ATI cannot make working video drivers

[Ket]

I've read the entire thread, I even read your GTX 460 review where you mentioned this issue so I don't need your advice. I was simply pointing out an issue which seems that most others fail to mention when they're praising Nvidia and flaming ATI.

Nvidia's 2D image quality is FAR more of an issue to me than ATI's loss of a few FPS in 3D from one driver release to the next or a broken V-sync issue in one game here or there. The bottom line is that I can live with ATI's mistakes more than I can live with Nvidia's since I spend MUCH more time in 2D mode on the internet or at my desktop working.

I've used video cards from both manufacturers so I'm not brand loyal, but I'm always happier when I switch back from Nvidia to ATI due to the 2D image quality. For the 10% of time I spend gaming, I can excuse an anomaly here and there in a particular game compared to dealing with fuzzy text, low gamma, and washed out colors using Nvidia's cards the other 90% of the time I'm using my PC.

To each his own though...just my preference.

You can always properly set your monitor up via your actual monitor settings, not driver panels. If you did, you can likely clear those issues right up by adjusting your monitors sharpness levels slightly. Since I done this on my monitor, text is actually slightly crisper than with my ATI card. Colour and gamma has never been a problem for me because I always properly adjust my monitor settings and don't use the crap presets.

[audiofreak]

5) & you could of let that comment pass then instead of what you haver been doing now.

Congratulations, you just proved yourself that what you write is irrelevant.

Its totally upto you if you want to continue a debate about one comment or you can put your money where you mouth is & let it die & move on.

Glad to see that you are finally admitting that you have dumped a turd in this thread, and that when being confronted about it you advise me to close my eyes and wait for the smell to pass.

Going back to the topic, anisotropic filtering is broken on 5xxx series:
http://www.gpu-tech.org/content.php/...HD-5000-series

[PaganII]

The article claims "theoretical".

[Final8ty]

Congratulations, you just proved yourself that what you write is irrelevant.



Glad to see that you are finally admitting that you have dumped a turd in this thread, and that when being confronted about it you advise me to close my eyes and wait for the smell to pass.

Going back to the topic, anisotropic filtering is broken on 5xxx series:
http://www.gpu-tech.org/content.php/...HD-5000-series

Again you fail as i had admitted nothing you saying so changes nothing.
As i said YOU thought that my comment didn't belong here, i didn't, it belongs here for comparison & no matter what you think & you should move on but you have become obsessed with it & you have made a big deal out of it & its shows your weakness as you cant drop it.

[Ket]

@audio, that depends what driver you used. I noticed AF being borked (10.5 and 10.6 I think) with the HD5830, rolled back to 10.3.. no problem. Haven't noticed any AF issues with 10.9 hotfix either. But seriously.. posting in this thread is like pissing in the wind now its lost any momentum it may of had many pages ago.

[Blkout]

You can always properly set your monitor up via your actual monitor settings, not driver panels. If you did, you can likely clear those issues right up by adjusting your monitors sharpness levels slightly. Since I done this on my monitor, text is actually slightly crisper than with my ATI card. Colour and gamma has never been a problem for me because I always properly adjust my monitor settings and don't use the crap presets.

My Dell 2405 doesn't have a sharpness adjustment, or at least it doesn't on the DVI input, I haven't used the D-sub input. That being said, you shouldn't have to change your monitor settings to adjust for a video card that clearly has an issue by one manufacturer for years now. Its great if you make a work-around to the problem, but what if someone doesn't have sharpness adjustments? And before you go bashing my monitor, the Dell 2405 was in the cream of the crop when released and is still a great monitor by today's standards.

[Ket]

Hate to say it, but pretty much any relatively good modern monitor (read: 1-2yrs or newer) that has DVI and VGA options has a sharpness adjustment option. I agree you shouldn't HAVE to use that feature and nV should sort it out, but for most people its no big deal they just tweak the actual monitor settings a tad.

