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Anandtech: Benchmarked – Civilization: Beyond Earth

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AMDMatt said:
Just to clear up something i said from earlier, which I've now corrected. EQAA is actually available on DirectX and Mantle for Radeon. EQAA offers superior image quality by applying anti-aliasing to areas of the scene that might have been missed by MSAA’s coverage testing.
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IIRC, EQAA is in Dirt Showdown and when the bench thread started, you and a few others ran with it and posted results and when you switched to MSAA, you had lower frames. Stuck at work or I would check but seems that if I am correct, AMD should be spanking nVidia.

Nice to see you doing your job well though and give me a shout if you still need me to do your graphs for ya :p
 
Gregster said:
IIRC, EQAA is in Dirt Showdown and when the bench thread started, you and a few others ran with it and posted results and when you switched to MSAA, you had lower frames.
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That is not correct and I'm not sure where you have the idea that EQAA is lower image quality. I will say it again, EQAA is better image quality than MSAA, and certainly it’s not possible for it to be worse. Hope that clears it up for you.

EDIT - I will test Dirt Showdown now and report back my findings.
 
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I did say I wasn't sure but thanks for clarifying. Saved me a job :D

So is EQAA an AMD only thing or is it open aliasing that can be used by nVidia and Intel?
 
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Lol are you only retesting because the screens you had pulled proved Greg right???

iirc it had eqaa at 134fps and msaa at something like 118fps for those interested.

A little Google suggests eqaa at full tilt has the performance hit roughly to 4x msaa.
 
SFR performance is tragic, developers have been saying only recently AFR is still very much preferable, so not sure why someone would try and trump by saying DX still uses it as a bad thing.

Just to be clear SLI can be forced to use either under DirectX anyway
 
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Gregster said:
I did say I wasn't sure but thanks for clarifying. Saved me a job :D

So is EQAA an AMD only thing or is it open aliasing that can be used by nVidia and Intel?
Click to expand...

It's exactly the same thing as nvidias csaa, not sure what it's like now but last time I looked csaa had a far wider range.
 
AMDMatt said:
That is not correct and I'm not sure where you have the idea that EQAA is lower image quality. I will say it again, EQAA is better image quality than MSAA, and certainly it’s not possible for it to be worse. Hope that clears it up for you.

EDIT - I will test Dirt Showdown now and report back my findings.
Click to expand...

Gregster said:
I did say I wasn't sure but thanks for clarifying. Saved me a job :D
Click to expand...

FYI @4K

EQAA
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MSAA x8
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MSAA x4
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Can you post an image comparison showing the difference or is it just paper talk? those are pretty underwhelming results as far as Mantle is concerned and there's still no telling whether Civ will suffer from memory management issues like other Mantle games have.
 
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I am very surpised that anandtech didn't show minimum fps numbers. I would have thought that mantle would help a lot in this case and provide a much more consistent experience. The developer even said that this is what they had achieved in a video (It was from the AMD 30 live event: http://www.amd.com/en-us/who-we-are/corporate-information/events/amd-30-live). I wonder if Mantle helps reduce the time to process a turn, unfortunately anandtech didn't test this.

Also, they show that the SFR solution did not scale with multiple GPUs. It would be great if Firaxis and AMD had spelled out what the advantages are of this solution and why they implemented it. There are other ways to use multiple GPUs to improve the experience beyond pure performance, maybe they did something like that in this case.

I am a big fan of the concept of Mantle. However, as I understand it, games are still being developed around the limitations of d3d 9-11.

If the draw call count were increased to a level where d3d would struggle, then I would imagine that there would be much more impressive gains from using Mantle even on very high end CPUs. However, it would be commercial suicide for a developer to do this when most customers cannot benefit or even run the game acceptably if this were the case, so I understand why they do not at the moment.

I find it frustrating that reviewers use very high end overclocked CPUs to test games that are built around the aforementioned limitations, thereby nullifying most of the gains that Mantle would have in these games where there aren't many draw calls anyway.

I feel AMD haven't been vociferous enough about the potential gains that could be achieved with Mantle and that it's not just about increasing performance for lower-end CPUs.
 
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Gregster said:
IIRC, EQAA is in Dirt Showdown and when the bench thread started, you and a few others ran with it and posted results and when you switched to MSAA, you had lower frames. Stuck at work or I would check but seems that if I am correct, AMD should be spanking nVidia.

Nice to see you doing your job well though and give me a shout if you still need me to do your graphs for ya :p
Click to expand...

lol brits have a way of being "nice".
 
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