LockOn Experiment: Maximum Image Quality (7900GTX)

Hey,

Just a little experiment of mine,

The question is simple, what's the best possible image quality in LockOn, with some of the best hardware available today, and a few cool shots in the process.

Image quality shots: http://users.adelphia.net/~neolink1/LockOn/LockOn.htm

NOTE: this is NOT the default install, I'm using the HQ skins (awesome job to whoever made these) and a couple of other visual improvement tweaks to make it as sweet looking as possible.

-Also, some quality is lost due to jpg compression, but I did not want to post 3Mb+ "png" screenshots and the loss is minimal with low compression.

Enjoy, :icon_supe

-Neodark

I spose the best image quality would come from using quad sli and getting 32x AA

Surely 32x AA would over-compensate any aliasing resulting in blurred edges?

YEA! Shots without AA have a very bad image quality!

Surely 32x AA would over-compensate any aliasing resulting in blurred edges?

Well, i use 16xAA and i dont see any blurring...

this is with 16xAA and no mods except for the skin... Taken awhile ago using my 78s...

Any ATI card will pwn the quality of what I get, for the simple fact that ati cards have better implementation of AA, nvidias sux....

I would diasagree with that... ATI drivers are a pain to tweak with (and they do require tweaking... Although Omega drivers are/were generally very good!).

I had ATI ages ago on my old laptop, and was happy with it... But now with My ASUS 6800GT/TD, I get nice framerates and Image quality.

I don't belive about such a huge difference in AA eyecandy, although if you can give me examples that show it, I would gladly take this statement back...

P.S. R we talking cross-grid antialasing or a simple one?

P2.S2. No offence intended, but out of curiosity, why did U get nVidia card if it sucks?! :D

P3.S3. Very nice pics!

I never said/meant nvidia cards suck ( the sentence above, if read properly says : ati cards have better implementation of AA, nvidias suck, that to me means nvidias aa implementation sucks), I said there AA sucks, ATI do it slightly differently and thus supposed to have a better overall sharpness...

Even ATI cards in general have a better IQ than nvidias...

Many many ATI owners who have purchased top of the line nvidia cards have complained that the sharpness of the overall picture is worse with nvidia than it is with ATI, also the same with the AA, ati implement there AA differently thus it isnt the same pattern/s as nvidia uses and nvidias is slightly worse....

I also didnt mean comparing a 6800gt to an old ati card that you had ages ago, I mean compare 6800 to x800/850 and the nvidia 78s to the 1900, and you will see that ATI wins the majority of the time for sharper image and better implementation of AA.

Also, HDR which is kinda new for games.

ATI can do HDR and AA, whereas nvidia can do HDR or AA, it cant do both unless under special circumstances, but the majority of the time with nvidia cards, hdr and AA dont go together, 95% of the time both will not work together on nvidia cards but with ati the 1900 anyway can easily have AA turned on with hdr in games....

Basically, ATI has the better AA implementation....

What I think it all boils down to is, the drivers are made for speed rather than uber leet picture quality, thus we suffer, tweaked drivers are sometimes the best drivers to get as they are made for the best possible picture quality setting instead of nvidias own drivers which are basically tweaked for speed but with decent enough picture quality...

I for one would rather have the best picture quality available, and if it interfered with fps in games, then I could turn off or down some of the eye candy options....

Me being an nvidia majority card holder :p after seeing screenshots of lomac with x800s and comparing to my 78s/79 even I think ATI have the sharper picture quality, there is even a thread where me and some ati owners speak about the very same thing, this was way back when i just got my 78s. Due to that screenshots and basically lots of people saying same thing all over the net, I am inclined to believe it to such an extent that I am seriously thinking about going ati whether it be for a cheapo 1900 or wait til the dx10 cards come out. I think I will wait til dx10 cards come out, as I have too many video cards at the moment and havent got enough puters to put them into :(

I did try to offer some people on these boards good deals on video cards which have never or barely been used and everyone of em have either lifetime warrantys or have 3 year warrantys with the manufacturer, but nobody took meh up on them. One dude did, but he tries to give me weird deals and his agreed price keeps chaging hourly, he be told to, well you know what i told him.....

So, I will never try to sell hardware on teh net again......

Evil,

How do you play with that green line across the middle? Thats terrible!!

Thats only to display SLI rendering, and can be turned off ;)

Evil,

As far as anti-aliasing, there is really no difference in image quality. (specially doing 8xS) Both ATI's and NVIDIA's are great. Many articles have been done on this, google it.

