Skyrim, NVDA vs AMD IQ?

Look I dont think the IQ difference is really an issue anymore.
I will say that those skyrim screen shoots are not great.
Nvidia or Bethesda (whomever is doing it) is taking detail away from the scene, which is less work for the GPU and less detail for the gamer.

NV obviously culling tree branch entity mesh for performance. AMD either too stupid/lazy to care about doing the same thing for some boost in fps. I could care less about branches, I like the NV approach.
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How is AMD being lazy for drawing the full sceen in full?
You need to look up what lazy means cause I associate lazy with cutting corners which is what the GTX480 is doing. I wont argue that you could care less about branches, thats opinion based.
To say that AMD is stupid or lazy though for rendering all of the game? Really? Do you really prefer that the 400-600 dollar GPU you own renders less of the image because they feel its worth the FPS boost?
Me personaly, I hate the idea that AMD or Nvidia ever lower IQ in order to increase FPS.
 
sdlvx said:
If I crank up the settings, I want to see the full game. I don't want NV to decide that ultra settings on NV should have less pretty things than on and AMD so it can win at benchmarks. For all you people saying that you'd rather have missing polygons for higher FPS, are you retarded? If you want to have lower polygon counts in your scenes, lower your fucking settings. Seriously, if I spent $500 on a video card so it could disable parts of the game to get faster FPS at ultra settings, I'd be pissed off. That's why you have settings that are lower than ultra in games.
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{NG}Fidel said:
Look I dont think the IQ difference is really an issue anymore.
I will say that those skyrim screen shoots are not great.
Nvidia or Bethesda (whomever is doing it) is taking detail away from the scene, which is less work for the GPU and less detail for the gamer.


How is AMD being lazy for drawing the full sceen in full?
You need to look up what lazy means cause I associate lazy with cutting corners which is what the GTX480 is doing. I wont argue that you could care less about branches, thats opinion based.
To say that AMD is stupid or lazy though for rendering all of the game? Really? Do you really prefer that the 400-600 dollar GPU you own renders less of the image because they feel its worth the FPS boost?
Me personaly, I hate the idea that AMD or Nvidia ever lower IQ in order to increase FPS.
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+1000
 
Wow what have I created. :eek:

Let's not jump conclusions just yet here. When I get home later, I'm going to sweep everything AMD and NVDA off of my system (that includes Radeon Pro) and try this again, and in different locations as well. But that's still a few hours away.
 
sdlvx said:
Well, obviously since NV scores significantly higher in Skyrim benchmarks and 7970 looks a lot slower in them, I think it's pretty obvious who is behind it.

If I crank up the settings, I want to see the full game. I don't want NV to decide that ultra settings on NV should have less pretty things than on and AMD so it can win at benchmarks. For all you people saying that you'd rather have missing polygons for higher FPS, are you retarded? If you want to have lower polygon counts in your scenes, lower your fucking settings. Seriously, if I spent $500 on a video card so it could disable parts of the game to get faster FPS at ultra settings, I'd be pissed off. That's why you have settings that are lower than ultra in games.
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:rolleyes:

This is all just FUD until we hear something concrete.
 
MavericK96 said:
:rolleyes:

This is all just FUD until we hear something concrete.
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Yeah, because pictures of the exact same scene with NV missing geometry isn't concrete? Have you even looked at the pictures? The difference is significant.

And this wouldn't be the first time NV has fucked with things to give them a benefit in benchmarks.

Do you not remember this?

http://techreport.com/articles.x/21404/2

Look at the polygons on that jersey barrier. This was at a time before 7000 series and GCN when AMD was awful at tessellation compared to NV.

Trees are expensive to render if you have them set to be anti-aliased. It's no wonder NV products are so much faster at Skyrim, it's anti-aliasing significantly less transparent edges.
 
Just because the screenshots show the NV scene missing detail doesnt mean its Nvidias fault.
Though that thought process takes an awful lot of hope to believe.
Bethesda could have done it but I highly doubt they just decided to do this for one IHV and not the other.
So Im going to put my bet on Nvidia being the culprit, followed by Bethesda, followed by user error?

