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Interesting....

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  • Graphics Cards
  • Performance
  • Graphics
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Last response: in Graphics & Displays
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February 2, 2002 12:04:36 AM

I was playing around with some settings in the Radeon 8500 control panel and in 3DMark2001 and I have found a couple of interesting things:

First of all, I'm 95% CPU bottlenecked in 3DMark2001. At 640*480*16bit colour, I barely get over 8000 3DMarks. I get around 7500-7600 at 1024*768*32-bit. The only reason that the score improved is because Nature seems to be graphics card bottleneck. Not only that, it's T&L bottlenecked because anything other than Pure T&L will slow down the performance in that benchmark to a crawl. What this means is that ATI wasn't optimizing for the Nature benchmark in their latest drivers, they were improving T&L performance. Hmm, so, the only way a GF4 can score faster than a GF3 and R8500 now, is if nVidia improve the T&L engine. Fill Rate isn't the main problem. Next, some IQ (image quality) findings:

On the latest 6025, ATI seems to have perfected Texture Compression. On earlier drivers, I was always able to spot minute quality differences with Texture Compression on and off. Now, I can't. Therefore, ATI rightfully so, made Texture Compression enabled in both Quality and Performance settings. Now, another way ATI improves performance when Performance is selected is that they convert all 32-bit colour graphics to 16-colour graphics at the end of the processoing. This has negilible loss in quality and is supposed to improve performance. Under Quake III, I saw neither performance nor quality loss or gain by toggling that option. My processor may again be the bottleneck, but I see no point in disabling the option as I can't see any difference in quality.

The new fully-working Anisotropic filtering settings in the 6025 allow users to have more control over the quality of Anisotropic filtering. In most games, the difference between 2X filtering and 16X will be less than 5% so I recommend 8X or 16X in all OpenGL and DirectX games. Can someone with a faster Northwood or AXP system test anisotropic filtering and tell me the performance difference between each setting under the latest drivers?


AMD technology + Intel technology = Intel/AMD Pentathlon IV; the <b>ULTIMATE</b> PC processor <P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by AMD_Man on 02/02/02 08:03 AM.</EM></FONT></P>

More about : interesting

February 2, 2002 1:26:44 AM

For 3d Mark test Nature, I think GF3 had something with its capabilities to win it, and also the most intensive of the tests is the 8 Lights one, which up to today a maximum of 12 FPS is attainable even though the scene was rather undetailed, just with lights! How so?

--
The other day I heard an explosion from the other side of town.... It was a 486 booting up...
February 2, 2002 1:51:30 AM

I have two questions:
What CPU do you have?
How much does Anisotropic Filtering really improve image quality?

It sounds to me like the 8500 has developed into a really solid card after the initial hiccups; it will be very interesting to see how it compares to the GeForce 4.

"Ignorance is bliss, but I tend to get screwed over."
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February 2, 2002 2:03:34 AM

Quote:


I have two questions:
What CPU do you have?
How much does Anisotropic Filtering really improve image quality?

It sounds to me like the 8500 has developed into a really solid card after the initial hiccups; it will be very interesting to see how it compares to the GeForce 4.

I have a 1.33GHz Athlon.

Anisotropic filtering greatly improves image quality. It removes the blur from far away textures in games.

I agree, the 6025 drivers are light-years ahead of the original Radoen 8500 drivers but they still haven't quite reached Detonator XP maturity. I'm eagerly awaiting the next Microsoft-certified set of drivers which should be out within two weeks.

AMD technology + Intel technology = Intel/AMD Pentathlon IV; the <b>ULTIMATE</b> PC processor
February 2, 2002 2:18:35 AM

I made also a observation.Off topic

There seen to have huge issue with the lastest detonator.There a lot of post that say i my [-peep-] geforce dont work.ATI 8500 dont have anymore any stability issue.Ironic that some have buy a overprice geforce over the Radeon 8500 because of the driver.

http://service.madonion.com/servlet/Index?pageid=/orb/p...
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