying goes, the proof is in the pudding and I don't see any pudding.

[informal]

Yeah IIRC that whole "microstuttering" thing was started by pcgh website. Although some games can't scale well from one to multi GPUs,I haven't seen this thing manifest in reality with neither 4870X2 nor GTX 260 SLI...

[kuhla]

mh, am i the only one who notices the pretty sharp-edged gradient in the grey area (respectively: there's no gradient at all)?

i don't know, but the gradient of the gtx285 in the grey area looks more appealing to me.
what's the way it's meant to be? i have no idea.

check the attachment for a quick comparison i did to illustrate what i mean:

wowa..... good eye, I'm wondering what that is all about too....

[trinibwoy]

Yeah IIRC that whole "microstuttering" thing was started by pcgh website. Although some games can't scale well from one to multi GPUs,I haven't seen this thing manifest in reality with neither 4870X2 nor GTX 260 SLI...

Sigh, it's not some mysterious urban legend made up by people just for kicks. All you need to do is bring up Fraps and record frame times to see it for yourself.

With respect to AF quality, you cannot tell anything from static screenshots. The underfiltering can only be detected in motion. Those static shots show the level of angle dependence, not the level of filtering.

[LordEC911]

wowa..... good eye, I'm wondering what that is all about too....

You want the gray area like that. That is why everyone is calling ATi's new angle independant AF algorithm near perfect, it doesn't get much better.

You can see why in that test, look on the top half, GTX285, between the "gray" area and the white/gray, you can see where it should be completely grey, there are small spots of white/gray. On the 5870 side that isn't present.

[saaya]

yes, is should all be an even grey, the more spots or lines or uneven scaling towards the center you can see, the worse the filtering...
and yes i wish pcgh would make some videos, they tried it some time ago, but not very high res and it was too short and blurry to see much...

[Manicdan]

someone should make a flash animation to describe the problem

[trinibwoy]

someone should make a flash animation to describe the problem

Ask and you shall receive

http://ht4u.net/reviews/2009/amd_ati...istory_state0=

There are three videos in the middle of the page 60MB each.

HD4890, HD5870 and GTX 275.

In each video they did a comparison between the AF hardware and the reference image. The reference image was generated using a shader so it's how things should look if the TMUs were not doing any optimizations.

You can clearly see under-filtering/shimmering on the ATI cards. Now let the conspiracy theories begin!

[RaZz!]

that's quite a let-down tbh. even though i recognize the texture shimmering only in older games where the surfaces are mostly flat etc (with a 4850 that is), i still hoped they'd finally abandon these issues. nothing can beat texture shimmering on the g70 though

[saaya]

according to pcgh using supersampling aa solves the problem, mostly at least!

SSAA in games
In comparison to the internal Oversampling, which can be forced on Geforce graphics cards with the tool Nhancer, the texture LoD is not adjusted with Ati's SSAA. To put it bluntly this means that the amount of AF is not increased. With a third party application like the Ati Tray Tools you can adjust the LoD by hand in order to receive the best texture sharpness. For 2x SSAA we don't recommend any changes yet, but for 4x SSAA you should set the LoD to -1 and for 8x SSAA -2 or -3 are flicker free - depending on the texture content.

so we need to use ssaa, which doesnt work in newer games, and a third party tool to adjust lod to get rid of the texture flickering... not perfect, but if it works... hooray!