Mavericks is right though, to go about talking about this as if its a proven fact its Nvidias doing is jumping the gun. But I do feel that the dots connect in such a way that the culprit is obvious.
 
Slightly ot but the image looked sharper on a 7970 than my gtx680 for....dota2. Still haven't figured out why yet. Didn't notice it in skyrim though.
 
sdlvx said:
Do you not remember this?

http://techreport.com/articles.x/21404/2

Look at the polygons on that jersey barrier. This was at a time before 7000 series and GCN when AMD was awful at tessellation compared to NV.

Trees are expensive to render if you have them set to be anti-aliased. It's no wonder NV products are so much faster at Skyrim, it's anti-aliasing significantly less transparent edges.
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What does the Crysis 2 over-tessellation have to do AT ALL with nVidia? It's not nVidia-specific. The AMD cards do not process tessellation as well in those examples, it has nothing to do with nVidia. All that it proves is that Crytek was lazy with tessellation coding, and AMD doesn't handle extreme tessellation as well.

All I'm saying is that without actually knowing the exact settings in the drivers for both cards, and how each driver set affects the game, the screenshots don't really prove anything.

Yes, it appears something is clearly going on there. Does it automatically mean that nVidia is trying to cheat for benchmark numbers, as you would have us believe? Absolutely not.
 
MavericK96 said:
What does the Crysis 2 over-tessellation have to do AT ALL with nVidia? It's not nVidia-specific. The AMD cards do not process tessellation as well in those examples, it has nothing to do with nVidia. All that it proves is that Crytek was lazy with tessellation coding, and AMD doesn't handle extreme tessellation as well.

All I'm saying is that without actually knowing the exact settings in the drivers for both cards, and how each driver set affects the game, the screenshots don't really prove anything.

Yes, it appears something is clearly going on there. Does it automatically mean that nVidia is trying to cheat for benchmark numbers, as you would have us believe? Absolutely not.
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A lot of people cried foul because Nvidia had developers embedded at crytek specifically to work on dx11 features for crysis 2, nvidia usually has a team of 10 people that it can embed to assist with nvidia features at any point and time. Anyway, it was an nvidia TWIMTBP title - and nvidia paid for that privilege. As far as over tessellation, I don't necessarily think it was intentionally crippled that way, probably more along the lines of a rush job to get it out the door ASAP......proper tessellation takes forever to implement. So I doubt it was malicious.
 
staticlag said:
As a long time AMD user I was shocked as to how much worse the image quailty is with Nvidia.

I used dual 4870s for 3+ years and recently upgraded to a 680.

I can definitely tell that image quality is worse with Nvidia.

So that's how they make the "faster" card. Cutting corners.
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^^^^ This ^^^^

I went from being a long time Nvidia owner back to ati not long ago and was immediately struck by how much sharper even text looks on the desktop. Almost everything is better about ATI image quality.

I've argued this extensively with people on this very forum, and all I can say is that some people are blind, because it absolutely jumps out at me. I won't return to nvidia anytime soon. I would rather have the clarity of amd and not run quite as fast.
 
Q1DM6 said:
^^^^ This ^^^^

I went from being a long time Nvidia owner back to ati not long ago and was immediately struck by how much sharper even text looks on the desktop. Almost everything is better about ATI image quality.

I've argued this extensively with people on this very forum, and all I can say is that some people are blind, because it absolutely jumps out at me. I won't return to nvidia anytime soon. I would rather have the clarity of amd and not run quite as fast.
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:rolleyes: Yeah, ok dude. I'm usually the first to cry little things like microstutter, aliasing, texture filtering, and popins but thats one thing that I've never noticed when switching between Nvidia and AMD. The op also made no mention of that either.

I would love to take a good look at those screen shots but image shack is a pita.
 
demowhc said:
That I would agree with, and simply tweaking digital vibrance brings them both on par.

