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AMD Vs. Nvidia Image Quality - Old man yells at cloud

I moved from 290 to a 1070 and now back to Vega 64 and even with colour calibration on my monitor the Nvidia graphics always looked less vibrant and less finer than the AMD ones.

I really noticed this in Grim Dawn and FF14 where both games were significantly darker and dreary on the 1070 with no changes at all to my monitor settings, went back to Vega 64 and straight away everything just looks noticably more vibrant and brighter without the washout of high contrast or gamma etc.

I firmly believe Nvidia sacrifice overall graphic fidelity to achieve faster frame rates

Can't really comment on smoothness as I went from Freesync to no Freesync back to Freesync, and Freesync is just all round better as an experience, however I would bet G-Sync would feel the same.
 
0bitflip1 said:
You might set some Ultra setting for your shadows in XYZ title, but if Nvidia has reviewed the differences internally for XYZ title and decided that Ultra shadows provide very little benefit over High, while having substantial performance setbacks, then they will force High shadows and "lie" to you. It's understandable, to be clear I'm not trying to make it sound like a negative.
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This has been tested by reviewers many times and only once has any instance of it been found (and that was more complex than simply forcing a different setting - but rather a shader specific optimisation was causing some shadow artefacts) and in some games would break the rendering engine if nVidia was doing that.

Your smoothness issue is more likely differences with V-Sync behaviour at different framerate ranges - again reviewers have done lots of frametime tests, etc. that said I did some testing with a 980ti and my 1070 and noticed some cases where the 980ti's minimum framerate would fall down quite significantly in certain scenes in comparison despite the average holding up well against the 1070.

KentMan said:
Can't really comment on smoothness as I went from Freesync to no Freesync back to Freesync, and Freesync is just all round better as an experience, however I would bet G-Sync would feel the same.
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While it is quite minimal it seems to me FreeSync biases slightly towards smoothness over responsiveness some of that incidental as their low framerate management tends to build in additional redundant frames in comparison to G-Sync which can make G-Sync feel a little more stuttery in edge cases but personally I prefer it. There are also some tricks they do with G-Sync for motion clarity that can have some undesirable side effects at times which I have mixed feelings about.
 
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Marine-RX179 said:
1st comparison top image seem to have more depth/layers the leaves look more separated whereas the bottom image the leaves looks like they are smudged together difficult to make out the layers for the leaves and trees - more difficult to make out what's at the front what's at the back.

2nd comparison the bottom image generally look worse: more blur, and less sense of depth (particularly noticeable with the stones on the left wall and the patio on the ground)- generally there's more 3D depth in the top image comparing to the bottom image.

Both comparisons the bottom image looks more dull, flat, and not as realistic...or may be not as believable would be a better way to say it.
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Yea the bottom image looks washed out, especially in the shady areas. Also distant textures are clearer/sharper on the top image (e.g. look at the red B on the wall).
 
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Nasher said:
Yea the bottom image looks washed out, especially in the shady areas. Also distant textures are clearer/sharper on the top image (e.g. look at the red B on the wall).
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One of them is a slightly position and different angle (look at the pallet on the right hand side) which has slightly changed the filtering/mip-maps.
 
Rroff said:
One of them is a slightly position and different angle (look at the pallet on the right hand side) which has slightly changed the filtering/mip-maps.
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It wouldn't make anything like that much of a difference. The whole scene has a different tone.
 
Rroff said:
One of them is a slightly position and different angle (look at the pallet on the right hand side) which has slightly changed the filtering/mip-maps.
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Think we all noticed that, but it doesn't change the reality that for the 2nd image comparison the bottom image has far less depth than the upper one.

Just look at the pillar on the right, it looks also blending into with the background/wall behind it and area surrounding it, whereas the top image you can clearly see the wall is behind the pillar.

Also note that 4K8KW10 did not label which image is which vendor, but I am willing to bet images of the two comparisons is that the top image is AMD and bottom image is Nvidia. If there's enough people here noticed the different can correctly identify these images in this blind test, then the image quality difference between AMD and Nvidia is probably not not subtle or a placebo afterall.

Again, not trying to turn this into vendor war, but this discussion seem to be useful for people to have a better understanding of the difference, and make their purchase accordingly.

Nvidia has AMD beat in area of top performing cards, better efficiency and better features sets, so even IF AMD having better image turn out to be true, it is not the end of the world. People just need to buy base on their need and expectation accordingly.
 
