April 11th, 2012
AMD’s HD 7000 Series Trade Image Quality For Performance
Tom’s Hardware reports that AMD’s HD 7000 cards may present worse image quality than their predecessors to increase overall performance.
Tom’s Hardware posted very interesting article. They noticed some blurry textures while performing tests with HD 7800s cards. So they continued with their investigation to find evidence. As they say, previous HD 6000 generation cards present more crisper image quality in comparison to HD 7000.
They focused on various aspects, including driver related problems, impact on performance and more.
Test were performed with four cards, including 3 AMD’s and one NVIDIA’s – HD 6870, HD 7870, HD 7970 and GTX 580.
Game Comparison
The only game they didn’t find any difference was Crysis 2.
Driver related comparison
It seems that it doesn’t matter which driver you use.
Performance comparison
As you can see image quality settings can have a huge impact on some games. Those conclusions were sent to AMD. This is what they got from them:
“For our Southern Island product family launch we picked a set of settings that we tested in several scenarios for image quality and found that those specific settings were providing the best overall quality. When you pointed out these issues in some games around texture quality, we went back and found one specific setting that was causing the described texture blurriness. This has now been removed and the quality of textures should be as intended, with performance unchanged. These settings will be adjusted accordingly in the 12.4 April Catalyst release, later this month.”
TH continued with their investigation and they tested new drivers, it appears that it was an error in drivers and the new ones released by AMD fix this problem. They did not notice any difference between HD 6970 and HD 7870 anisotropic filtering after applying new beta driver. So if any of you still consider installing it, then we highly encourage you to to do so.
- READ MORE (Source): Do AMD’s Radeon HD 7000s Trade Image Quality For Performance? : Radeon HD 7000 Texture Problems: Uh Oh!
