ATI's Optimized Texture Filtering Called Into Question

Optimizations Without End

There are still other filter optimizations. But it would be going too far to describe them in detail here. However, we recommend a look at this article on the 3DCenter website. You can learn that much more filtering optimization is going on in detail.

In our article, we took a look at today's well-known filter optimizations. Shader optimizations, which were heavily discussed as early as last year, are a whole different chapter. This is where NVIDIA came out looking bad, because many shaders have been completely replaced by other ones, some of which were of poorer quality for performance reasons. The reason was the limited DirectX 9 Shader performance of the GeForce FX 5xxx cards. There were also just a few games available that offered real DX9 support and shader quality decreases could be detected. Let's hope that the introduction of the new GeForce 6xxx series, which is greatly improved in this respect, will soon make this issue a thing of the past. Although ATI and NVIDIA will surely continue to optimize this aspect, as long as the result is good and the optimization serves to make better use of the capacity of the graphics processor, shader tuning seems to be legitimate. However, that is a different issue, though one that is no less controversial and hotly discussed.