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Marine-RX179 said:
Also note that 4K8KW10 did not label which image is which vendor, but I am willing to bet images of the two comparisons is that the top image is AMD and bottom image is Nvidia. If there's enough people here noticed the different can correctly identify these images in this blind test, then the image quality difference between AMD and Nvidia is probably not not subtle or a placebo afterall.
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He has posted them a number of times - pretty sure he mentioned which was which before - I also explained a few of the problems with his comparison in the past.
 
Rroff said:
He has posted them a number of times - pretty sure he mentioned which was which before - I also explained a few of the problems with his comparison in the past.
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Did he? At least I didn't see him mentioning in this thread (or may be I missed it?) and I was just approaching the images he posts as a blind-test.

Regardless, as I haven't used any of the newer GPUs from Nvidia (the newest I got is a 960M on my laptop), I won't know for sure the state of the image quality of the new Nvidia cards. However I genuinely hope it is not really a issue, as believe it or not I would like to have the option to go Nvidia, given that IF they have graphic card at attractive pricing and performance, and if they would do something about the long-term support on driver for older graphic cards in new games.
 
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Marine-RX179 said:
Did he? At least I didn't see him mentioning in this thread (or may be I missed it?) and I was just approaching the images he posts as a blind-test.

Regardless, as I haven't used any of the newer GPUs from Nvidia (the newest I got is a 960M on my laptop), I won't know for sure the state of the image quality of the new Nvidia cards. However I genuinely hope it is not really a issue, as believe it or not I would like to have the option to go Nvidia, given that IF they have graphic card at attractive pricing and performance, and if they would do something about the long-term support on driver for older graphic cards in new games.
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More than once - I think this is one instance but the images aren't loading https://forums.overclockers.co.uk/threads/have-amd-stopped-competing.18811302/page-10#post-31601796 one of the times I did explain some of what was going on.
 
Marine-RX179 said:
1st comparison top image seem to have more depth/layers the leaves look more separated whereas the bottom image the leaves looks like they are smudged together difficult to make out the layers for the leaves and trees - more difficult to make out what's at the front what's at the back.

2nd comparison the bottom image generally look worse: more blur, and less sense of depth (particularly noticeable with the stones on the left wall and the patio on the ground)- generally there's more 3D depth in the top image comparing to the bottom image.

Both comparisons the bottom image looks more dull, flat, and not as realistic...or may be not as believable would be a better way to say it.
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I would seriously need to see settings in the NCP/game settings before I believe this or that in truth. I remember having a bug with drivers and they were defaulting to performance over quality (No idea why) but after running DDU, that was solved. Maybe the same issue here?
 
Thew comparisons are flawed because they aren't the exact same camera position.


If you really want to compare image quality you will need to set up a specialized test suite, not rely on a standard game engine.
 
I looked at that scene last night with my 970 and it didn't look like either image. For starters there is no specular highlighting on the floor for me and the floor textures were worse than either image. I'll grab a screenshot tonight but it is definitely not because of any change in camera position/angle.
 
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Remember what you claimed?

4K8KW10 said:
Well, clearly nvidia cards don't render ultra high. Their "ultra high" must be high or medium on AMD cards..
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How do those images demonstrate that.

Also how about something a bit more modern than CS source, which is 14 years old.

Some articles from reputable tech sites would help to prove your point, preferably relatively recent ones.

Else it is just like AMD having dodgy drivers, they may have done once and the stigma has stuck.
 
bru said:
Remember what you claimed?



How do those images demonstrate that.

Also how about something a bit more modern than CS source, which is 14 years old.

Some articles from reputable tech sites would help to prove your point, preferably relatively recent ones.

Else it is just like AMD having dodgy drivers, they may have done once and the stigma has stuck.
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It's such a subjective topic though. I personally think AMD/ATI offered better IQ for some time.
 
jigger said:
It's such a subjective topic though. I personally think AMD/ATI offered better IQ for some time.
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I mean some settings can be subjective but it isn't really a subjective topic - image quality can be quantified by pixel analysis/comparisons and tech sites have covered it.

A lot of what is being covered in this thread is almost certainly not comparing like for like and/or problems with individual user environments such as remnants of older drivers, etc.
 
james.miller said:
I looked at that scene last night with my 970 and it didn't look like either image. For starters there is no specular highlighting on the floor for me and the floor textures were worse than either image. I'll grab a screenshot tonight but it is definitely not because of any change in camera position/angle.
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Have you got a screenshot to share here?

Ian Evey said:
You not buying an RTX card then?
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There is no reason for me to buy an RTX card.
 
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