Radeon HD 5000 series image quality - flawed?

[titaniumx3]

I was a little suprised that there's been very little discussion about the image quality on these cards so I decided to do some looking around and found this article:

http://alienbabeltech.com/main/?p=12648&page=2

HD4850 AF:

GTX285 AF:

HD5770 AF:

... Moving on to the 5770, we see something bizarre happen. It introduces sharp gray transitions of varying texture detail, eventually culminating into what can be called a “dead-zone” – the solid gray ring touching the outer red section with no discernable texture pattern applied to it. Furthermore, the largest gray ring introduces new stars that the other two cards don’t have (two such instances are marked with white arrows).

There clearly seems to be an issue with the anisotropic filtering on these cards where texture detail drops off at distant angled surfaces, eventually leading to deadzones with no definition at all. I tried this myself on my HD5870 (Catalyst 9.12) using D3D AF-Tester (download) and this is what I got:

The article goes on to show actual in game comparisions, where the effect is a lot less pronounced but still noticeable in certain situations.

Personally, I'm not too concerned as I doubt I'll ever notice it in games and certainly, image quality seems just as good as it did on my HD4890, but it is still a little worrying that this wasn't picked up by ATI before and that it hasn't been discussed by any of the major reviews sites.

I just hope that it's not something that's hardcoded into the hardware, but fixable via driver update. Would also be useful if more people tested this, on different cards and raised the issue on the ATI support webpage.

 

[JGBR]

I sometimes get the feeling, everyone jumped on these cards as the best with DX11 etc and now...

Driver problems...AF problems... AA Problems...5870 issues and so on...

I had heard about the image quality issue but as you mentioned maybe people can't tell when their playing a game.

Will test when my replacement 5870 arrives.

 

[Rroff]

Reminds me of the filtering on the good old nVidia FX series... wonder if the banding is noticeable.

 

[wolvers]

So ATIs new, extremely good, method for making round stuff actually round has a slight blurring effect that's barely noticeable. If it was that bad and that noticeable, this forum would be full of people complaining about it. I'm sure that if it was 'unacceptably poor' I'd notice it on a 70" screen!

 

[RavenXXX2]

http://www.hardocp.com/article/2009/09/22/amds_ati_radeon_hd_5870_video_card_review/6

I would say ATI has succeeded in providing the absolute best filtering quality in a gaming graphics card.

 

[buttkinz]

tried the same on the 5770's, AF seems to give up on the miniscule textures that are in the very far distance. I guess its never noticed in game as the textures would be a few pixels in size ??

 

[Rroff]

So ATIs new, extremely good, method for making round stuff actually round has a slight blurring effect that's barely noticeable. If it was that bad and that noticeable, this forum would be full of people complaining about it. I'm sure that if it was 'unacceptably poor' I'd notice it on a 70" screen!

Its more than just a slight blurring effect - theres several deadzones, new moire artifacts and potential banding issues lacking smooth transition between mipmap levels.

Tho we can only assume at the moment the author of that article has got it right and not screwed up somewhere with settings, etc.

 

[RavenXXX2]

ATI currently has the best filtering out there, this is fact, I see no reports of image quality problems anywhere else, in fact the opposite, the 5000 cards are praised for their top IQ.

 

[JGBR]

I suppose the point is, unless your a render er or looking at something very close. Does it matter?

 

[mmj_uk]

Why does the 5770 image have a dark circle around when the other oens don't? perhaps that is causing the anomaly.

 

[buttkinz]

doesnt matter no as ingame its really nice, just an interesting point i guess that people are trying to find out how ati have implemented their AF and AA, this inevitably will incur comparision to nvidias way, although im sure nvidia implement different AA methods to ati although its called the same thing?? cant remeber where i read it, was a long time ago?? feel free to correct me Rroff if im wrong

 

[JGBR]

Probably just different techniques; To the naked eye well its anyones game

 

[Rroff]

Question is did he have High Quality enabled in the drivers - its quite hard to compare like to like with the different settings unless you have them on highest or lowest quality.

 

[wolvers]

Its more than just a slight blurring effect - theres several deadzones, new moire artifacts and potential banding issues lacking smooth transition between mipmap levels.

Tho we can only assume at the moment the author of that article has got it right and not screwed up somewhere with settings, etc.

Like I said, 70" screen. I've gone from a 260 to a 5850 and I'm bowled over by the IQ.

It's clever really. Who on earth is staring into the distance when there's a nazi solder in front of you that is about to get a hole in the face? Come on, get real. These are just video games.

Loyalty clouds your judgement my friend.

 

[JGBR]

Or do they have some clever process of adapting to the task at hand or was their examples of it doing it in games?

 

[Rroff]

I'm being objective about it if you hadn't noticed...

 

[buttkinz]

I dont think this is an issure of brand loyalty, just a opinion on the screenshots above

 

[JGBR]

Unfortunately super-sampling performance is subpar and inconsistent in many games due to suboptimal drivers, and there are also issues with forcing it from the control panel and the 5XXX is a mixed bag

Shall we try a 59XX now? lol

 

[titaniumx3]

ATI currently has the best filtering out there, this is fact, I see no reports of image quality problems anywhere else, in fact the opposite, the 5000 cards are praised for their top IQ.

I'm not doubting it has excellent image quality and from the brief experience I've had using the card, I see no noticeable issues in comparision to my old 4890, but clearly there is an issue with texture detail on distant and angled textures as the pictures in the OP show. Notice also that the author of the article also gives a comparision of actual game screenshots and it is evident that there is some loss of detail in these distant, angled textures.

I'm not sure why other reviews haven't picked it up, since it's quite an obvious anomaly. Note that anandtech in their review of the 5870 even state that they used this same program (D3D AF Tester), but they don't mention seeing the anomaly:

As you can see, the MIP maps in our venerable D3D AF Tester are perfectly circular, the hallmark of an angle-independent implementation. With angle-independent filtering, this effectively marks the end of the filtering arms race. AMD has won, and should NVIDIA catch up in the future the two would merely be tied. There’s nowhere left to go for quality beyond angle-independent filtering at the moment.

(source: http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3643&p=13)

It's possible that they weren't using a fine enough texture pattern as many other review sites have done since it doesn't show up when the pattern is scaled larger (i.e. bigger chessboard squares).

Whatever the case, it should at the very least be addressed and explained.

Why does the 5770 image have a dark circle around when the other oens don't? perhaps that is causing the anomaly.

I think that's the anomaly itself.

 

[RavenXXX2]

They don't mention it because it's not worth mentioning, you're not going to notice it at all in game so who gives a crap, the site I linked to even did the same tests and they reported back with the finest IQ available on the market, so I'll go with them.