Are ATI being..ahem...sneaky?

[petrolhead2003]

I saw this on a review in THW.

"Questionable optimizations in ATi's drivers?

Earlier this year, NVIDIA drew a lot of flak over a number of questionable optimizations in their drivers for 3DMark 2003 - optimizations which could definitely be called cheats. It was in response to this that NVIDIA came up with the guidelines pertaining to performance optimizations mentioned above. Laudably, we haven't been able to make out any "violations" of the new rules in the new driver v52.16 - at least so far.

ATi, on the other hand, repeatedly claimed that their drivers implemented no illegitimate optimizations. The accusations leveled against ATi at NVIDIA's Editors' Day two days ago thus become that much more serious. Epic's Mark Rein confirmed that in some cases, high-res detail textures were not displayed in some areas by ATi´s drivers and that standard, lower-res textures are used instead. Randy Pitchford of the Halo development team also mentioned that there were optimizations present in ATi's drivers which are detrimental to Halo's image quality. However, Randy didn't want to go into more detail here. Finally, Massive's new DX9 benchmark, AquaMark 3, also displayed some irregularities of ATi drivers in the overdraw test."



So it seems that even ATI have to "cheat" to get their cards going a tad faster.

 

[cleeve]

This is very old news.

From what I've seen, none of these accusations were proven. But if anyone has any proof I'd be interested in seeing it.

________________
<b>Radeon <font color=red>9500 PRO</b></font color=red> <i>(hardmodded 9500, o/c 322/322)</i>
<b>AthlonXP <font color=red>2600+</b></font color=red> <i>(o/c 2400+ w/143Mhz fsb)</i>
<b>3dMark03: <font color=red>4,055</b></font color=red>

 

[petrolhead2003]

Here we go:-

http://www.tomshardware.com/graphic/20031023/nvidia-nv38-nv36-19.html#questionable_optimizations_in_atis_drivers

 

[cleeve]

Oh yeah, I saw that.

I think the only thing of note is the way the Radeon's handle alpha maps.

Just another thing on the list of differences. I have seen both Ati and Nvidia screenshots showing texture blurring, depending on the game used.
Ati has a questionable AF algorithm, but Nvidia has questionable bri-linear filtering.
Ati handles alpha maps differently, but Nvidia has a poor antialiassing implementation.

In the end it's pot-ay-to, po-tah-to. Both have their strangths and weaknesses.

________________
<b>Radeon <font color=red>9500 PRO</b></font color=red> <i>(hardmodded 9500, o/c 322/322)</i>
<b>AthlonXP <font color=red>2600+</b></font color=red> <i>(o/c 2400+ w/143Mhz fsb)</i>
<b>3dMark03: <font color=red>4,055</b></font color=red>

 

[addiarmadar]

Either way its their product and they can do what ever they want with them.. All I care is which one is the lesser evil and ATI has been far. I have had so much frickin problems with nvidia's filterings with the FX chips and not much at all with ati. They had been putting out what the people want:

QUALITY

Better looking graphics has always been the mega plus for me. Id bet that ati and nvida surgar-coated the truch with texutes but they are still way better than wat nvidia to try to shove down your eye sockets.

Barton 2500+ @ 2200mhz (10x220 vcore @ 1.8)
Asus A7N8X Dlx 440 FSB
1gb Geil GD pc3500 Dual Channel (2-3-3-6)
Segata 80gb SATA 8.5ms seek
ATI Radeon 9800 Pro(420/720)

 

[TheGreatGrapeApe]

That's not proof that's simply your source (the allegations/observations themselves). The initial observations were not representative of all other sources (especially the lack of rendering issues in HALO [digit-life showed that the walls' integrated lighting weren't rendered correctly]). There has been no follow-up on this issue, because it didn't pan out with other reviewers.

And yes this is VERY old news, and has in fact been proven incorrect by many reviewers. We even posted the whole issue from start to finish including LARS'/BORSTI's own contributions to the thread.

Got more Spam? At least make it current. Next you'll be posting Quake/Quackc cheat.

You could post the VOLARI cheats, at least that would be interesting and relatively new.


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