image quality comparisons ATI vs nVidia

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oqvist

[H]F Junkie
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Is these done anymore?

I have an 8800 GTX since a while. For such a while I wish it will die so I get an excuse to upgrade. I can still max out most of the games so can´t really justify it.

However reviews a while ago the ATI was consistently performing better. Not in all games of course but in most. an ATI 4870 at times beating a GTX 280 though that was never the norm of course.

However reading tests now nVidia is performing better. GTX 260 beats the 4870 1 GB and the 9800 GTX+ heats the ATI 4850. However I have noticed that with later drivers I often get more blurry textures so wonder how much nVidia cheats to get this performance? I am getting to the point where I feel I have to use these newer drivers anyway to get some more fps out of my 8800 GTX in some games.

General concensus is ATI is better but how much and is there any good tests out there? Now I know you really have to see for yourself but well I am trying to cut my expenses :)
 
Yeah, HARD ocp does a few and did one with L4D. Apparently, nvidia has the better IQ these days?
 
people argue that ati's 2d/colors are more vivid and sharp, which can NOT be captured with screenshots, only photos. Never saw any real evidence.

it was a consensus that nvidia on the other hand has better AF (and AA?) than ATI. They may have fixed it, don't know.

I really want to upgrade too but I can nearly max out everything so I think I will just hold out till everything gets nice and cheap again. I really like ATI especially after reading their story and am interested if their text quality and sharpness is better (HTPC), but why did they have to turn down physx? EA games are going to have it, so i might be sticking with nvidia.. at least for now.
 
Well i just had a 4870. about to install my gtx 260 I have to say i wasn't impressed with ATI's drivers. Which in the end stability > IQ I doubt when you have a card in the mid range > high end IQ differences are very minimal.
 
oqvist said:
Is these done anymore?

I have an 8800 GTX since a while. For such a while I wish it will die so I get an excuse to upgrade. I can still max out most of the games so can´t really justify it.

However reviews a while ago the ATI was consistently performing better. Not in all games of course but in most. an ATI 4870 at times beating a GTX 280 though that was never the norm of course.

However reading tests now nVidia is performing better. GTX 260 beats the 4870 1 GB and the 9800 GTX+ heats the ATI 4850. However I have noticed that with later drivers I often get more blurry textures so wonder how much nVidia cheats to get this performance? I am getting to the point where I feel I have to use these newer drivers anyway to get some more fps out of my 8800 GTX in some games.

General concensus is ATI is better but how much and is there any good tests out there? Now I know you really have to see for yourself but well I am trying to cut my expenses :)
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I was thinking the same thing, so went to ati, drivers were even worse than nvidia, iq was worse as well. the edaa is good, and dx10.1 is better than 10.0 but ati's problems are greater despite what reviews might say.
DoomzDayz said:
people argue that ati's 2d/colors are more vivid and sharp, which can NOT be captured with screenshots, only photos. Never saw any real evidence.

it was a consensus that nvidia on the other hand has better AF (and AA?) than ATI. They may have fixed it, don't know.

I really want to upgrade too but I can nearly max out everything so I think I will just hold out till everything gets nice and cheap again. I really like ATI especially after reading their story and am interested if their text quality and sharpness is better (HTPC), but why did they have to turn down physx? EA games are going to have it, so i might be sticking with nvidia.. at least for now.
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ati's max sample edaa with quality adaa looks excellent, but it only worked with one game I tried it with. mind you, i turned it on correctly. i also didn't try but maybe 3 games on the 4850 iceq4 1 GB i had then sold, so i'm not going to say edaa only works right 1/3 times, since 3 games is such a small sample size.

I like nvidia's text better, it doesn't look as jagged,

I liked ati's colors much better until i realized that they were unnatural and that they were over-gamma-ed. once i was told they were over-gamma-ed it was glaringly obvious that they were washed out/whitish.
MittWaffen said:
Well i just had a 4870. about to install my gtx 260 I have to say i wasn't impressed with ATI's drivers. Which in the end stability > IQ I doubt when you have a card in the mid range > high end IQ differences are very minimal.
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True, but nvidia's colors are more natural and their af is better in drivers that don't cheat (i.e., force "quality when you have hq selected.") ati only has the advantage of better edaa, which doesn't always work.
 
