Archived from groups: alt.comp.periphs.videocards.nvidia (
More info?)
GTX_SlotCar wrote:
>>......This allows for many fewer gradients and overall lower quality
>>filtering as the angle of incidence to a plane decreases.
>
> But doesn't aliasing become less apparent as the angle decreases anyway?
> That's what I've read and observed. So why not give up some filtering
> quality that's not needed to gain extra performance?
> Right now I have 2 ATI cards and 2 nVidia cards (Radeon 8500, Ti4400, Radeon
> 9800Pro and eVga 6800GT.) I figure I'll become brand loyal when one of those
> companies becomes Me loyal.
> One of the things I liked about ATI cards was that they seemed to have more
> gradients (smoother transitions between colors) than the nVidia cards. Not
> just in games, but in 2D also, in pictures and the desktop. Low quality
> pictures, especially, looked better on the ATI.
> Regardless, that's changed with the 62.xx series drivers, especially with
> the 6800 series cards. The Ti4400 with 65.62 drivers is very nice, and the
> 6800gt is even better. I can honestly say that I think the texture quality
> between ATI and nVidia is even now. Until ATI doesn't something with the
> poor performance of their OpenGL drivers, nVidia is definitely the way to go
> for any newer games with that format.
> Gary
>
Perhaps I worded it wrongly, but by decreasing angle, I'm referring to a
"sun on the horizon" situation. At a certain point, all the mipmaps
become too small anyhow. But generally with 90 degree fov games, we're
observing at a 30 degree agle to the floor plain and that's where I'm
coming from.
The absolute ideal situation is that of a raytraced scene taking point
many point samples for each given pixel and oversampling, but trilinear
filtering is used as an abstraction of that concept (the contribution of
neighboring texels as distance inreases and apparent resolution
decreases, such as the ability to decern details at X number of arc
seconds).
3dcenter.org has an excellent article detailing ATI's filtering methods.
You won't have to worry about 2d and overall image quality anymore with
NVidia based cards. NVidia as a company has never actually designed
cards, they've always sold chip designs. The chips are then made by a
foundry (TSMC, IBM) and sold to card makers. Then manufacturers take
the reference design and create their cards based on it. As such,
historically NVidia has been unable to achieve great quality control of
the final retail product.
That has changed however. There are now set standards for what
components (2d rf filters, ramdac's, etc) and specifications a given 3rd
party manufacturer can choose. This has led to a huge increase of
overall consitent quality. This system was implemented around the time
of the Geforce FX and ever since.