When compared to ATI's current flagship though, there is a little more to talk about. When the Radeon X1900XTX launched, we pointed out a problem with regard to its anti-aliasing quality as it related to micro-detail in the scene. Specifically, micro-detail in the fine lines, like in the trees in the shots above, would just disappear. We suspected this was a problem with the initial driver release though, and we were right. With the latest Catalyst drivers, micro-detail is just fine with the Radeon X1900XTX. With each successive level of anti-aliasing up to 4XAA enabled, it is extremely difficult to pick out differences between the competing architectures. Differenced between 8xS AA and 6XAA, the highest levels offered by NVIDIA and ATI respectively with a single card, are much more pronounced though. 8xS AA is a combination of 2x super-sampling and 4x multi-sampling which removes jaggies from within transparent textures and along polygon edges, at the cost of more performance, whereas ATI's 6XAA is strictly multi-sampled.

Article: http://www.hothardware.com/viewarticle.aspx?page=4&articleid=791&cid=2

If you want to upgrade to SLI just for LockOn, think again.. SLI in LockOn is ONLY good for (SLI-AA) nothing else.

Now, Anisotropic Filtering is a different matter. Normally both are pretty close (when set to HQ in the cp) However, if you enble non angle independant AF, ATI's is better, since NVIDIA doesnt do angled surfaces as well.

Again, there is no perceptible difference between the images produced on the GeForce 7900 GTX and GeForce 7800 GTX because of the similarities in the architecture, but there are some subtle differences between NVIDIA's and ATI's output. The differences are visible at the furthest point in the road at about in the middle of the slope in the hill. Saying which one is "better" is a difficult, but we'd give an edge to ATI here. We should also note that ATI offers a High-Quality aniso mode that is not angular dependant, which offers even better quality than the images shown here.

Article: http://www.hothardware.com/viewarticle.aspx

As for implementation,

I agree ATI's drivers and CCC suck. The latest and greatest from them (X1900XTX) is noisier, hotter, more power hungry etc (and crossf-dire is not even close to SLI) simple choise for me really..

In the end, I think the conclusion is easy. Lock on is a nice looking game, even today (as long as you stay off the ground) hehe.

-Mods: The only mods I have are "blue AF" and 2046 skins. Please let me know if you know of any other that make the game look better.

PS: here, evil.. Free image resizing http://download.microsoft.com/download/whistler/Install/2/WXP/EN-US/ImageResizerPowertoySetup.exe ;) :p

Please take screenshots in minimum 16x12 with a GPU like that.

Anyway nice shots!

:icon_supe

they where taken @ 1600x1200, then cropped the status bar off. (what my LCD does native) need a new 2407..

didnt remember the command at the time :D

glad you like the shots. :D

I never said/meant nvidia cards suck ( the sentence above, if read properly says : ati cards have better implementation of AA, nvidias suck, that to me means nvidias aa implementation sucks

You have to remember many people here speak English as a second language, so your language quirks (and you have many! :-) can be confusing, as they're not taught in any classroom.

If you say "Nvidias suck", that reads as "Nvidia cards in general suck". If, in that sentence, you'd said "Nvidia's sucks" then that would, indeed, have implied Nvidia's anti-aliasing sucks.

Sorry if this sounds like I'm having a go at you, it's just that in international forums you have to be careful. We take our language for granted and tend to abuse it. Many folk had to work hard to get to the same standard, and we owe it to them to at least try and type properly. Otherwise it's easy to generate misunderstandings and even friction.

I know how hard I find it to read Check-Six's forums. I can read classroom French fairly well. But French as it's typed on forums is like listening to people chatting in a bar... a totally different ballgame!

Andrew McP

LoL, Sorry ES, that was misenterpreted... Although I really don't have an excuse, I've been in UK for 7 years now, lol....

P.S. check your PM:D

AF set at X4 1600x1200

You have to remember many people here speak English as a second language, so your language quirks (and you have many! :-) can be confusing, as they're not taught in any classroom.

 

If you say "Nvidias suck", that reads as "Nvidia cards in general suck". If, in that sentence, you'd said "Nvidia's sucks" then that would, indeed, have implied Nvidia's anti-aliasing sucks.

 

Sorry if this sounds like I'm having a go at you, it's just that in international forums you have to be careful. We take our language for granted and tend to abuse it. Many folk had to work hard to get to the same standard, and we owe it to them to at least try and type properly. Otherwise it's easy to generate misunderstandings and even friction.

 

I know how hard I find it to read Check-Six's forums. I can read classroom French fairly well. But French as it's typed on forums is like listening to people chatting in a bar... a totally different ballgame!

 

Andrew McP

na dude, I dont takeitasyouhavingagoatmebutSINCEthisistehengerlishpartoftehforUMpplshouldatleastundertsandengerlish ;)

Ok, now check thomas's pic, his 4x is nearly as good as my 16x, I dont know how meany tweaks and mods thomas has, but knowing thomas its bound to be a few ;)

Anyway, see what I mean, ok his is zoomed in further, which smooths out AA, viewing slightly further back from his zoomed in view will show you more aliasing, also I have mine at an angle which will show off more aliasing.