Monitor and settings will make MUCH more of a difference than you will ever see by comparing video cards. I wouldn't sweat that aspect.

I love my 4870x2 but like the above mentioned, ATI's drivers are still awful.
 
no2censorship said:
I like nvidia's text better, it doesn't look as jagged,

I liked ati's colors much better until i realized that they were unnatural and that they were over-gamma-ed. once i was told they were over-gamma-ed it was glaringly obvious that they were washed out/whitish.

True, but nvidia's colors are more natural and their af is better in drivers that don't cheat (i.e., force "quality when you have hq selected.") ati only has the advantage of better edaa, which doesn't always work.
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jagged vs sharp? i find my text on my hdtv to be a little blurry and i feel like it could use a little extra sharpness. at 1080p i dont think i'd see jaggies from here anyway.

however, i had heard someone else's comment about ati's unnaturally vibrant colors, that makes me glad i have nvidia. i spend a lot of time calibrating to get the most natural color.

i find i don't care much about AA unless its a racing game (man did grid look bad) or lower resolution. however, most even older 3d games allow any resolution windows has, and i really like nvidia's custom resolution editor.. i can make it scale all resolutions between 720p and 1080p to 1080p perfectly fine and make it interlaced if i want or 24hz for movies. high res and clear textures for me
 
MittWaffen said:
Yeah, HARD ocp does a few and did one with L4D. Apparently, nvidia has the better IQ these days?
Click to expand...

that review is completely inaccurate....

I have a ATI 4870 CF, and never have those problems on there..

neither my old X1600 have that problem...

also, when I use 8800 GTX to runs it, somehow the texture are more blurry...

as a lot people saying 180 driver improve a big performance over nVidia card, but sadly, all I see is fps decrease in many games, and saw several review site have the same problem also... not just review site, several people here on forum also complain about same problem...

GTX 260 outperform 4870 ? huh...512MB version with very high resolution and AA active maybe, but that will not be true with 1G.....

about that AA problem with ATI, it always works for me...

PS: whoever wrote that L4D review, he really need to rewrite the whole comparison part, I have totally different experience with ATI card ..... especially that shadow problem, I have never seen it and I tried every spot that he shows to have a texture problem and shadow problem, never shows up like that....
 
I've always had better stability with ATi drivers. As soon as the 48xx series cards were out, I got one immediately to get rid of the problems I was having with my 8800GT. Couldn't be happier with my 4850.
 
look i'm sorry to say this but you shansoft are talking FUD! :rolleyes:

[H] clearly shows the shadowing issues and I also had these issues with my now sold 4870CF setup. My interim 3870X2 (while I wait for my GTX260) also has these shadowing issues.

Still ATI have not fixed the HDR issues in Fallout 3, The Witcher EE still has no CF profile... These games are over 3 months old... :confused:


Also this whole IQ thing is a load of baloney... I can only tell the difference in gaming between ATI and Nvidia in games, suffice to say that textures actually look better on Nvidia hardware.

But then that is due to TWIMTBP programme. ATI customers ever ask where ATI's developer programme is and what it is called?? Thats what left me scratching my head with their poorly implemented software.

Put simply.. ATI hardware is first rate... ATI software, drivers, dev support does not exist nor will it in the near future..:eek:
 
im not a Nvidia or Ati fan boy but one thing i noticed when i had my 4870 was when using overdrive with dual monitors if you would touch the memory one of the screens would blink or flicker.
 
raw image quality is the same between AMD and NV these days, I do not subscribe to the theory of "cheating drivers", you will find AF and AA looks exactly the same between AMD and NV, you will find that all the latest shader effects look the same (minus bugs of course), things are not like they were back in the original FarCry days when shader programs looked different between them, I would not worry about IQ at this point in time between NV and AMD, instead, I would focus on price/performance and get the better value
 
MittWaffen said:
im not a Nvidia or Ati fan boy but one thing i noticed when i had my 4870 was when using overdrive with dual monitors if you would touch the memory one of the screens would blink or flicker.
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lol that is about hte oddest thing i've read in a while

i can't say i touch my computer parts while its running..


probably more to do with static electricity than actual make of the card

:)
 
no no, i had reference to overdrive for ati, so i assumed that you'd understand when i said touch the memory it was in regards to the memory speeds from within windows. haha.
 
