Image Quality Bug

[josh6079]

http://www.legitreviews.com/article/946/1/

Legit Reviews:
After some further research from the community it and on the test bench it appears that when running Enhanced Full Dynamic Lighting that the camo mesh is present on NVIDIA GeForce GTX 200 series graphics cards, but not on ATI Radeon 4000 series graphics cards. If the setting is changed to Enhanced Full Dynamic Lighting (DX10) on the ATI Radeon HD 4000 series of cards the camo mesh appears after the game is restarted. This is still interesting as it means that benchmarking ATI versus NVIDIA with the 'Enhanced Full Dynamic Lighting' setting doesn't matter much as the cards will be rendering different objects in various parts of the game and this could impact the frame rate as the render path is not identical.

 

[Wreckage]

Sounds like the same issue ATi had in FC2
http://forums.anandtech.com/me...ght_key=y&keyword1=fc2

I believe there was a similar issue in HL2 as well.

Sacrificing Image quality to gain performance.

 

[error8]

"Just to clarify again, both AMD and NVIDIA cards have this issue, but I just spent a full day benchmarking for the Radeon HD 4890 versus GeForce GTX 275 article and saw this issue once again." What the hell is this conclusion? It's only on ATi or it's on Nvidia too?

 

[apoppin]

only on ATI 4800 series

and only on the DX9 pathway; NP in DX10

a bug

 

[BFG10K]

From the article:

Just to clarify again, both AMD and NVIDIA cards have this issue, but I just spent a full day benchmarking for the Radeon HD 4890 versus GeForce GTX 275 article and saw this issue once again.

So now he?s saying both vendors have the issue?

Originally posted by: Wreckage

I believe there was a similar issue in HL2 as well.

What issue might that be? Please show us.

 

[toyota]

I had missing fences in Clear Sky for the whole time I owned an ATI card. I guess they fixed that by now.

 

[error8]

I also had the fences bug, the artifacting rain bug, the every once in a while severe slowdown bug and the list is very long. The game lacked V-sync too and that was a big issues, since screen tearing was very bad. I reached one point where I couldn't stand it anymore and deleted the nightmare from my computer. It's clear that this game was released without some serious testing first, but ATi drivers for it, were probably no better . Frankly the missing meshes is one of the "soft" bugs. The reviewer should have concentrated in exposing the really important ones, not just one missing texture at some particular settings.
The bottom line is that this is clearly a bug and not a "sacrificing image quality to gain performance" as Wreckage is implying.:frown:

 

[palladium]

Originally posted by: apoppin
only on ATI 4800 series

and only on the DX9 pathway; NP in DX10

a bug

Hmm, why would anyone on a 4800 series card run DX9 instead of DX10? Essentially, the bug shouldn't affect alot of users....

 

[AstroManLuca]

Originally posted by: palladium

Originally posted by: apoppin
only on ATI 4800 series

and only on the DX9 pathway; NP in DX10

a bug

Hmm, why would anyone on a 4800 series card run DX9 instead of DX10? Essentially, the bug shouldn't affect alot of users....

I did for a little while but then I learned that I could get a similar increase in performance by turning down sun rays and AA (it's not even real AA anyway, apparently) and AF while using DX10 instead of trying to do DX9 + everything maxed out.

 

[toyota]

Originally posted by: palladium

Originally posted by: apoppin
only on ATI 4800 series

and only on the DX9 pathway; NP in DX10

a bug

Hmm, why would anyone on a 4800 series card run DX9 instead of DX10? Essentially, the bug shouldn't affect alot of users....

because maybe they want more than 25 fps. at 1920 and enhanced DX10 and high settings will make any single card slow and max settings are almost a slideshow outside. Crysis DX10 very high settings is no where near as demanding as enhanced DX10 max settings in Clear Sky.

 

[nenforcer]

Hmm, why would anyone on a 4800 series card run DX9 instead of DX10? Essentially, the bug shouldn't affect alot of users....

There is probably still a fairly large percentage of people running DirectX 10 class hardware on Windows XP.

I don't know what the percentages are but I'd like to know this stat.

 

[josh6079]

Originally posted by: BFG10K

So now he?s saying both vendors have the issue?

