Image Quality comparison AMD vs NVIDIA

Image Quality comparison AMD vs NVIDIA

A bit of debate lately has been AMD's image quality. It seems that AMD forfeited a tiny bit in certain settings, enabling more optimization than needed. As mentioned in the previous chapter AMD addressed this issue and feels that the default settings for NVIDIA is comparable to ATI's default image quality settings. So, let's have a look.

We took three games, each part of our benchmark suite, each setup in the AA and AF levels we use in the test suite and for each game we'll take a still screenshot of the exact same location at 2560x1600, we then crop to a 300 pixels wide segment of the 3D scene and thus leave the pixels in-tact, we do not resize them, and now we can start to compare, let's have a peek:

** if you download the original stills - they are 2560x1600 24-bit PNG files .. as such file-sizes are anywhere from 5MB to 10MB per screenshot.

Let me ask you a question, which side do you think is a still from ATI (R6870)and which one from NVIDIA (GTX 480) ?

So the left side is AMD and the right side NVIDIA. There is virtually no difference, good texture quality everywhere, nice and proper soft shadows coming from the trees.

Now make no mistake, in-between brands there always will be very tiny difference and offsets, the question however remains, is the difference big enough for you to spot in real-time game play ?

The next game then, we zoom in at the character, we spot a tiny bit darker character for AMD on the left side. Anti aliasing quality is 100% similar and the shadows in the front are casted perfectly from the bush in front of it. If you look on the holster of the gun, you'll see that the texture on the right side (NVIDIA) is a little more stretched, it looks a tad bit better on AMD's (left) R6870. It's an incredible level of nitpicking what I am doing here though.

This scene I have chosen to observe AA quality - it was very hard to capture this still as each time you load up the level and position yourself, you are positioned a little bit different, hence the angle might a be a tiny bit off. Eight levels of MSAA are applied here and the image quality is very much the same. Same colors, same texture quality.

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