Fall 2003 Video Card Roundup - Part 2: High End Shootout
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Derek Wilson on October 7, 2003 5:30 PM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Back to the game...
Since NVIDIA can't do floating point textures, PS2.0 shadows were left off, and we didn't use the NVIDIA shadow (depth sprites) for our cards as ATI doesn't support that. We have decided that since the glow effect uses PS 2.0 (and we are using this as a DX9 stress test rather than an actual game) this needs to be enabled. The 'goodness' of the glow effect has been questioned, but we aren't here to critique the quality of the implimentation. We simply want to test the raw power each card has to push TRAOD PS2.0 code. Personally, I think the effect glow had on the wall lights in the Paris demo was one of the only "pretty" things in the game.
Depth of Feild (DoF) is also on. After watching this demo hundreds of times, it really seems to me that using PS2.0 for DoF in TRAOD was overkill for what they ended up with. It just seems like they could have gotten similar results (with better frame rates) using lower detail (frequency) mipmaps and dynamic reduction of geometry. Of course, I could be way off base, but it just seems like there were better things that could have been done with PS 2.0 in this game.
We note that there have been issues with the accuracy of the Depth of Field post processing, but we think that the new 50 series of Detonators (along with the Cg compiler) will alleviate this issue. Of course, there are still some IQ issues in ATI's 3.7 cats.
As games and hardware move forward, post effects like DoF and rendered textures are going to be getting more and more complex, and the way hardware handles these things will be slightly different. It's less important to look at pixel level "sameness" between two solutions, but rather at overall image quality, and the impact of the effect. The user experience is what matters in this arena, and some things are going to be subjective. Pixel shader effects are much more intricate than geometry or T&L, and differences in architecture, precision, and drivers will all contribute to slight differences where no solution can clearly be labeled as more correct than another. Of course, that makes our job harder, but it will definitely be an interesting ride.
Anyway, in order to try to understand exactly how DX9 PS2.0 is affecting each graphics card, we are doing two tests at each resolution (with and without AA). The first test, everything we don't need to see something and have PS2.0 functionality is disabled. For the second test the only thing we do is turn off PS2.0 and run the benchmark again. The scores we will be giving you are in the form of percent decrease in performance when PS2.0 is enabled. This should give us some idea of how this implementation of PS2.0 scales on each card, and give us a good solid glimpse into the implications of DX9 in TRAOD (as this is the only game that will ever use this engine).
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
117 Comments
View All Comments
Anonymous User - Tuesday, October 7, 2003 - link
#41 "[...] who butters your bread???"Thats an interesting question, I suspect he does though my question is "who wants to know?" ; )
In regard to your other question. "Why can't we have a true winner now?". As for myself, I'm going to give Dereck and Anand the benefit of the doubt.
It seems to me that they realize that NVIDIA attempted to do somthing unique with it's 5000 series being that it does not exactly hold to the Direct X 9.1 spec. For instance it has a 16 bit and 32 bit rendering mode while DX 9.1 requires 24 bit - which ATI does (refer to Halflife 2 and DOOM III reviews). In the sharder area NVIDIA holds FAR more code (micro ops) than ATI - also if you check back to Anand's original post on the ATI and NVIDIA shootout(s) where there is a comparison between AA and AF NVIDIA was a CLEAR winner. I seem to recall a while ago that NVIDIA claimed ATI didn't do TRUE AF so they were therefore CHEATING. Boy did that one come back around with teeth, huh?
What I'm saying is NVIDIA tried to one up ATI by tring to do more, unfortunately it seems they tried to do TOO much and ended up doing SHADY maneuvers like the whole Future Mark mess. They should of instead focused on the spec. DX 9.1 and the Microsoft shader/pixel code path and not tried to pull a GLIDE like 3DFX (excuse the parsed english).
So, hopefully NVIDIA learns from it's mistakes modifies it's silicon to the spec. and gives us all BETTER cards to choose from come March/April.
