ATI vs nVidia: IQ in FS2004.....

[dohcmark8]

I've noticed in the screenshots forum that the Radeon cards have much brighter, and overall better looking images than the nVidia cards, is there really that big of a difference in IQ between the FX and 9xxx series of DX9 videocards?.

[Bigshot]

Yep.

[kc10]

You can simply turn up options like AA and AF and not lose as much FPS as with the FX cards. Probably the Radeon's 8 rendering pipelines allows this. There are FX5900 cards with somewhat limited 8 pipeline architecture (it will use 4 or 8,depending on the game) (??)
Note it's been months since I read up on this stuff so things may have changed since.

[TheFlightMan]

Since you can crank up AA and AF to much higher levels, the ATI cards can produce better IQ. The number of pipes do not improve quality, instead, they give you more or less performance. Therefore, a card with eight pipes can perform much more than one with 4 pipes.

Another thing worth mentioning is that the ATI driver has many more options for tweaking than NVidia's. This allows you to tweak the living daylights out of your card and with some ATI models, overclock them.

NVidia also suffers from Shader Performance problems, which means, they might be looking at problems down the road as more and more DX9 games come out. If you are looking into replacing your card, do some reading before making a decision. I don't recommend making your decision based on comments from this forum. Read some reviews and compare prices, every detail is worth looking at. One thing to keep in mind though, FPS in FS2004 is dictated by your Processor/Memory/MB?Video Card. If any of these items is on the low end is, such as the processor or memory, don't expect your video card to make up the difference.

TheFlightMan

[kc10]

The 8 pixel rendering pipelines = speed. But this contributes in allowing one to use the ATI cards' options (AA, AF..) without dropping to Nvidia-level performance.

[TheFlightMan]

Lets clear things up a bit because we are not being 100% honest here. If you have a nice system 2.6Ghz and up, you will get good IQ with either cards. Now, when it comes to AA/AF, ATI cards can go a bit higher and produce more details (less jaggies, etc) without a huge hit on FPS. However, the high end NVidia cards are just as good as the high end ATI cards. Its the middle market of NVidia where you see this performance issue and if you don't know where to navigate then you start having problems.

With that said, for the middle market, the two ideal cards right now are NVidia's 5900XT and ATI's 9600XT. Note, the 5900XT will smoke the 9600XT for the same amount of money. Reason being, the number of pipes and the 5900XT comes with a 256bit memory interface. So the moral of the story is, if you want our images to look like real life you will need several things. For one, a good processor and motherboard followed by at least 512 megs of Ram. Then, when that is all said and done, you introduce a nice video card to deliver the final product. Even by using the mid market cards, you can get beautiful images. So don't fool yourself or mislead anyone else, you don't have to spend $300 for a video card in order to get detail images.

TheFlightMan

[Bigshot]

The 9800Pro is selling for $239. The 9600XT is selling for $120. ATI has adjusted it's pricing to meet and beat any potential pricing competition from Nvidia. As far as the high end Nvidia keeping up with the high end ATI, well; that's an argument for another day. ATI does have considerably better 2d quality than Nvidia. That's pretty much unquestionable. We'll have to see what the new Nvidia NV40 will do?? Let the competition continue, I say!! As far as pipelines, ATI offers 8:1 while Nvidia offers 4:2. Only the techno geeks know the difference.

[TheFlightMan]

The difference is that NVidia does 2 instructions per pipe, in other words, while an ATI pipe handles one instruction NVidia handles two. But I have to agree with BigShot, the 8:1 ratio is more realistic than the 4:2.

TheFlightMan

[FatTulip]

While we're on minor points, in response to the original post (straight from PC Format - a UK computer magazine so I apologise to those in the UK);

"It's the subject of much debate, but put simply, nVIDIA cards are capable of higher colour accuracy, and can process scenes in 32-bit colour compared to ATI's 24-bit. This sounds like a good thing, but to the naked eye there's little difference in quality and the extra calculations slow the nVIDIA cards up.

To counter this, nVIDIA cards also have a seperate 16-bit path, for shader instructions that don't require full accuracy - but this doesn't meet DirectX standards and is therefore the subject of some controversy."

You could argue then, that whilst the ATI is 'faster' in terms of rendering games, the nVIDIA would be better for 'real-world video' if you have a quality display (for a small performance hit).

[javelin]

I couldn’t have stated it any better- I agree with your opinion!