HD 5870 Discussion thread.

[air_ii]

The 5870 screenshot for Oblivion is only 1635x1022 pixels.

When I download it and open the file, it says 1680x1050 (checked on 8MSAA 16AF)...

 

[wolf]

You exaggerate. The memory gives more than 1% gains per 50MHz increase (58XX series cards).

not only that but the gains grow as the core speed increases, I'll exampleize it using my previous data (HD5870 - Unigine Heaven Benchmark - 1680x1050 - 4xAA, 16xAF - max w/tesselation - Cat 9.10 official 5800 support)

725/1000 = 26.7 fps
725/1250 = 28.0 fps

~4.75% gain from memory speed increase.

950/1000 = 31.7 fps
950/1250 = 33.8 fps

~6.22% gain from memory speed increase.

This all again touches on how the 5870 is not bottlenecked by the memory speed/bandwidth, nor is any other Cypress chip.

However it shows that you can't dismiss overclocking your memory, for example lets take a 5850, don't just clock the core up to 900+ mhz because it shows the most gains, as clocking the memory in tandem will allow that GPU OC to shine more.

 

[air_ii]

I'm sure bottlenecks will be different for different games. What settings did you run your tests at? I'm sure with heavy AA memory overclocking would yield better fps increase than that (again, not in every game though).

Some say that 5870 is limited by its triangle setup rate, which is basically the same as in 4890 and is directly linked to core clock.

 

[kylzer]

If overclocking the memory yields no change, then overclocking the core should have yielded 2000000 times more effective performance boost than ocing memory, or infinite more times!

Yer over 9000%

 

[Bo_Fox]

Hey, there's a recent announcement that the 5830 will be released with similar performance to a 4890, to bridge the gap between a 5770 and a 5850.

http://www.nordichardware.com/news,10553.html
(thanks to btarunr for the heads-up on the TPU front page)

Let's see if the 5830 will be exactly like a 5770, but with the much-needed 256-bit bus!

 

[Bo_Fox]

I don't see that. To me it's just different Moire pattern, due to slightly different camera angle (I did try).

Edit: Ok, I see a slight difference. But is it brilinear optimisation? I'm not sure...

Yeah, it's called trilinear optimization.

We can try to get this problem fixed by asking ATI, or not.

There's a noticeable mip-map line on the road surface, right where the 9th curb stone is (counting from the bottom). Sorry, I do not have time today to copy the picture, edit it, and then upload it. Gotta go and do some errands.

No big deal for me, unless I own a 5k series card sometimes later on this year. Hopefully ATI Tray Tools will have driver signing for x64 versions of Windows so that you can force Full Trilinear.

 

[erocker]

Yeah, it's called trilinear optimization.

We can try to get this problem fixed by asking ATI, or not.

There's a noticeable mip-map line on the road surface, right where the 9th curb stone is (counting from the bottom).

I do not have time to copy the picture, edit it, and then upload it.. gotta go.

No big deal for me, unless I own a 5k series card sometimes later on this year. Hopefully ATI Tray Tools will have driver signing for x64 versions of Windows so that you can force Full Trilinear.

I've tried on two separate monitors are various brightness and contrasts and connot see the line. However the 4870 shot does look a little better than the 5870 shot in Oblivion. Distant objects are a little darker in the lines, but it's very minimal and nothing I would be concerned about personally. It's not using trillinear filtering, it's using x16 anistropic filtering.

 

[Bo_Fox]

Yeah, the 16x perfectly circular AF is great, but with brilinear filtering right before the AF kicks in, therein lies the problem.

Hey air_ii, I forgot to tell you about the SSAA.. try turning up the LOD to -1 or -2 if you can. It'll help to sharpen the textures up close. You might have to use ATT to do this (by making a specific profile for the game .exe). It was done at PCGamesHardware with Crysis and fixed the blurriness problem. In the Oblivion SSAA screenshot, the distant textures look wonderful, but up-close, the road looks more blurry. Hope this helps.

Now, I really gotta go!!!!

 

[bobzilla2009]

I saw the line when driving on a flat planet on mass effect! It's still no biggy for me, i managed to lose it again after about 30s of not following it and hasn't appeared in any other game noticeably. But anyways, If you're so bored in a game that you're staring at the floor for long stretches of time, it's the games fault ^^

And i noticed the SSAA blurryness on left 4 dead 2, so i just put on 24x CSAA instead. o i may look into that fix if it substantially improves texture quality (since the edges were perfect in SSAA).

