This concerns YOUR nVIDIA card!!! ATi users are welcome too!

sleepygamer213 · Aug 30, 2005

WE CALL IT optimisation these days, but what do you call it when a firm over optimises? We used to call it something different in the days of the NV30, when Nvidia had to do something to make its chip work better and do better in benchmarks but to our surprise it seems to have done it again. The chaps from 3D Center, a very talented in-depth site, spotted and tested and proved that Nvidia is using a lower anisotropic filtering quality than any other card available.

Those guys noticed a texture shimmering problem when you are using normal driver settings. This was the case with NV40 cards but you could resolve this flickering by using high quality driver settings. This won't work on G70 based cards, so the guys well known for its thorough benchmarks went digging a little deeper into the chip.

It turns out that Nvidia is not doing anisotropic filtering the way it should and that the picture quality is the one to suffer. You will get the shimmering effect on your textures whenever you are using Geforce 7800GTX cards but you won't see this using Radeon cards.

The guys claimed that all NV40 and G70 cards will suffer from the same flickering problem and that these cards have "by far worse AF quality". They also add that Nvidia got the flickering because it was using general under sampling and as a result is getting the flickers. It's interesting to note that older Geforce 5800 Ultra won't suffer from this, just the new cards that 6800 or 7800 based.

Another German web site Computerbase , went a step further. It made a custom driver by changing the inf, where the driver could not recognise 7800GTX and use its optimisations. The card was listed as unknown but was working just fine. But when the guys went testing they noticed a massive performance drop when using those drivers, close to 30 percent and related it to anisotropic filtering. Nvidia has a lot to explain.

3DCenter, for the original article, is here in English while the Computerbase German article is here. We will ask Nvidia what is going on but we think there's something up. At lease the guys proved it isn’t a hardware bug - it's a driver problem only but performance drops dramatically as soon as you resolve it.
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From www.theinquirer.net

It seems as if nVidia is cheating its customers and still charging top notch prices!

sleepygamer213 · Sep 1, 2005

thoughts?

~Pyrate~ · Sep 1, 2005

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=25820

i think they fixed the problem ... seems it's just bug ...

Adrynalyne · Sep 1, 2005

Old news. Nvidia has been accused of rigging their drivers before to artificially inflate benchmark results...

Major Attitude · Sep 1, 2005

Heres a thought, the Inquirer posts more bs then anyone. The new 7800 cant be debated and the latest ATI card is delayed as proof of it.

sleepygamer213 · Sep 1, 2005

The new ATi card is already on its way out. The R520 with 16 piplines.... heres news on the R580...

ATI engineers are working hard to lay to rest the ghosts of the past. The company experienced many problems with the forthcoming R520 but learned from its mistakes. Shifting to 90 nanometre is not an easy thing to do and it takes, time, effort and money. The R520 aka "Fudo" chip was taped out three times until the company managed to get any reasonable yield numbers. The chip was working fine, but you could not reach high speeds with it, that was the problem and only a few chips per wafer actually worked.

The R520 chip is delayed for a whole quarter now and this has given ATI enough time to prepare for its next step, the R580 chip. The R580 is done by a separate team from the one making R520, with both teams working independently.

It's funny enough that R580 chip was taped out a few weeks back and that this time ATI got it right with its first tape out. It is working fine but we are not sure about the yields. If it makes ATI happy, that means that it got much better numbers than with R520.

The R580 won't be just a clock speed upgrade. It will be a slightly different chip with some marchitectural differences but we don’t know all the details yet. We don’t expect that it will be just have a different number of pipes, it might have a few changes, here and there.

This chip may be ready sooner than anyone expects but ATI will follow its path and launch the R520 first, and after that will go for R580, not before Nvidia announces its G70 Ultra.

We still don’t think we will see any products based on R580 before Yule at least, but it makes much more business sense to deliver it even later than that. I guess it will depend how the R520 will fare against the Geforce 7800GTX and G70 Ultra, which will make up ATI's mind on this subject.
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Also from theinquirer....

theefool · Sep 2, 2005

The Inquirer... (the)
The Enquirer... (national)....

Thoughts!

sleepygamer213 · Sep 2, 2005

The National Enquirer is the one with all the freaky and B.S. stuff in it.

theefool · Sep 2, 2005

But, I think that the inq has freaky stuff and BS stuff for geeks.

/me shrugs

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This concerns YOUR nVIDIA card!!! ATi users are welcome too!

sleepygamer213 First Sergeant

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