ATI texture filtering quality? Shimmer this!
 

Throwing fud back and forth is not uncommon in this industry, many manufacturers do it to put their product in the spotlight and make it appear to do a lot better in terms of performance or features than the competition. ATI and NVIDIA have both been doing their fair share of fud throwing, but it usually is ATI that goes out of its way to find fault in new NVIDIA products shortly after launch. So we weren’t surprised to be notified by them of a texture filtering quality issue with NVIDIA’s top-of-the-line GeForce 7800 GT and 7800 GTX graphics cards.

Upon closer inspection there indeed was an issue with the texture filtering algorithm used in the 77.77 drivers of the GeForce 7800GT and 7800 GTX. This algorithm is said to up the performance, but lower the image quality as it causes for texture shimmering. Unfortunately it isn’t easy to reproduce this ‘shimmering’ as it appears to vary from game to game and system to system, with some games appearing fine and some clearly having issues. That being said NVIDIA was on the ball quickly and resolved the issue in the 78-series drivers that were launched last week.

So to our surprise we found out earlier this week, and as reported here, that ATI’s Catalyst 5.8 new drivers have the exact same problem. And unlike NVIDIA, that was on the ball immediately after reports of texture filtering issues with their newly bought GeForce 7800 GT or 7800 GTX, ATI doesn’t even list it in the release notes for their Catalyst drivers. Normally these new releases are accompanied by release notes that describe bugs that are still unresolved and are being worked upon, the texture filtering issue however isn’t mentioned. So did ATI code this in as a feature to up the performance? Was it simply a bug that got in somehow? Or is this a case of the pot calling the kettle black? We’re waiting for ATI’s reply on this, and whether they’ll be on the ball just as quickly to resolve it. Or will we have to wait another month for the next Catalyst release?

http://www.hardwareanalysis.com/content/article/1812/