Brent_Justice said:
you will find AF and AA looks exactly the same between AMD and NV
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I disagree. AF looks much better on NVIDIA cards. AA is about the same, but I think AMD's AA looks slightly better and their edge detect AA is awesome. Right now I'd still pick NVIDIA over AMD for their better drivers. AMD has a bad habit of breaking stuff with every new driver release.
 
tejas said:
[H] clearly shows the shadowing issues and I also had these issues with my now sold 4870CF setup. My interim 3870X2 (while I wait for my GTX260) also has these shadowing issues.
Click to expand...

My 4850 isn't having any shadowing issues in L4D.

Still ATI have not fixed the HDR issues in Fallout 3, The Witcher EE still has no CF profile... These games are over 3 months old... :confused:
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HDR+AA also works perfect for me in both Fallout 3 and Oblivion.

Also this whole IQ thing is a load of baloney... I can only tell the difference in gaming between ATI and Nvidia in games, suffice to say that textures actually look better on Nvidia hardware.
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It is baloney - neither company has overall better IQ. Nvidia has technically superior AF (albeit very slightly), while ATI has superior AA (fyi, nvidia's xQ modes are MSAA, the non-Q modes are not). For everything else they are either identical or just slightly different, with neither being "better".

But then that is due to TWIMTBP programme. ATI customers ever ask where ATI's developer programme is and what it is called?? Thats what left me scratching my head with their poorly implemented software.
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ATI had the Get in the Game program, but didn't have the resources for it. Not that it really matters. The optimizations made due to the TWIMTBP program help BOTH companies' cards, not just nvidia's. Its not like they make a separate nvidia path that is awesome and an ATI path that sucks. Likewise, an engine optimization will go faster on both cards - less work is less work.

Put simply.. ATI hardware is first rate... ATI software, drivers, dev support does not exist nor will it in the near future..:eek:
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I disagree. ATI's drivers and CCC have given me fewer problems than Nvidia's. Both have their problems, but I definitely wouldn't definitively say one is better than the other.

no2censorship said:
I was thinking the same thing, so went to ati, drivers were even worse than nvidia, iq was worse as well. the edaa is good, and dx10.1 is better than 10.0 but ati's problems are greater despite what reviews might say.
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I went from nvidia to ati as well. There is zero IQ difference. Any change in IQ was either the result of different driver settings, different game settings, or a placebo effect. Nothing more.

I like nvidia's text better, it doesn't look as jagged,
Click to expand...

Then you either changed your font rendering mode or its another placebo effect. The video card driver doesn't render text, Windows (or X11, etc..) does (and in some cases it is the application that does the font rendering. Safari, for example, uses its own custom font rendering on Windows that sucks ass). As such, the card and driver you use has basically zero effect on font rendering.

I liked ati's colors much better until i realized that they were unnatural and that they were over-gamma-ed. once i was told they were over-gamma-ed it was glaringly obvious that they were washed out/whitish.
Click to expand...

Colors really depend on your monitor *and* video card settings. Both nvidia and ATI let you very easily change the color settings should it not be correct for your monitor. Claiming one company is superior in this department is just FUD.

True, but nvidia's colors are more natural and their af is better in drivers that don't cheat (i.e., force "quality when you have hq selected.") ati only has the advantage of better edaa, which doesn't always work.
Click to expand...

There isn't any cheating going on :rolleyes:
 
dark_reign said:
I disagree. AF looks much better on NVIDIA cards. AA is about the same, but I think AMD's AA looks slightly better and their edge detect AA is awesome. Right now I'd still pick NVIDIA over AMD for their better drivers. AMD has a bad habit of breaking stuff with every new driver release.
Click to expand...

