NVIDIA image quality decreasing

[Sgt Joch]

interesting article at Tom's Hardware which shows that NVIDIA has been lowering the image quality of it's drivers to increase speed.http://www20.tomshardware.com/graphic/20030918/index.html

I had noticed that the image quality of more recent drivers was slightly worse than that of the 30.82's, especially the FSAA.

[Schrullenhaft]

It's a common routine to reduce image quality for performance. Almost every one of the video card developers has done this at one point or another. For NVidia it seems a bit dire since ATI has a bit of a quality and speed edge over them at the moment. NVidia's saving grace has been its frequent driver updates and fairly comprehensive API support, but with DirectX 9 they're not doing so well, even with their latest hardware.

In CM's case NVidia provides a slight edge in feature support (fog tables), but otherwise they are about even. Some subjective opinions posted here suggest that the Radeons have better visual quality with CM, which may be true. However both video card families have some annoying bugs that haven't gotten quashed lately and it may be some time before they do (especially with the focus on DirectX 9 by both companies). Rumor has it that the Catalyst 3.8 driver has a bunch of fixes in it (rather than speed optimizations). If we're extremely lucky ATI may have addressed some of the problems we've seen, but I wouldn't count too much on that (not that NVidia has done any better lately either in CM's case).

[Jack Carr]

This is interesting. It just goes to show you that the latest isn't always the greatest. I made a decision when the FX series of Nvidia cards came out not to upgrade and instead to stay with my Ti4600 running 30.82. After reading through your post I'm glad I didn't get one of the newer cards.

[FatherTime]

Based on my expeirence you made a very sound decision by staying with your ti4600.......I recently purchased a fx5600 ultra.....according to it specifications it should be faster and more powerful than any of the ti's model.....it is not!!! the original card I was replacing was a ti4400.....though I did a couple of benchmarks just to do it offically for myself.....I could tell before hand the obvious difference....something just is not right with the new nvidia chipset....especailly considering the old ti chipset out performs it....the only thing that makes me apprehensive about going to ATI is all of the nightmare stories I have read about thier cataylst drivers....where as detonators have always been very stable and efficent.

[Sgt Joch]

I have owned a lot of ATI cards, including a Radeon 8500 which sees daily use in my son's computer playing mostly Dungeon Siege ...The latest ATI drivers are as good as recent NVIDIA drivers IMHO and the image quality of the 8500 is better that that of the GF4, especially in 32 bit color.

The big problem is that many game developpers used to tune their games to work with NVIDIA cards, which is what most people have and neglect ATI. Because of that, many older games (i.e. Jane F/A-18, CMBB, Sub Command) have issues with ATI cards. However, that situation is changing, ATI now has IMHO better hardware that NVIDIA and developpers are now making sure their games run on ATI cards.