.
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Digital Vibrance will easily blow out certain colors into neon when you don't get that effect on amd hardware. They are simply more pleasing.
 
Q1DM6 said:
lol, because that's never happened before, right? ;)
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I just think it would have been pointed out before now in an actual, legitimate review rather than some random person on a forum. ATI's done the same thing in the past as well, so there's no need to solely vilify nVidia.

Until I see some actual reviewers or the companies themselves address this, or some high-res, close-up photos of displays with ATI vs nVidia at stock settings, this is still FUD.
 
Well I am a pro photographer.

I stare at images all day.

I assure you I can pick out the subtle differences in the same games I have been playing for 3 years.

I haven't had the opportunity to look at the 7970 yet, but I can tell you that poor anti-aliasing is very noticeable to my eye with the 680 gtx, as well as poor distant texture rendering.

And at the end of the day, if I want to cut corners for better fps, I will turn down my resolution to 800x600.

I bought the top of the line Nvidia offering because I wanted best image quality and best performance, not for some company to cheat their numbers out.

My next upgrade will definitely be to AMD
 
Sycraft said:
Except that unless you are talking an analogue connection, or you have something configured in the settings to alter the colour, that just isn't possible. Understand that on a regular computer desktop, all your stuff is encoded in 8-bit per channel colour, 256 steps for each channel. You can see it in HTML colours, a photo editor, all that kind of thing. Ok then understand that DVI is the same way. It is an all digital link, and it is again 8-bits per channel. There's no room for extra data and indeed the processors and displays on most monitors only handle 8-bits per channel (some pro displays can do 10 bits per channel, but only over DP and only fairly recently).

So if the card is accurately passing the data from the OS on to the display, there is no room for it to make it "more colourful" or anything. It can't add information. It does a 1:1 passthrough, unless it has been specifically changed not to.

Then there's the whole measurements thing. Get yourself a colorimeter and measure the things yourself. If there were some kind of built-in difference between the cards, a colorimeter could easily measure and quantify it. So you should be able to show some measurement and documentation of it. It would most certainly be of interest to professionals.

Now if you are talking about some specific subset of things, like say video playback, then yes there can be differences because of how the decoders are set up to handle things like colour range and so on (which you can change in the contorl panel) and they may be different by default. However if you are talking general display, then I'm sorry but I'm not buying it without some evidence. It flys in the face of what I know about how the signal chain works, and my measurement with my gear.
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The card and the drivers still have to interpret the information and apply any changes based on the CP settings so I don't think it's a stretch to assume that both companies might have different default values, ranges, and might even have different methods for applying these changes. I've noticed this before and always seemed like both companies handle saturation differently, AMD has always seemed a little over saturated and Nvidia has always seemed under saturated. I prefer the image on AMD because it's a little closer to what I consider correct and because I prefer over saturated to under saturated images. Digital vibrance can help some on Nvidia cards but as someone else mentioned if you turn it up too high(high enough to match AMD) some colors get blown out and start to bleed.
 
thundermitty said:
I see "digital vibrance" in the Nvidia Control Panel under "adjust desktop color settings"

It seems to look best on its default setting of 50%.

I downloaded the latest version of Nvidia Inspector from the offical website:

http://blog.orbmu2k.de/tools/nvidia-inspector-tool

I opened up Nvidia Inspector and clicked on "driver profile settings"

I don't see any settings that would further enhance the image quality of games beyond what I've already described in post # 2 of this thread.

Perhaps you could elaborate?
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You only posted various "app preference" settings, theres plenty of options there to further increase IQ and/or gameplay over "app preference"..

Digital Vibrance can be used to slightly increase colour saturation without blowing out the image if needed. Handy for 3D.


