Another video card thread.

[VolumetricSteve]

So it's easy to find out what video cards get the highest frame rates at different settings, but which cards present the best image quality? I realize this is somewhat subjective, so naturally I'm looking for opinions.

[Plan B]

Do you mean stuff like what material the card's ports etc. are made of?

Because I think it doesn't really matter, and image quality is *much* more dependent on monitor than video card.

[GONNAFISTYA]

"Best Image Quality" is probably the most vague, unhelpful question you could possibly ask. Your question doesn't address monitors or any other variable at all.

Are you asking about such things as which card does AA better? Even that is a pretty useless question all things considered.

[GONNAFISTYA]

Damn you Plan B. :angrymad:

[VolumetricSteve]

whoaa....it'll be ok.

When I said "presents" I meant that to imply which cards will generate an image, in the frame buffer, that might be sharper or have better looking anisotropic filtering, etc. I figured since I said video card, no one would jump to monitors or anything else but I can see why someone could get the wrong impression.

to be clear, I'm only referring to the image as it stands in memory immediately after rendering.

fun fact: if you think the question is useless, you should state why.

[GONNAFISTYA]

It's useless because "somewhat subjective" is an understatement.

[VolumetricSteve]

That's why I was looking for opinions, things people may have noticed, maybe AA looks horrible in some cases and someone would have had a gripe about it -that's what I was looking for. Or maybe someone could show a high-res side by side comparison of the same scene rendered on different gpus? That'd be good too. I only ask here because I haven't been able to find anything on google. A while ago, ATI used to be the one that focused on image quality, and nvidia wanted to crank out higher frame rates any way they could. I was mostly curious how this has changed or not through user's experiences.

Here...here's something non-subjective. Multi-GPU configurations, they sandwich cards together pretty close, like 6970s and other high end cards that generally appear that the majority of their air flow comes from a hole in the middle of the card which becomes completely obscured by the card next to it, so it seems as if the only card that can be properly cooled would be the last one in the system. How does this work without destroying the cards under heavy load?

[U4EA]

I can sort of see where he's coming from. Back in the day, it was widely agreed that Matrox cards had the best "image quality" of all the available 2D cards at the time. I do agree that it's not really relevant anymore, and as you guys said it's subjective. Anandtech will occassionally talk about image quality in some of their more comprehensive reviews, but I don't think they really do an A to B comparison either.

[VolumetricSteve]

Is this because that technology in-general has just reached a certain point that now...everyone's image quality is good? I remember distinctly being able to tell the difference between ATI and nVidia cards just from screen captures. I just didn't know if ...that was still the score today.

[SoM]

i remember the difference between Matrox, Ati, Nvidia, 3DFX.

but these days if you run at 16AA and 16 or 8AF it's all good bro

[obsidian]

There is a lot more feedback between GPU manufacturers and game developers. Developing with consistent results between architectures is pretty crucial on modern games. You might see bigger differences between Xbox and PS3 comparisons than you would between nVidia and AMD due to hardware limitations on consoles. Due to tight competition, PC GPUs have been pretty similar for some time.

[Foo]

Steve - Take a look at the nVidia Quadro and ATI FireGL cards. They're designed for design/CAD work and push better per-pixel accuracy than the consumer gaming-oriented cards (Geforce and Radeon).

This is all a function of the drivers, too. There were instances in the past where a simple software unlock on a card converts a Quadro to a Geforce, and vice versa.

And of course the tradeoff in quality comes at a heavy FPS price.

[VolumetricSteve]

I actually had a Quadro 600, one of the new Fermi ones for a while, and I wasn't too impressed. For 170 bucks I got 96 CUDA cores, ECC ram on the video card, one DVI, one Display Port, and no 3D Vision Pro support in linux. I didn't find out that last part until after I had it for a while. I didn't get the impression it produced images that really looked accurate, I still saw fuzz with anisotropic filtering, FSAA should have been more configurable. What I was really looking for was something that could pull of 8x or 16x FSAA via super-sampling and had 3D support in linux, but given the prices of these cards, getting both of those in one card is going to be pricey. I remember being able to mod Radeon 9700s into their workstation counterparts. I wish I could do the same thing with a 580GTX but you need a special connector to make 3d support work in linux via their special glasses.

[^Ghost]

any gtx 200+ cards will do

[VolumetricSteve]

I don't think the gtx200s or any gtx cards will provide 3d vision in linux. I didn't see any on the HCL for linux 3d support.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/quadro_pro ... linux.html

However, it's clearly going to be so expensive to get 3d vision in linux I've just given up caring about that, at this point I've narrowed it down to super sampling, running in windows is fine, and I'll worry about 3d junk later.

Does anyone out there running a 5xx or 4xx series nvidia card see super sampling options in the driver settings? If so, which options do you see? Thanks