Fall 2003 Video Card Roundup - Part 2: High End Shootout
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Derek Wilson on October 7, 2003 5:30 PM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Back to the game...
Since NVIDIA can't do floating point textures, PS2.0 shadows were left off, and we didn't use the NVIDIA shadow (depth sprites) for our cards as ATI doesn't support that. We have decided that since the glow effect uses PS 2.0 (and we are using this as a DX9 stress test rather than an actual game) this needs to be enabled. The 'goodness' of the glow effect has been questioned, but we aren't here to critique the quality of the implimentation. We simply want to test the raw power each card has to push TRAOD PS2.0 code. Personally, I think the effect glow had on the wall lights in the Paris demo was one of the only "pretty" things in the game.
Depth of Feild (DoF) is also on. After watching this demo hundreds of times, it really seems to me that using PS2.0 for DoF in TRAOD was overkill for what they ended up with. It just seems like they could have gotten similar results (with better frame rates) using lower detail (frequency) mipmaps and dynamic reduction of geometry. Of course, I could be way off base, but it just seems like there were better things that could have been done with PS 2.0 in this game.
We note that there have been issues with the accuracy of the Depth of Field post processing, but we think that the new 50 series of Detonators (along with the Cg compiler) will alleviate this issue. Of course, there are still some IQ issues in ATI's 3.7 cats.
As games and hardware move forward, post effects like DoF and rendered textures are going to be getting more and more complex, and the way hardware handles these things will be slightly different. It's less important to look at pixel level "sameness" between two solutions, but rather at overall image quality, and the impact of the effect. The user experience is what matters in this arena, and some things are going to be subjective. Pixel shader effects are much more intricate than geometry or T&L, and differences in architecture, precision, and drivers will all contribute to slight differences where no solution can clearly be labeled as more correct than another. Of course, that makes our job harder, but it will definitely be an interesting ride.
Anyway, in order to try to understand exactly how DX9 PS2.0 is affecting each graphics card, we are doing two tests at each resolution (with and without AA). The first test, everything we don't need to see something and have PS2.0 functionality is disabled. For the second test the only thing we do is turn off PS2.0 and run the benchmark again. The scores we will be giving you are in the form of percent decrease in performance when PS2.0 is enabled. This should give us some idea of how this implementation of PS2.0 scales on each card, and give us a good solid glimpse into the implications of DX9 in TRAOD (as this is the only game that will ever use this engine).
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Anonymous User - Tuesday, October 7, 2003 - link
How very balanced of you #30.Let us be patient; Anand is asking questions on OUR behalf in order to REVEAL truth.
I'm focused on the questions and the answers. Where is your focus?
AgaBooga - Tuesday, October 7, 2003 - link
#33, that's what came to my mind as soon as I read this article. I think that Anand may have just provided some input, done testing, or just edited it slightly...Anonymous User - Tuesday, October 7, 2003 - link
The IQ shots are not the best I could imagine.Some of them are cropped out so that you can't see a lot of details: UT2003, Aquamark3, Wolfenstein.
Some of them are set up so that you wouldn't get any possible artifacts with texture filtering, because of the high camera angle: Warcraft3, C&C Generals.
The Tomb Raider, Aquamark and Wolf screenshots are also too dark to notice anything. And I don't see any sign of a DX9 shader in either the Halo or the TR shots, so we have no idea of DX9 image quality.
But kudos for all the testing you've done, must have been a lot of hard work.
Anonymous User - Tuesday, October 7, 2003 - link
#30 ATI has not released performance drivers for a long time now and they already said don't hold your breath on those performance increases coming in the 3.8s either. The main focus since the 3.1s have mainly it seems been bug fixes with slight performance improvements in various games. 3.8 = more features and bug fixes with probably slight performance improvements here and there in specific games.Anonymous User - Tuesday, October 7, 2003 - link
Derek probably wrote the whole article while Anand was behind him cracking his whip. So I dunno about this "supposed" two authors!Anonymous User - Tuesday, October 7, 2003 - link
Would all the fanboys please take a deep breath or troll elsewhere? I swear to god some of you people will go out of your way to look for bias where there isn't any.I own a 9800 Pro and I for one am glad that it seems like Nvidia has closed the gap considerably, their customers deserve it.
Anonymous User - Tuesday, October 7, 2003 - link
Great review, I love the IQ shots. I too am waiting to see the 9600xt review though.AgaBooga - Tuesday, October 7, 2003 - link
To those of you mentioned Anand a few times, you should also note this was written by two authors. Or atleast worked on together by two authors, so you should try and understand that you may different "types" of responses and analyses (sp?) of similar results if they're done by different people. I think we should wait for the 3.8 Cat. article before we jump to too many conclusions.PKIte - Tuesday, October 7, 2003 - link
This is the way I take screen shots in final fantasy XI benchmark 2.- Use Hypersnap-dx
- Enable directx capture in Hypersnap
- Change Hypersnap “Quick Save” settings to repeat capture every 5 seconds
- Launch Final Fantasy XI benchmark 2 menu
- When you click the “START” button press “Print Screen” once resolution changes.
Wow this is the biggest video card review I have ever read: Awesome!!
Anonymous User - Tuesday, October 7, 2003 - link
>Right now NVIDIA is at a disadvantage; ATI's >hardware is much easier to code for and the >performance on Microsoft's HLSL compiler clearly >favors the R3x0 over the NV3xever heard from the ps2_a compiler target?