A somewhat heated topic amongst graphics card manufacturers is how to get as much performance out of a graphics card with as little as possible image quality loss. In the past both ATI and NVIDIA have been found guilt on cheating in applications to gain better performance. Both companies promised from there on to stay away from cheats.

Topic of discussion for many weeks now is that AMD has been applying a series of optimizations that could easily be seen and explained as a cheat.

Currently with the Radeon HD 6000 series release the Catalyst drivers (Catalyst AI) have a new setting which allows control over control texture filtering with settings for ‘High Quality’, ‘Quality’ and ‘Performance’.

High Quality turns off all optimizations and lets the software run exactly as it was originally intended to. Quality, which is now the default setting – applies some optimizations that AMD believes remains objective and keeps the integrity of the image quality at high levels while gaining some performance. The last setting is the Performance setting which applies supplementary optimizations to gain even more performance.

• READ MORE (Source): Exploring ATI Image Quality Optimizations