Theres a bout 50 extra modes of AA and combinations in inspector including SGSSAA & OGSSAA along with mixed modes (as a Tri SLI user more modes are exposed), High Quality AO, the ability to use AO in games with no profiles, and ability to adjust neg lod bias. Theres also a Frame rate limiter (which can increase fluidity and reduce tearing without vsync), along with extra pre rendered frame settings, aswell as various SLI modes & profiles for improved performance or SLI AA rendering modes. When used in combinations you can go from regular MSAA + trSSAA to high quality mixed modes that not only have better AA quality, but also reduce texture and alpha shimmer, can sharpen textures, use higher quality/resolution AO, and it allowed you to use things like adaptive vsync and FXAA long before the latest driver added such features to CP. Theres a few other bits a peices there if you spend soem time with it.
 
Ebernanut said:
The card and the drivers still have to interpret the information and apply any changes based on the CP settings so I don't think it's a stretch to assume that both companies might have different default values, ranges, and might even have different methods for applying these changes. I've noticed this before and always seemed like both companies handle saturation differently, AMD has always seemed a little over saturated and Nvidia has always seemed under saturated. I prefer the image on AMD because it's a little closer to what I consider correct and because I prefer over saturated to under saturated images. Digital vibrance can help some on Nvidia cards but as someone else mentioned if you turn it up too high(high enough to match AMD) some colors get blown out and start to bleed.
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I have a hard time believing people move from one to another and don't notice these things. The Nvidia under saturated, washed out 'look' is very apparent once you move to an amd card, even at default settings. Perhaps it's somewhat lost on TN monitors and people don't notice because of that?
 
From memory AMD does use both a different default colour profile (with slightly more saturation) and texture filtering bias setting, and while some may like it better its also fair to say its actually less accurate, and nothing that cant be achieved on Nv hardware with 2 seconds of tweaking.This is also one of the reasons AMD hardware tends to have more texture shimmer or noise in motion.

Here's a good post for you guys: http://semiaccurate.com/forums/showpost.php?p=80799&postcount=12

For the OP, would be good if he took the same screenshots with AA disabled, as transparency AA and adaptive AA tend to do different things to alpha textures, and in some cases antialiase certain parts of alphas totally out of existence. What you will also notice if you flick between the two shots is slightly better texture filtering on the Nvidia screenshots, along with extra texture details in the distance, such as the tree trunk on the right hand side of image.
 
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The rest of that thread you posted shows that the results were incolnclusive.
 
{NG}Fidel said:
The rest of that thread you posted shows that the results were incolnclusive.
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What was inconclusive? That AMD generally has a more vibrant image? or that AMD uses a slightly sharper texture filtering bias by default?

Both are true, caveman jim should know, he does all the AMD reviews for AMD fanboy central - Rage3D.
 
Oh not that, I was speaking about who had better IQ.
Thats inconclusive.
 
Oh ok. The only reason you can achieve better IQ on Nvidia hardware is due to far more AA options and mixed SSAA modes, aswell as Ambient Occlusion, and slightly better texture filtering (in the past, not so sure texture filtering applies to 7 series anymore). Theres no reason why AMD couldnt produce the same results if they had the options available, but sadly they dont.
 
OK everyone. I found out what the issue was.


When I put in the HD 6950, the video settings would always default to Ultra. For the GTX 480, the video settings would default to High. So what I did previously was just adjust everything manually to the maximum settings they could go to... well apparently that doesn't give you the maximum detail. I didn't know you had to click the "ultra" button first to set maximum settings.

So, sorry for leading everyone down this path. I didn't intend for this thread to turn into what it did. I should update the first post.
 
I'm a perfect example of how "smart people" just fail so hard sometimes. When faced with a problem, we start to try to think of the most complicated shit to solve it. I went looking through all of these settings, trying too many different things - went even as far as to read about how different types of AA worked and etc... and all I had to do all along was click ultra. *Rage*
 
Originally Posted by staticlag
As a long time AMD user I was shocked as to how much worse the image quailty is with Nvidia.

I used dual 4870s for 3+ years and recently upgraded to a 680.

I can definitely tell that image quality is worse with Nvidia.

