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AMD responds to NVIDIA’s image-quality complaints

by Pete Mason on 26 November 2010, 17:00

Tags: AMD (NYSE:AMD), NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA)

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Earlier in the week we reported that NVIDIA's Nick Stam had written a damning article on his company's blog decrying AMD's use of lower image-quality settings that gave better performance in benchmarks at the expense of graphical fidelity. Of course, the claims were met with little sympathy in our forums, where members rightly pointed out that NVIDIA had pulled exactly that sort of stunt in 2003 by tuning drivers to perform better in benchmarks.

Now a representative from AMD has gotten in touch with us to try and set the record straight. Obviously the company denies any accusations of underhand tactics and reaffirmed its commitment to the PC gaming community. The rep also pointed out that the default image-quality settings in the Catalyst drivers had recently been revisited and that they were - in AMD's opinion - "on par" with NVIDIA's defaults.

The statement added that the company takes "great care in determining the default settings of Catalyst drivers" and that the current defaults "deliver a very good gaming experience".

Obviously the real test comes down to user experience, and in our thoroughly unscientific testing we couldn't see any particular degradation in image quality when using the default Catalyst settings. There will obviously be differences in the companies' hardware and drivers that will render textures in different ways, but we doubt that the majority will be able to notice any difference in real world scenarios. And for those that do notice, the settings can always be changed manually.



HEXUS Forums :: 10 Comments

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yes because shimmering textures are `on par`….
http://www.guru3d.com/article/radeon-hd-6850-6870-review/9

So the difference at default driver setting in-between AMD and NVIDIA is as far as we are concerned NIL.

Just more noise from nVidia.
the same guru3d that declared AMD to have an amazing win over nvidia - after reviewing the gtx 460/470 using 6 months old drivers against the 68xx with the latest drivers….. objective reviewing it isnt.
Maybe you missed it Jack but most websites found the 6850 beat the 460 and the 6870 was on par with the 470.
HalloweenJack
the same guru3d that declared AMD to have an amazing win over nvidia - after reviewing the gtx 460/470 using 6 months old drivers against the 68xx with the latest drivers….. objective reviewing it isnt.

What did they clarify as “amazing win” and what are you referring to with that statement?

It is a highly vague phrase which does not mean the same thing to everybody. For example Guru3D might of weighed up the power draw against the performance and price of the GFX cards where you could be interested in only image quality and performance at a specific resolution. Very different criteria for the same classification both providing very different conclusions. Neither of them wrong in case you didn't realise.

You need to accept the criteria taken into account by the reviewer not the criteria you are interested in if you wish to quote a conclusion. You should be able to realise the differences in application between you and a reviewer as well, and not be so narrow minded in your reading of reviews.



I find the spat to be pointless and rather funny. Instead of getting on with their jobs nVidia employees apparently prefer to complain about what AMD are doing. Acting like spoilt brats, just proves that what we call “civilised” is actually very far from it.