ATI cannot make working video drivers

[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.