[Blkout]

Hate to say it, but pretty much any relatively good modern monitor (read: 1-2yrs or newer) that has DVI and VGA options has a sharpness adjustment option. I agree you shouldn't HAVE to use that feature and nV should sort it out, but for most people its no big deal they just tweak the actual monitor settings a tad.

The Dell 2405 is still a top notch monitor, it simply doesn't do sharpness adjustment on DVI, only on analog. Like I said, its not so much a matter of being able to use a work-around solution but you just shouldn't have to.

[audiofreak]

@Final8ty:
As I said many times before, smart people are doing comparisons by reading threads in ATI part of the forum and threads in NVIDIA part of the forum, or even threads in ATI only forum .vs. threads in NVIDIA only forum.

What you and Blkout keep insisting on is totally pointless, because it just boils down to poisoning all threads in all forums with irrelevant content.

It is as if you two came to Celine Dion concert and started playing heavy-metal on a boombox, because people listening to Celine Dion should be able to compare. Guess what? They don't give a f*ck. Same here.

So, how about you all start talking about Anisotropic filtering that doesn't work properly on 5xxx series instead?

Get the tool and see it for yourself:
http://www.3dcenter.org/dateien/date...-af-tester.zip

[Final8ty]

@Final8ty:
As I said many times before, smart people are doing comparisons by reading threads in ATI part of the forum and threads in NVIDIA part of the forum, or even threads in ATI only forum .vs. threads in NVIDIA only forum.

What you and Blkout keep insisting on is totally pointless, because it just boils down to poisoning all threads in all forums with irrelevant content.

It is as if you two came to Celine Dion concert and started playing heavy-metal on a boombox, because people listening to Celine Dion should be able to compare. Guess what? They don't give a f*ck. Same here.

So, how about you all start talking about Anisotropic filtering that doesn't work properly on 5xxx series instead?

Get the tool and see it for yourself:
http://www.3dcenter.org/dateien/date...-af-tester.zip

The problem is that you took the comment as an ATI v NV flame comment when it was not.

[Blkout]

@Final8ty:
As I said many times before, smart people are doing comparisons by reading threads in ATI part of the forum and threads in NVIDIA part of the forum, or even threads in ATI only forum .vs. threads in NVIDIA only forum.

What you and Blkout keep insisting on is totally pointless, because it just boils down to poisoning all threads in all forums with irrelevant content.

It is as if you two came to Celine Dion concert and started playing heavy-metal on a boombox, because people listening to Celine Dion should be able to compare. Guess what? They don't give a f*ck. Same here.

So, how about you all start talking about Anisotropic filtering that doesn't work properly on 5xxx series instead?

Get the tool and see it for yourself:
http://www.3dcenter.org/dateien/date...-af-tester.zip

Sorry, I don't think anyone here got the memo that only your posts contain relevant content on this forum. I'm glad we all have an understanding now. Should everyone just cease to post and just listen to you from now on, Mr. Supreme Being? Better yet, just snap your fingers and make everyone go away so you can talk to yourself.

[audiofreak]

This is how 16xAF looks on NVIDIA GTX 470:


If you get D3D AF Tester as I suggested above, you will be able to compare the result with your "pure awesomeness" high-end ATI video cards -- set Mipmaps to Normal and Use Checkerboard Texture slider to 2 in order to get comparable image to mine.

EDIT:
Added HD 5870 sample image, courtesy of Lukija


On HD 5xxx series you will only see a flat gray disc in the middle with those settings. Someone might say "it is better filtering" (good joke!), but even if that was the case, transitions between filtering stages should not be as abrupt and harsh as they are on ATI cards. Whatever way you put it, anisotropic filtering is broken on 5xxx series.

[Kurz]

This is how 16xAF looks on NVIDIA GTX 470:


If you get D3D AF Tester, you will be able to compare your result with your pure awesomeness high-end ATI video cards -- set Mipmaps to Normal and Use Checkerboard Texture slider to 2.