But, saying that, ATI have still got the edge over nvidia cards for IQ and AA...

I dont like saying it, but it cannot be denied many and i mean many people jumping from highend ati's to similar or better nvidias have complained about the very same thing.

I have seen the difference first hand, heck, even ati 96 and 98 owners complained that the 6800 cards had worse iq and aa compared with a lower end card....

As I say, I dont like saying especially as I have many nvidias, but there isnt getting away from the fact, and nvidia owners who have just spent hundreds on a top of the line card will most probably not agree...

Although I have many cards, I am a fanboi of neither company, i buy what i want to buy and what I think will give me decent iq and aa and high fps, it just so happens that either nvidia have had the cards out of the door first or there cards were better than ati at the time that i purchased my stuff...

I think with 100% conviction that ATI cards have the superior picture quality with AA turned on, end of.

Now watch the fight begin...

no they havent, yes they have yada yada yada blah blah blah....

P.S.

I down sized my pic to i believe 1280x1024, as i dont believe everyone has huge monitors and can be ass'd scrolling to see a pic....

Also, I forgot to add, nvidias 8sxAA is uber shiat compared to ati's true 8x.

nvidias's 8sx is 4xmultisampling and 2xsupersampling = 8SxAA, it isnt just either ms or ss for the full 8x, so basically nvidias 8sxAA which without sli is the highest you can go is crap compared to ati's 8x...

4+2 =8 ?

I agree, but.. read my post, and the article..

Not AA (anti-aliasing) they are equal, but they do for AF (anisotropic). I personally like ndidia's AA better because it combines both supersample AA and multisample AA.

I think the main reasoning still stands, if you want dual cards and best possible performance go NVIDIA, if you want best AA (and less framerate hit) go ATI. Good thing is that both have transparent AA as well.

there's also what I listed about power, temp, noise, etc..

PS: my previous card was a 6800GT, but before that a 9800pro (I'm no fanboy of either, I go where "performance/features that interest" me are)

To be honest, the price that we are being charged, these cards should magically transform games into reallife like a hologram n shit...

I would like it if we could actually pick a lot of the different types of AA that nvidia cards could use in the past but they are now not able to use because a driver says so....

There are many types of AA, but nvidia refuses to use them, or has used them in the past but stopped using them now for some reason ?

Some are actually quite good compared to what we have now, and they can be turned on with some programs, nvidia control panel doesnt allow you any where near to getting to access them....

I just think with the cash we pay, we should at least get the option to turn them on or not....

Evil,

How do you play with that green line across the middle? Thats terrible!!

Thats just me testing when I was making a new sli profile, as if you dont have the line turned on, some types of AA/vsync etc can actually override your sli setting and turn it off, so having the green line on is the only real way to make a profile and test all the options..

If the game starts and the green line isnt there, if the green line is enabled in the first place, then you know that your aa settings are conflicitng and turning sli off..

Once you have made a good profile and saved it, you can turn the line off, and whenever you load lockon, the profile is auto activated...

Its a pain in the ass having to make profiles for everything, but once done, you never have to do it again unless you change drivers and forget to save the previous profiles.

Also check this.

I can use 4xAA with transperancy AA and gamma correct AA in SLI

as soon as I turn that upto 8sxAA ( the next available AA setting on nvidia cards) and with transperancy and gamma AA still on, then sli deactivates and the game runs in single gpu mode...

many many ppl who use sli, probably dont even realise that what they think is them running in sli, is in reality them only running in single gpu mode.

SLI isnt as easy to use as nvidia would have you believe, and I am thankful to nvidia for that green line, as without it, I wouldnt of known in certain games when sli is enabled or not, the bigger the cards, the harder it is to know if sli is on or not...

I must admit, I dont miss the amount of tweaking i had to do with sli, which i dont have to do with the single 79 i use now

Is it possible to run the 7900gtx in SLI mode, or does the fan and the taking up of the second slot prevent the card from being run in SLI?

the 7900 can be run in sli, it doesnt block up the slot, as the second slot is further away than a normal slot, there is 2 pci-e 1x or 2x or 4x slots inbetween the 16x video card slots...

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pretend the dots are not there, as when i just used the space bar, it would align the lines wrongly, so just imagine the dots are not there.

The first and last slot, the long ones are the video card slots, the 2 small ones in the middle are pci-e 1/2 or 4x slots and will be blocked and cannot be used when there is sli running. So there is ample room for 2 7900gtx's..

the spacing also varies by motherboard. Some boards cram the cars a bit, while others are slightly farther appart.

but yes, it works fine (even with dual slot coolers)