What games/areas specifically do you see where AF looks better on NV cards?

Regular MSAA is the same between NV and AMD, once you start getting into the territory of edge detect filters, of course there are differences
 
MittWaffen said:
no no, i had reference to overdrive for ati, so i assumed that you'd understand when i said touch the memory it was in regards to the memory speeds from within windows. haha.
Click to expand...

lol my bad.. i guess a long day at work will do that to you..
 
Well from what I hear ATI does a lot better with AA. Color does look more vivid and sharper
switching form a gtx260 to a 4870x2.
 
Brent_Justice said:
What games/areas specifically do you see where AF looks better on NV cards?

Regular MSAA is the same between NV and AMD, once you start getting into the territory of edge detect filters, of course there are differences
Click to expand...
I saw a lot of shimmering in all games on my 4850 with 8xAF or 16xAF applied. It might have been driver related, but I got rid of the card. I've seen others report the same thing here in these forums and elsewhere.
 
only people who think ATi drivers scuk are the ones stuck in the rage 128 days.....................ATi consistantly delivers driver's at least once a month and then releases hot fixes for stuff that crops up........ ATi has been far superior to Nvidia is driver releases for quite a few years now........
 
dark_reign said:
I saw a lot of shimmering in all games on my 4850 with 8xAF or 16xAF applied. It might have been driver related, but I got rid of the card. I've seen others report the same thing here in these forums and elsewhere.
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as far as i know it's at least mostly a hw limitation. i could be wrong, but from what i understand ati doesn't have true trilinear. they use brilinear which causes some texture stages to be bilinear and some to be trilinear, and then that shift is what causes the shimmering.

also, the angle variance of af samples applied over and under sharpens textures at certain angles, and the ones over sharpened show aliasing.

Totally unacceptable, imo.

Of course, nvidia sometimes forces quality rather than high quality, when they want to get extra perf. in certain driver releases. i believe i'm having that problem with my 180 drivers and that just sucks.

Every individual should determine whether they want texture aliasing, not the nvidia driver team.
 
I own Both ATi and Nvidia.
I been Happy with ATi despite they are AMD now.
But before the 4xxx series came out i had ot give it a shot and went bought a Nvidia that was supposetly faster than the competition at the time. I am also very pleased with it.

If I would have answered this question years back i would say ATi has a better looking Image quality; Crisper and More Vibrant Colors, which came with a loss of fps. Where as the Nvidia seems to be always run faster fps and smoother on high demanding programs/games, if compared to the ATi.

But now, My opinion, Nvidia improved ALOT in image quality, and ATi got their stuff together and improved the smoothness of high graphic demanding games/programs.

Playing the same game of a "8800 GT 512 SSC" and a "HD 3870 512 Toxic" the games don't look much different (This is based of games that are neither designed for nvidia or ATi).

Now this whole thing changes, if you play a game which was designed for ATi or Nvidia.
Then you see Color changes and Smoother patterns for the game which was designed specific for that engine of nvidia or ati, it is minimal but it's still visible. Especially the games that have PhysX on board will be different of the ATi. Games designed for off the ATi cards have a wicked nice color patterns and crispness to them.

And last but not least if you compare cards with your mates computer, make sure you "COMPARE THEM WITH SAME MONITORS !!!" alot of brainfarts/fanbois/gals don't take the different monitors in account.

So at the end of the day its up to ur own prefrences and what games you play.
 
dark_reign said:
With a higher marketshare, the numbers will look bigger.

I'll quote Anandtech again:



http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3463&p=6

Are they lying or biased?
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Neither. They are simply a single entity in the broad picture. Me and my friends experience far fewer problems with ATI than Nvidia. I'm not lying or biased, just one of the statistics. Its no different for Anandtech. They go through more cards than most people, but the dozen or so 4870s that they have likely tested is statistically insignificant. They said they had issues with ATI's drivers and FC2. I have had zero issues. Different hardware == different results. Just because they are a famous hardware review site doesn't make their driver experiences any more important than anyone else's.