 

[Steevo]

I've tried on two separate monitors are various brightness and contrasts and connot see the line. However the 4870 shot does look a little better than the 5870 shot in Oblivion. Distant objects are a little darker in the lines, but it's very minimal and nothing I would be concerned about personally. It's not using trillinear filtering, it's using x16 anistropic filtering.

Actually look at the stone division on the towers at the end. 4870 sucks balls at rendering the lines.

I will agree that the stones look a little rougher on the 4870, and the miore pattern is discernable on the 4870, but the overall lifelike appearance is better on the 5870. And if you don't believe me then go outside. I have a paver stone driveway, and none of them are as rough as the 4870 is depicting them, and at a angle you cannot see the edges clearly. My eyes must need better AF, mebey God or no one tried optomizing my eye driver and got a bit happy with the filtering.

 

[Goodman]

ATI’s effort to improve their anisotropic filtering has given rise to texture processing which produces a near-perfect circle at any angle. Older video cards cannot replicate a perfect circle when forced to render a texture at an extreme angle, such as the one found in the image below. This will have the direct effect of ensuring that game textures on things like walls and characters will remain sharp and clear no matter how you view them.

Beyond the reform of its anisotropic engine, ATI has also doubled the accuracy of all texture rendering. That means users who eventually sidle up to even the most bargain basement GPU in the 5000 series will enjoy an overall improvement in texture quality.

Link;
http://tech.icrontic.com/articles/the-secret-sauces-in-atis-new-radeon-hd-5000-gpus/

 

[Bo_Fox]

http://icrontic.com/uploads/2009/09/Anisotropic_compare.png

http://icrontic.com/uploads/2009/09/anti_aliasing_example.png

Link;
http://tech.icrontic.com/articles/the-secret-sauces-in-atis-new-radeon-hd-5000-gpus/

Yeah, that's just the circular AF, which is great, but there's still that dame line in both pictures of the airport runaway. In the top left picture, the line is very, very noticeable, but in the top right picture with AF on, the line is still there!

With TRUE trilinear filtering, the line should not be there at all. On Nvidia cards, you'd be seeing a more real-life appearance without any blurrying lines of demarcation!

 

[Mussels]

one thing to keep in mind, is that if they're doing the effects as post processing, they wont show up in screenshots.

I recall one of the big things people went on about a few years back, i think it was with temporal AA on ATI cards - people ranted about how there was no quality improvements based on screenshots, simply because the effects didnt show up in them. The same could be applying here.

 

[Bo_Fox]

one thing to keep in mind, is that if they're doing the effects as post processing, they wont show up in screenshots.

I recall one of the big things people went on about a few years back, i think it was with temporal AA on ATI cards - people ranted about how there was no quality improvements based on screenshots, simply because the effects didnt show up in them. The same could be applying here.

AF and bilinear/trilinear filtering are done in the same process. If brilinear AF is being used, the line will be noticeable. If true trilinear AF is used, the whole image will be smooth and detailed, without any noticeable lines of transition.

 

[Mussels]

AF and bilinear/trilinear filtering are done in the same process.

but its entirely possible these effects are only showing up in screenshots, and not in actual gameplay.

It may explain the discrepancy over why the owners of these cards are saying they cant see it, while you have screenshots that (arguably) show otherwise.

 

[Bo_Fox]

but its entirely possible these effects are only showing up in screenshots, and not in actual gameplay.

It may explain the discrepancy over why the owners of these cards are saying they cant see it, while you have screenshots that (arguably) show otherwise.

A couple did notice it. It usually should be more noticeable in motion, rather than in a screenshot. But when we are playing dark games or detailed games with lots of objects and clutter like Bioshock with small rooms and lots of shadows, most of us will not even notice the line as an annoying thing.

I saw the line when driving on a flat planet on mass effect!

The image is apparently showing ATI's new AF algorithm. @ Mussels, it does not matter if it's post-processing, or not, I think. The issue at hand here is that ATI thinks that those excessive trilinear optimizations are fine to use along with perfectly circular AF. It's so bad that it actually looks like bilinear with good AF.

True trilinear filtering doubles the number of samples required to process the filtering versus bilinear. However, it is not as anywhere bad as the ridiculous 24x CFAA mode that only brings slight IQ improvement over 8x MSAA, at a severe performance penalty. I can understand how ATI would want to compensate for the new perfectly circular AF method, which is more demanding, but ATI should at least give us an option for full trilinear. I find it surprising how well ATI has gotten away with it so far, even with this image above that clearly shows the heavy optimization in use.

To further counter Mussel's argument, the basic D3DAFTester program shows the same problem as in the above image, as seen below.

