AMD puts image quality debate to bed

[qubit]

Hexus had an interview with AMD technical staff about this controversy and their answers seemed quite reasonable to me. I don't think AMD has done anything underhand. In particular, there's always the High Quality setting for a picture perfect, unoptimised mode. It sounds like this is the mode that should be used when benchmarking cards, especially against their competition nvidia, which should have the equivalent settings activated.

Dave explained to us that there had been some changes to the Catalyst drivers to coincide with the release of the HD 6000-series GPUs, and that image quality had been a big part of that. At the heart of all this is Catalyst AI, which controls a whole host of different settings via a single slider.

Responding to feedback, this single slider was divided into a number of different settings in the latest release, giving users a bit more control. One of the new additions was a slider to control texture filtering with settings for 'High Quality', 'Quality' and 'Performance'.

High Quality turns off all optimisations and lets the software run exactly as it was originally intended to. Quality - which is now the default setting - applies some optimisations that the team at AMD believes - after some serious testing, benchmarking and image comparisons - will maintain the integrity of the image while increasing the application performance. Lastly, the Performance setting applies even more of these optimisations to squeeze out a few more frames, but risks degrading the image quality just a bit.

Full Hexus article


Please observe forum etiquette: this is one of those subjects that can make fanbois on all sides wave their handbags around, causing our moderators to swing into action with warnings and infractions all round and possibly shut down the thread.

Let's keep this one pleasant people and enjoy the discussion.

 

[travva]

Nice article qubit. It's interesting to hear different sides to the story and the description the amd guy provided was believable to me.

 

[cadaveca]

Funny, I've tried to make this adjustment on the slider appear, and have had no success. I call shens!!!

 

[LAN_deRf_HA]

These are just your typical optimizations both companies do, nothing really worth getting worked up about as long as they give you control over it. What is annoying though is how one or the other company always seems to develop a driver bug that only effects crysis for some reason right around a new card release. First instance I remember is in 8800 gt vs 3870 reviews, where I think nvidia disabled water reflections. It'd be nice if both of them knocked that shit off.