As for marketshare, you are perfectly correct. However, even if you take market share into account, nvidia still has more driver crashes than ati. Nvidia has about 1.7x the market share of ATI, yet at least 2.5x the number of driver crashes in Vista
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/pos...ake-graphics-market-share-from-amd-intel.html

Granted this is the data for Q2 07, which is rather dated, but it is still actual EVIDENCE as to which has more stable drivers (especially since many of the arguments for nvidia have better drivers around here amount to "right now there are more ati driver problem threads than nvidia driver problem threads" :rolleyes: )
 
Well put. I know some people here are scratching their heads when people talk about ati having bad
drivers. It's also funny how many who say ati has bad drivers have probably never used ati cards. From
having both nvidia and ati cards, I've had minor driver issues from both the green and red team. On my
GTX260 I had an issue with idle clocks going to 3d clocks when in IE or windows media center. With the 4870x2,
I've also had idle clock issues where the correct idle clocks wouldn't engage at startup. With the 8.12
s, they seem to be fixed. All games run fine on my system with these 8.12s, and there is definitely a
performance improvement across the board.
 
YeuEmMaiMai said:
only people who think ATi drivers scuk are the ones stuck in the rage 128 days.....................ATi consistantly delivers driver's at least once a month and then releases hot fixes for stuff that crops up........ ATi has been far superior to Nvidia is driver releases for quite a few years now........
Click to expand...
Nobody is saying their drivers suck, but the experience I had with the 4850 for 3 months wasn't all that great. Monthly driver updates don't mean squat when they consistently break stuff while fixing other stuff. Anandtech noted in that FC2 article:

Maintaining a monthly driver release schedule is detrimental to AMD's ability to release quality drivers.
Click to expand...
 
kllrnohj said:
Neither. They are simply a single entity in the broad picture. Me and my friends experience far fewer problems with ATI than Nvidia. I'm not lying or biased, just one of the statistics. Its no different for Anandtech. They go through more cards than most people, but the dozen or so 4870s that they have likely tested is statistically insignificant. They said they had issues with ATI's drivers and FC2. I have had zero issues. Different hardware == different results. Just because they are a famous hardware review site doesn't make their driver experiences any more important than anyone else's.
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Well, at least they're admitting it rather than letting it slide under the rug. They didn't say they had issues with the 4870-1GB card with FC2; it was the other 4800 series cards that have or had issues with the game. The part about the monthly driver updates appears to be why their drivers are quite buggy.

kllrnohj said:
Granted this is the data for Q2 07, which is rather dated, but it is still actual EVIDENCE as to which has more stable drivers (especially since many of the arguments for nvidia have better drivers around here amount to "right now there are more ati driver problem threads than nvidia driver problem threads" :rolleyes: )
Click to expand...
With a new GPU you're going to see more driver issues. NVIDIA released the 8800 cards around the time Vista was released, so it took some time for their drivers to mature. I recall buying my 8800 GTS 640MB and the 158.xx drivers were just coming out. I had few issues and don't recall any driver related crashes. Sure, there were some bugs, but overall they were pretty solid. By the time the 169.xx drivers came out most of the problems were gone and performance was solid.
 
Is there a way to get around this high quality is quality in some drivers? I have noticed when going from 169 to 170.xx drivers I got more blurries. I always run high quality without any optimizations since the trade off is never worth it.

Is there a list somewhere of safe drivers that don´t uses this?

Otherwise not much help here all is good. My mainboard is built for crossfire but then having had the 8800 GTX for so long and it´s not exactly slow I doubt I would ever need such a setup.

As for drivers well going from Geforce 4 to 9700 PRO was a big step up in driver quality so I don´t have the experience with ATI having worse drivers then nVidia. Everybody said it by then but that was never my experience. When I got a 7800 GT I instantly got more driver problems again. But my 8800 GTX has been fine it just wants to crash a bit to often. But it did have image quality as good as I remembered on the 9700 PRO. 7800 GTs was indead horrible worse then 6800 ULTRA even if I remember correctly :).

