14 DAY TRIAL // The war between NVIDIA and AMD has really heated up over the past two-or three months or so, each of the two sides throwing some new and improved GPU models in the battle, but it seems that, this time around, the former has decided to launch a rather different type of attack, practically calling out the latter for being a cheater and “doctoring” its drivers in order to provide better benchmark results, at the cost of a drop in image quality.
So, withing a recent posting on NVIDIA's NTERSECT blog, the “green team” claims that multiple hardware-focused websites, such as ComputerBase, PC Games Hardware, Tweak PC, and 3DCenter.org, discovered that changes introduced in AMD’s Catalyst 10.10 default driver settings caused an increase in performance and a decrease in image quality, actually confirming NVIDIA's own findings.
Apparently, the problem seems to be that reviewers were forced to push to “High” the Catalyst AI texture filtering setting for AMD 6000 series GPUs instead of the default “Quality” setting in order to provide image quality that comes close to NVIDIA’s default texture filtering setting.
Practically, what NVIDIA does here is accusing AMD of obtaining up to a 10% performance advantage by lowering their default texture filtering quality, a process that affects not only the latest-gen Radeon HD 6800 series, but the previous HD 5800 graphics cards as well.
Specifically, AMD drivers appear to disable texture filtering optimizations when smaller window sizes are detected, like the AF Tester tool uses, and they enable their optimizations for larger window sizes.
We won't go into more specific technical details here (since you'll be able to find out more on NVIDIA's own blog), but what we'll do is provide NVIDIA's final words for AMD, that are some particularly harsh ones: NVIDIA strives to deliver excellent IQ at default control panel settings, while also ensuring the user experiences the image quality intended by the game developer. NVIDIA will not hide optimizations that trade off image quality to obtain faster frame rates. Similarly, with each new driver release, NVIDIA will not reduce the quality of default IQ settings, unlike what appears to be happening with our competitor, per the stories recently published. AMD promotes “no compromise” enthusiast graphics, but it seems multiple reviewers beg to differ. We have had internal discussions as to whether we should forego our position to not reduce image quality behind your back as AMD is doing.We believe our customers would rather we focus our resources to maximize performance and provide an awesome, immersive gaming experience without compromising image quality, than engage in a race to the IQ gutter with AMD. As you can see for yourselves, these are pretty strong words from the green team, and we're really looking forward to seeing what AMD has to say on the matter (we've already contacted the company's reps and we're waiting for an official position on their part as soon as possible).