 

[Bo_Fox]

ATi 5000 Series Image Quality Analysis

The Alienbabeltech site is back up online!


http://alienbabeltech.com/main/?p=12648


Did anybody notice that the AFTester image for the 5770 is a bit better than the 5870 image in the above post? The AF colors are the same, but there are more transition lines in the 5770 image (3 to be exact) from the alienbabeltech.com site:

(I copied the picture, compressed it a little bit so I could upload it here because of the file limit size, but at that site, it's easier to see the 3 lines).

In the above post, the 5870 image has only 1 line of transition (very bilinear) by comparison.

Perhaps ATI did improve it just a bit with 9.10's as compared to 9.9's?

 

[Bo_Fox]

Should I make a new thread on this trilinear optimization issue?

I'm just afraid that if people think that I'm doing to do all of the effort by myself, and since I do not own a HD5k series card, they would just lay back and flame me for all they want without taking me sincerely and helping me in my efforts in getting ATI to give us the Full Trilinear option with AF.


(EDIT: See, right after I tried to ask people to not flame me, Steevo just did a minute later. I know that I do not have a 5xxx card, but Steevo, please.)

 

[Mussels]

Should I make a new thread on this trilinear optimization issue?

I'm just afraid that if people think that I'm doing to do all of the effort by myself, and since I do not own a HD5k series card, they would just lay back and flame me for all they want without taking me sincerely and helping me in my efforts in getting ATI to give us the Full Trilinear option with AF.

its impossible to make an accurate, honest guide without a 4k card, 5770, 58x0, and an nvidia card to take your own screenshots with and do a direct comparison.

Otherwise, you wont know what drivers people took their screenshots on, what game settings, whether they used the game or CCC AA/AF settings, and so on.

 

[Steevo]

tripple posting, double posting, random guesses and complaints about a card you don't have.

I only wish I could get away with such.

 

[Bo_Fox]

its impossible to make an accurate, honest guide without a 4k card, 5770, 58x0, and an nvidia card to take your own screenshots with and do a direct comparison.

Otherwise, you wont know what drivers people took their screenshots on, what game settings, whether they used the game or CCC AA/AF settings, and so on.

Hey, we can work together. I do not have a problem with trusting people, especially those who own both a 5870 and a 4870 like air_ii above. What's wrong with that? It's just hard for me because I want to make sure this issue is resolved before I become a sucker for a 5830 or 5890.

The more people can confirm the issue, the better. Then there would no longer be a reason for us to be so skeptical.

tripple posting, double posting, random guesses and complaints about a card you don't have.

I only wish I could get away with such.

Please stop threadcrapping for the 10th time on this thread, thank you very much, sincerely -Bo_Fox
(I tried so hard to not report your posts for a long time, but finally had to since I already asked you to stop this. It's my first reporting on TPU. If anybody else wants to help me with reporting his post, I would appreciate it.)


I'll be making threads about the potential AF trilinear optimization issue on other forums such as [H] and Guru3D.com, etc.. if my efforts are completely vain and fruitless here thanks to Steevo.

 

[bobzilla2009]

i was hunting around for it in other games, but i can't find the transition line, at distances the textures are obviously not as sharp, but their is no distinct transition.

The only time i can see it, is whilst driving the mako in mass effect on a darkened/grey planet and looking 45 degrees or so to the ground. It shows that it exists, but i can see why ATi disabled it, there really is no real problem when the game is in motion. Still, there's no reason not to have an option.

 

[Bo_Fox]

Cool. Thanks for the constructive input, bobzilla2009.

 

[Mussels]

Please stop threadcrapping for the 10th time on this thread, thank you very much, sincerely -Bo_Fox
(I tried so hard to not report your posts for a long time, but finally had to since I already asked you to stop this. It's my first reporting on TPU. If anybody else wants to help me with reporting his post, I would appreciate it.)


I'll be making threads about the potential AF trilinear optimization issue on other forums such as [H] and Guru3D.com, etc.. if my efforts are completely vain and fruitless here thanks to Steevo.

actually, he is correct. you broke a forum rule with the double/triple posting, and now you're attacking him and reporting his posts (personal attacks are also against the forum rules), when he informs you of such?

I assure you that you are in the wrong here, not him. Do not make a fuss about it.

Feel free to make threads on other forums, i doubt anyone minds at all. Just dont think that because you have a strong belief that you are right, that you make the rules.

edit: stop spamming and reporting every post he's made in this thread. You dont want to get into a pissing contest here.

 

[Bo_Fox]

Hmm, all right. Sorry Mussels I did not know that you did not like me.

Ok, I'm outta here. Bye all. Yes, I'm a bit disappointed.