GPUs and IQ: where we are today

I had a talk a while ago with my friend ChrisRay about IQ. The reason was Ratchet’s excellent 8800GTX article here: http://www.rage3d.com/reviews/video/nvidia8800 , and this in particular: http://www.rage3d.com/reviews/video/nvidia8800/af.php

As you can see in that comparison, the Radeon looks sharper in distant texture than the Geforce so it could be an AF issue. Anyway, ChrisRay was telling me that it’s probably a LoD issue instead, and if the LoD was to be unclamped, everything would be peachy. So I started looking at the screenshots back and forth, and then it hit me: here I am, looking at three screenshots for more than a minute, going back and forth between them, in order to see potential differences between the two cards. Do you see where I am getting at? I sure did. Think about where we were two and three years ago, and where we are today. Ugly filtering, blurry AA, scetchy “optimizations”. And now, in order to realise what the differences are between high end solutions, you have to stare at screenshots and hope you’ll actually see something, which may not even be what you’re looking for! Inside the game, will you ever notice a difference? Highly doubtful. It’s really a IQ guy’s dream come true. The new nVIDIA cards really deliver in the IQ front (at last), so much that I believe those poor GX2 owners must be feeling a bit dumb for paying premium a few months ago :p

An exciting era dawns upon us, and with R600 approaching ATI will want to maintain the IQ leadership that it has for the past years. So bye bye shoddy optimizations, nice knowing you