I believe the author mistyped. It appears in the article's forum link that he's only acknowledging the issue occurring on 4800s:

Apoptosis: Link

okay.... I've gotten a ton of e-mails about this and one of our readers helped figure out what is going on... This is interesting...

On NVIDIA GeForce cards with these settings you get the mesh, but not on ATI...

In order to get the camo mesh on ATI cards you have to set the image quality down one more to Enhanced Full Dynamic Lighting (DirectX 10)...

Once you have it set to Enhanced Full Dynamic Lighting (DX10) the camo mesh appears on all of the ATI Radeon HD 4000 series cards again.

This site also echoed the same findings:

BSN: Link

The problem lies in the rendering paths - if you select Enhanced Full Dynamic Lighting, the render path is in DX9 mode and ATI 4000 series won't render camo on a specific wireframe, as witnessed in screenshots below. But, if you turn Enhanced Fully Dynamic Lighting (DX10), you won't experience any issues.

While there is something certainly wrong with ATI's to use of different code paths, we can say that ATI focused on DirectX 10(.1) too much, and neglected DX9 users, e.g. players that use ATI's DX10/10.1 hardware in conjunction with the Windows XP operating system. If you use Windows Vista or Windows 7 beta, you should select DX10 codepath and be able to enjoy all the bells and whistles.

Our advice to all of our readers is always the same: when you buy the latest hardware, especially of the high-end flavor - crank everything up to the maximum. We see no reason why would you play S.T.A.L.K.E.R. using DirectX9 render path when playing on DirectX10, or DirectX 10.1, which ATI oh-so touts wherever it can.

Originally posted by: Wreckage

Sacrificing Image quality to gain performance.

Issues like these are pretty rare and occur on green and red hardware alike. (e.g., NVidia and the Crysis demo)

I wouldn't claim them to be sinister; with recent games I'd need more than one occurrence before I label things as a trend.

Of course, I suppose that could be the case. Let's just hope ATi fixes it now that it's received some public attention.

 

[lavaheadache]

Originally posted by: Wreckage
Sounds like the same issue ATi had in FC2
http://forums.anandtech.com/me...ght_key=y&keyword1=fc2

I believe there was a similar issue in HL2 as well.

Sacrificing Image quality to gain performance.

:roll::disgust::roll:

amazing how you forget about the Nvidia FarCry texture crawling fiasco

 

[error8]

Originally posted by: lavaheadache

Originally posted by: Wreckage
Sounds like the same issue ATi had in FC2
http://forums.anandtech.com/me...ght_key=y&keyword1=fc2

I believe there was a similar issue in HL2 as well.

Sacrificing Image quality to gain performance.

:roll::disgust::roll:

amazing how you forget about the Nvidia FarCry texture crawling fiasco

Do you think that Wreckage will ever say anything bad about his beloved company? Be serious. In his dreams, only ATI has issues.

 

[josh6079]

Originally posted by: error8

Do you think that Wreckage will ever say anything bad about his beloved company? Be serious. In his dreams, only ATI has issues.

Wreckage's dreams and bias, while irritating to some, have nothing to do with the topic.

I know you're not a fan of the guy, but please keep the provoking out of my thread.

 

[error8]

Originally posted by: josh6079

Originally posted by: error8

Do you think that Wreckage will ever say anything bad about his beloved company? Be serious. In his dreams, only ATI has issues.

Wreckage's dreams and bias, while irritating to some, have nothing to do with the topic.

I know you're not a fan of the guy, but please keep the provoking out of my thread.

Ok, sorry about that. But it would have been nice for Wreckage to link us to that particular bug in HL2 that he spoke of, since I and a couple of others, have no idea what is he talking about.

 

[josh6079]

Yeah, I'm unfamiliar with the HL2 incident he's referring to as well.

 

[BFG10K]

He's probably talking about the fog issue which affected not only ATi and nVidia DX10 parts, but the reference rasterizer as well (i.e. it was HL2 at fault).

 

[schneiderguy]

The missing camoflague netting has been missing since Clear Sky released for ATI cards. I don't think it will ever be fixed since Clear Sky isn't really used as a benchmark much anymore & ATI probably has better things to do with their driver team time.

 

[alcoholbob]

Compared to Clear Sky, Crysis is a monumental accomplishment in graphical engine efficiency.