So am quite surprised going by my previous experience that they are as good pretty much.
 
dark_reign said:
With a new GPU you're going to see more driver issues. NVIDIA released the 8800 cards around the time Vista was released, so it took some time for their drivers to mature. I recall buying my 8800 GTS 640MB and the 158.xx drivers were just coming out. I had few issues and don't recall any driver related crashes. Sure, there were some bugs, but overall they were pretty solid. By the time the 169.xx drivers came out most of the problems were gone and performance was solid.
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The 8800 GTX/GTS G80 were far from new by Q207. Also, they make up the smallest market share and would have had the least impact on those rankings. You can't blame the frequent nvidia crashes in Vista on the G80. Of course, the 2900XT was being release in Q207, so by the logic of new card == more crashes, ATI should have had more. But they didn't.
 
kllrnohj said:
The 8800 GTX/GTS G80 were far from new by Q207. Also, they make up the smallest market share and would have had the least impact on those rankings. You can't blame the frequent nvidia crashes in Vista on the G80. Of course, the 2900XT was being release in Q207, so by the logic of new card == more crashes, ATI should have had more. But they didn't.
Click to expand...
Those "frequent crashes" are mostly related to the "nvlddmkm stopped responding" error, which is a Vista issue because a similar crash happens on ATI cards. I saw it a few times on the 4850. It's one of the most talked about problems if you go to NVIDIA's forum or NVNews. The 8 series cards didn't really sink into the market fully until Q2 of '07, so that was my point. Early adopters make up a very small group. And I wasn't blaming the G80 on all or even most of the crashes. I said that you tend to see more "driver issues" with a new GPU--and by Q2 '07 many more people had 8800 cards in their PCs due to price drops.
 
I adoped Vista right from the start Ultimate x64 and never ever had my ATi card give me issues. System has been somewhat upgraded since then as well changing from a x1950 pro through a 4870 and from a 320GB HDD to a 1TB model and from a Core 2 duo 2.33 to an E8500.

MS own data showed nvidia had shittay ass drivers causing the majority of system crashes.....
 
I personally think both have very awful drivers. One being better than the other doesn't necessarily make the "better" one good, but rather the lesser of 2 evils.

Regardless of who has more or less crashes, they BOTH need to work on their drivers big time, IMO.
 
People need to keep in mind that hardware/driver stability varies greatly between systems. What one encounters with his system may be totally nonexcistant with other systems. So lets say your exp has not been good with ATI drivers, that does not mean everyone will fit that bill. Ive never had issues and Ive been with ATI since the Radeon 9800XT, but I also build solid systems. I buy only the best componants that are compatible with each other and configure them to be stable.

Im always scratching my head when I hear all these stories of bad ATI drivers. I dont remember the last time a driver instalation went wrong LOL. They have all installed perfectly on the first try and I dont even uninstall first. And there hasnt been a single game ever I wasnt able to play to my satisfaction at the settings I play at. à

I also dont OC. I have found that when I do, system looses stability and sometimes program/driver installs dont get installed properly. Im not sure why that happens so I avoid Overclocking and issues dissapear.
 
dark_reign said:
Those "frequent crashes" are mostly related to the "nvlddmkm stopped responding" error, which is a Vista issue because a similar crash happens on ATI cards.
Click to expand...

No, its actually that the driver crashed. It isn't a problem with Vista, it is Vista gracefully handling what would otherwise result in a BSOD.
 
kllrnohj said:
No, its actually that the driver crashed. It isn't a problem with Vista, it is Vista gracefully handling what would otherwise result in a BSOD.
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Yes, it's the driver that crashed but it happens primarily on Vista with both ATI and NVIDIA cards. But not everybody experiences it, so more than likely it's not a driver issue--or at least not the primary reason for the crashes.
 
ATI I experience only like 1-2 times BSOD due to OC failure..

nVidia card, huh...been crash lots of times without OC....

but the latest driver seem to fix a bit of this problem, not happening that much now, but it still happens..

especially during the change of graphic settings or loading screen in game that mainly appear to be BSOD...
 
I perfer nvidias drivers personally... I was going to go with the 4870 1gb, but after looking at benchs im prolly going to go with the new 260
 
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