On HD 5xxx series you will only see a flat gray disc in the middle. Someone might say "it is better filtering", but even if that was the case, transitions between filtering stages should not be as abrupt and harsh as they are on ATI cards. Whatever way you put it, anisotropic filtering is broken on 5xxx series.

Question is does this cause problems in today's games?
We are talking about a very specific situation here.

[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.

[rintamarotta]

1. ATI Cards, never had any problems what i have read from this thread, running on 3 x 24" LCD's with Eyefinity, have had cards from radeon 9700 to ares hd5870x2.
2. Nvidia Cards, never had any problems with them, i have got from Geforce MX 440 to GTX480's.

ATI and Nvidia been allways fantastic to me from the day i bought my first card .

Only thing i complain about in ati hd5 series cards is worse image quality than that of nvidia cards, but i love them bowth.

SO, everyone stop complaining, its about personal reference what kind of card you like or what kind of looking image you want to see on your screen.

[audiofreak]

SO, everyone stop complaining, its about personal reference what kind of card you like or what kind of looking image you want to see on your screen.

I have to disagree with you on the last part -- image quality is not a personal preference. There are standards for anisotropic filtering, antialiasing, etc.

If ATI card/driver combo doesn't do the filtering with the same quality like the NVIDIA card/driver combo, then ATI doesn't have the right to compare performance and power efficiency directly because their workload is not the same.

Other than the already discussed broken anisotropic filtering, another thing broken with ATI drivers is that you cannot clamp negative LOD bias like you can with NVIDIA. This is a problem for many older games because they use negative LOD bias to make their textures look sharper which causes texture shimmering.

My friend Lukija recorded the following motion sequences in his favorite racing game rFactor. Those are animated PNG files, so there is no loss of quality due to compression. They are around 15MB each so please be patient if you do open them to check them out.

rFactor on HD5870

The above is obviously unplayable due to excessive texture shimmering. This level of image "quality" is not what I expect from high-end video card costing 365 US$.

rFactor on HD5870 (with LOD patch)

I hope you will agree that the above looks much better. So, what's the problem then?

The problem is that he had to reverse-engineer and patch ATI video driver to get acceptable result, while on NVIDIA he can just set the option "Texture Filtering - Negative LOD Bias" to "Clamp" in driver control panel.

To implement LOD bias clamping in driver (like NVIDIA has done for ages), all ATI developers would have to do is to add the following 3 lines of code:

if (lod_clamp) { // if the user sets "negative LOD bias" to "clamp" via CCC
    if (lod_bias < 0.0f) { // and if LOD bias passed by the game is < 0.0
        lod_bias = 0.0f; // set it to 0.0
    }
}

ATI not implementing this simple fix for so long while constantly bragging about "pure awesomeness" on Tweeter shows either how incompetent they are, or how much they don't give a f*ck about people who occasionally want to play an older game on their high-end cards without going blind from awfull texture shimmering.

[Ket]

To implement LOD bias clamping in driver (like NVIDIA has done for ages), all ATI developers would have to do is to add the following 3 lines of code:

if (lod_clamp) { // if the user sets "negative LOD bias" to "clamp" via CCC
    if (lod_bias < 0.0f) { // and if LOD bias passed by the game is < 0.0
        lod_bias = 0.0f; // set it to 0.0
    }
}

Thats not reverse engineering the ATI driver, its a simple script.

[audiofreak]

Thats not reverse engineering the ATI driver, its a simple script.

Jesus... have some coffee before posting next time.

That is a pseudo-code example of what should ATI have done, not what my friend did.

[rintamarotta]

I have to disagree with you on the last part -- image quality is not a personal preference. There are standards for anisotropic filtering, antialiasing, etc.

If ATI card/driver combo doesn't do the filtering with the same quality like the NVIDIA card/driver combo, then ATI doesn't have the right to compare performance and power efficiency directly because their workload is not the same.