As far as the authors are concerned, Anand and Derick seem to be attempting JUSTICE (helping the party who needs the most help, and treating all parties equally) - which in this case seems to be NVIDIA. The authors are helping NVIDIA by dropping HEAVY hints like what you stated
" Next year will be the year of DX9 titles, and it will be under the next generation of games that we will finally be able to crown a true DX9 winner. Until then, anyone's guess is fair game." and
" If NVIDIA can continue to extract the kinds of performance gains from unoptimized DX9 code as they have done with the 52.14 drivers (without sacrificing image quality), they will be well on their way to taking the performance crown back from ATI by the time NV40 and R400 drop.".
If NVIDIA takes head of these CONSTRUCTIVE statements then the entire gaming community could benifit - in better prices, higher quality to which the customer usually benifits (AMD vs INTEL sound familiar?).
So, let us be easy and enjoy the night. Time will tell.
Cheers,
aka #37
PS: Dereck please excuse me for leaving out your name before. The article was well written.
Anonymous User - Tuesday, October 7, 2003 - link
Regarding my previous post #44, I wanted to write:...the difference **between AA/AF and noAA/AF** is very noticeable in the game...
Jeff7181 - Tuesday, October 7, 2003 - link
Can you say "highly programmable GPU?" I can =)Anonymous User - Tuesday, October 7, 2003 - link
Why didn't you guys wait for Catalyst 3.8? It's out tomorrow and is reported to fix many IQ problems in games like NWN. What would a couple of days have hurt, especially since this article is going to be irrelevant after the Cat drivers are released tomorrow?Anonymous User - Tuesday, October 7, 2003 - link
Note: the AA/AF and noAA/AF images of Warcraft3 have been mixed up for the NV52.14.It tells a lot about the value of the screenshots that it takes careful inspection to find this error. I have played a lot of War3 recently and the difference is very noticeable in game, even with this GF4.
Anonymous User - Tuesday, October 7, 2003 - link
#18 Its not a problem figuring out the graphs its just weird that he would choose that type of graph excluding FPS.BTW I own a 5900U and a 9700pro.
I don't like people avoiding ps2.0 tests. My 5900 sucks at it. I paid too much for what I got in the 5900. I try to get a good bang for the buck. The 5900 is not.
Anonymous User - Tuesday, October 7, 2003 - link
...DerekWilson - Tuesday, October 7, 2003 - link
First off... Thanks Pete ;-) ...Secondly, Anand and I both put a great deal of work into this article, and I am very glad to see the responses it has generated.
Many of the image quality issues from part 1 were due to rendering problems that couldn't be captured in a screen shot (like jerkiness in X2 and F1), or a lack of AA. For some of the tests, we just didn't do AA performance benchmarks if one driver or the other didn't do what it was supposed to. There were no apples to anything other than apples tests in this review. The largest stretch was X2 where the screen was jerky and the AA was subpar. But we definitly noted that.
TRAOD isn't a very high quality game, and certainly isn't the only DX9 (with PS2.0) test on the list. Yes, ATI beat NV in that bench. But its also true that ATI won most of the other benchmarks as well.
Anyway, thanks again for the feedback, sorry BF1942 couldn't make it in, and we'll be bring back a flight sim game as soon as we tweak it out.
J Derek Wilson
Anonymous User - Tuesday, October 7, 2003 - link
Didn't Gabe Newell complain about screen capture "issues" with the Nvidia 50.xx drivers that show better image quality in screenshots than actually shows up in game?Anand spoke about image quality problems in almost every test in part 1, but i see almost nothing wrong with the screencaps in part 2.
Can you verify this Anand?
Anonymous User - Tuesday, October 7, 2003 - link
No difference in IQ, huh? Am I the only person to notice an IQ difference between the AA+8xAF pics of Aquamark3?http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/video/roundups...
http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/video/roundups...
It's funny how Anand and Derek did not comment on this. Maybe they missed it because they based their comparison off of those tiny images. Ah, so that's what the need of full-sized images are for?!