So that's how they make the "faster" card. Cutting corners.
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Q1DM6 said:
^^^^ This ^^^^

I went from being a long time Nvidia owner back to ati not long ago and was immediately struck by how much sharper even text looks on the desktop. Almost everything is better about ATI image quality.

I've argued this extensively with people on this very forum, and all I can say is that some people are blind, because it absolutely jumps out at me. I won't return to nvidia anytime soon. I would rather have the clarity of amd and not run quite as fast.
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we need a Hall Of Shame section.
 
TroyX said:
we need a Hall Of Shame section.
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Why, exactly? I've stated and argued this FACT well before this thread: AMD cards have better clarity of image, especially at the desktop level, and particularly with text.

Keep your simpleton snide comments to yourself kid. Just because you're blind and can't see it doesn't really mean crap to me.
 
Q1DM6 said:
Why, exactly? I've stated and argued this FACT well before this thread: AMD cards have better clarity of image, especially at the desktop level, and particularly with text.

Keep your simpleton snide comments to yourself kid. Just because you're blind and can't see it doesn't really mean crap to me.
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I noticed it for 5 minutes when i switched. Havent noticed it since. You either have to be a fanboy or really look for it all the time to notice it. Also, remember that not everyone shares you opinions/preferences and that we are all different.
 
Q1DM6 said:
Why, exactly? I've stated and argued this FACT well before this thread: AMD cards have better clarity of image, especially at the desktop level, and particularly with text.
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You can "argue" all day long, but until you provide conclusive proof, no one is going to believe you.
 
MavericK96 said:
I'm inclined to believe the guy with hardware-calibrated displays. :cool:

I've also used both brands recently (5770 & 570) and have not noticed a difference.
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Well of course you are, it certainly SOUNDS impressive doesn't it? Did you know that you can measure sound with test equipment too and almost everyone will still hear those sounds differently and while something looks to be great on paper when using equipment can still sound very bad to someone's ears? Food for thought.
 
xIronCrossx said:
I noticed it for 5 minutes when i switched. Havent noticed it since. You either have to be a fanboy or really look for it all the time to notice it. Also, remember that not everyone shares you opinions/preferences and that we are all different.
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I'm a 'fan' of noticeably better anything. It amazes me how quickly the pathetic mentality is on this site to jump to the 'fanboy' insult. I don't know how the statement that I'd come from a long line of nvidia cards gets misinterpreted. I see something better, I call it out.

If you noticed it switching, you'd notice it switching back. Try it.
 
Q1DM6 said:
Why, exactly? I've stated and argued this FACT well before this thread: AMD cards have better clarity of image, especially at the desktop level, and particularly with text.

Keep your simpleton snide comments to yourself kid. Just because you're blind and can't see it doesn't really mean crap to me.
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No they dont buddy, the only facts are that AMD uses slightly more colour saturation by default and slightly more aggressive neg lod bias, which not everyone likes as it introduces more noise/shimmer in motion. Both of these settings can be matched on Nv hardware in 2 seconds, and conversely, AMD can match Nvidia default settings easily aswell.

Anything else is placebo.
 
thundermitty said:
You can "argue" all day long, but until you provide conclusive proof, no one is going to believe you.
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As I don't work for amd or nvidia, and don't do professional hardware reviews or have the equipment or knowledge to do such I can only call out what I see.

I'm talking to the same group of people on this site many of whom turn their monitors to portrait mode and don't even realize the text goes all to hell.

If you can't see that kind of thing no one can help you.
 
demowhc said:
No they dont buddy, the only facts are that AMD uses slightly more colour saturation by default and slightly more aggressive neg lod bias, which not everyone likes as it introduces more noise/shimmer in motion. Both of these settings can be matched on Nv hardware in 2 seconds, and conversely, AMD can match Nvidia default settings easily aswell.

Anything else is placebo.
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Neither of which accounts for something like text quality being better on amd cards in windows. And please, don't talk about the cleartype tuner like every other feeb who has undertaken this argument has done.
 
Yeh I call shens, I have both an AMD and Nv machine right here infront of me and desktop looks identical.
 
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