Delerious

Not only has the mighty Nvidia been dragging it's heels with driver support for the 8 series cards it seems the "Battle of the benchmarks" with ATI means so much to them the official nvidia drivers are sacrificing quite a pile of IQ to maintain pace with ATI it seems these days.
I know IQ is and can be a very subjective area to deal with, but what i have seen with my own eyes there is quite a big difference in the way the NGO vs Nvidia drivers seem to deliver IQ wise. I personaly could not care what FPS is pouring out the card unless it drops to less than about 30 to 35 FPS.

I dont want to turn this post into a typicial Nvidia bashing thread, but more a thank god NGO actually care enough to stand upto Nvidia pushing sites about and do something about it for us the end users of Nvidia GPU's. Dont get me wrong dont think i am very impressed at all with Nvidia over this but at least we have a solution available with the NGO drivers.

I decided to do the tests for two reasons because i was curious to see if what i perceived as a IQ difference was actually real or not, trying to remember what one driver vs another looks like without screenshots is not going to prove anything much i decided. Also as i have not seen any IQ comparisions of Nvidia drivers on the net, not even Nvidia one version to another Nvidia version, it is time there was i thought.

The following series of screenshots were taken on a Acronis True Image of a clean installed XP SP2 that has had all the drivers and bloat removed by Nlite, and brought upto date with the RVM hotfix addon, so no previous nvidia drivers or registry entries have ever been on the system. The screenshots were loaded into GIMP 2 and saved in .jpg at 100% quality with all the "make me a smaller file options turned off". There will be .jpg artifacts present in these but as your about to see it a tad more than let me get the magnifying glass out to see the differences.

NGO drivers used 97.92 v2
Nvidia drivers used 97.92

Warning some images are over 1.4mb

Oblivion


NGO Top - Nvidia Bottom

UT2k4


NGO Top - Nvidia Bottom


Flatout 2


NGO Top - Nvidia Bottom

You can draw your own conclusions from this visual comparision of the two drivers, i know who i will stand up and thank and who i wont. I think we all knew that IQ was compromised to some degree by Nvidia for performance but i did not expect it to quite such a big marked difference myself.

nCaine

As Rege mentioned some time back. In NGO drivers some tweaks ( by nVidia) that drasticaly lower the IQ are dissabled.

Actualy i alvays wanned do that kind of test , but have ben too lazy.

__________________

-----------------And if someone gave you a pile of gold, you'd probably complain that it was too heavy-------------------

Unixlord

On the NGO drivers go and enable Trilinear and anisotropic optimisation, clamp the LOD from the control panel or you can do the reverse on Nvidia drivers.

__________________
IQ, when aggregated, follows Ohm's law.

Delerious

Yes i think i can name one that is used, older games like UT2K4 and DX texture compression levels/quality. Older engines use level 3 and not level 1, i think the NGO drivers force/ask nicely to use level 1, but i could be wrong here.

Mac Daddy

Some interesting points there and nicely detailed ... great job Delerious

__________________
"People who live in glass houses shouldn't cast stones"

Chaos

I find it hard to believe that UT2K4 looks that bad with the Nvidia driver are you positive that the detail levels are set the same? If so then props to Regeneration. I find it hard to fathom that the Nvidia quality is that poor but I guess that's why I use ATI graphics cards

__________________

Delerious

Yep totaly sure Chaos, as i said i suspect some of the IQ is gained by DirectX and texture compression being used in UT2K4, but Regen will know more about that if it is.

Unixlord

Like I said, unless you're using the exact same 3D settings this is an unfair comparison. NGO turns off trilinear and other optimisation by default.

__________________
IQ, when aggregated, follows Ohm's law.

Regeneration

There is a simple explanation to all of this. Since the GeForce FX defeat, Nvidia is trying to do anything just to beat ATI. Releasing unfinished products to the market to make more sells then ATI and more marketing tricks/tactics. Nvidia is trying to inflate their benchmark scores by these ‘small optimizations’ just for marketing needs. I feel like they are sacrificing their own customers just to fight ATI; and that’s why they are getting so much heat from me.

Let’s admit it, must of the reviewer’s knowledge is average and most of them are ignoring the image quality and giving Nvidia high scores against ATI. Nvidia simply wants to ‘look better’ in the consumer’s eye in every way. Also, Nvidia Corporation is avoiding from providing samples to graphic sites! Maybe they are afraid that some smart user will expose all of these tricky optimizations and cheats? This is very suspicious to me, because ATI is also targeting graphic sites, unlike Nvidia.

In the NGO Nvidia Optimized Driver, we are disabling all these tricky optimizations because our goal is to provide the user with the best image quality and performance. There are other ‘modified’ drivers out there, but we don’t care about benchmarks. Some of the other drivers may perform faster then our drivers, but we’re not going to sacrifice our own users just for some ‘good scores’.

Hopefully, some day Nvidia will stop with all this ‘ATI Competition’ bullshit and aim to provide better solutions then just fighting ATI and sacrificing their own customers for some good reviews. Until then, I’m considering Nvidia as an unethical corporation without any respect for their customers.

Unixlord

Just been informed that they were both tested with the high quality setting. That means NGO drivers will always have better image quality. So you can enable Optimizations and still have better IQ than the standard issue drivers with optimizations enabled.

__________________
IQ, when aggregated, follows Ohm's law.