Other than the already discussed broken anisotropic filtering, another thing broken with ATI drivers is that you cannot clamp negative LOD bias like you can with NVIDIA. This is a problem for many older games because they use negative LOD bias to make their textures look sharper which causes texture shimmering.

I haveto disagree with what you disagree, infact it is personal preference what you like and what you dont like, to hell with standard's if i like from what i see from screen, no one of us humans see things exactly same way there will be allways small differences beatwean invidual humans and due that we like from different kind of looking images.

For me, some games i play look even better with my Ares HD5870x2 card than with my GTX480 with all details at higest possible and antialiasing and anisotropic filtering set to higest with resolution i play with.

For LOD bias, i dont play older games so i dont really care about it and if i play older games, and if i see problems with image qualities, i just go to my 2nd pc and dont think about it.

[audiofreak]

I haveto disagree with what you disagree, infact it is personal preference what you like and what you dont like, to hell with standard's if i like from what i see from screen, no one of us humans see things exactly same way there will be allways small differences beatwean invidual humans and due that we like from different kind of looking images.

You can disagree all you want, but if there is no standard in image quality then you cannot compare card performance without taking IQ differences into account.

For me, some games i play look even better with my Ares HD5870x2 card than with my GTX480 with all details at higest possible and antialiasing and anisotropic filtering set to higest with resolution i play with.

"Some games look even better" is subjective term while I am showing visible and measurable differences between things that should be (almost) the same in this thread.

For LOD bias, i dont play older games so i dont really care about it and if i play older games, and if i see problems with image qualities, i just go to my 2nd pc and dont think about it.

So your solution is that we all buy two full blown PCs, one with NVIDIA and one with ATI card instead of having them fix things that are broken?

Brilliant mind... so much wasted potential in playing games on two PCs.

[Olivon]

CarstenS talks about anisotropic filtering of the Radeon HD 5000 series on his blog

[Blkout]

"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.

Doesn't appear that the 5xxx series is worse than the 4xxx series here...

http://www.hardocp.com/article/2009/..._card_review/6

[audiofreak]

Doesn't appear that the 5xxx series is worse than the 4xxx series here...

http://www.hardocp.com/article/2009/..._card_review/6

How about you get a prescription for glasses? Same thing shown in this thread is clearly visible in that old article, I wonder how nobody picked it up earlier:



On HD 5xxx you still have a huge gray disk killing all the texture details and abrupt transition to unfiltered area, while both HD 4xxx and NVIDIA have gradually increasing filtering towards center of the frame as it should be.

The problem is that everyone keeps staring only at the pretty rainbow colored circle which shows how HD 5xxxx has angle independent anisotropic filtering, but they keep missing the loss of detail and abrupt transitions.

[Blkout]

How about you get a prescription for glasses? Same thing shown in this thread is clearly visible in that old article, I wonder how nobody picked it up earlier:

On HD 5xxx you still have a huge gray disk killing all the texture details and abrupt transition to unfiltered area, while both HD 4xxx and NVIDIA have gradually increasing filtering towards center of the frame as it should be.

The problem is that everyone keeps staring only at the pretty rainbow colored circle which shows how HD 5xxxx has angle independent anisotropic filtering, but they keep missing the loss of detail and abrupt transitions.

I don't need glasses and the colored area is the only area you should be concerned with. This same AF test has been used for years on most tech sites when reviewing video cards and never once that I can recall has a reviewer ever mentioned being concerned with the gray area. The colored circle is the benchmark sample. If you can find information from a credible tech site that says the gray area is important as well, please post it. The colored area is what determines the quality of the filter.

[fantomx]

Tested on Catalyst 10.7.

Only instaled drivers, nothing to set, no ccc, no RadeonPro. I've put patched file in crysis folder and voliaaa... It's working, shimmering is not actually removed permanently, but it is HUGELY smaller !
It can be seen on vegetaion and on the shadows of trees and objects in far distance.

Graet work Audio and Lukija !!!