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GTX 770 vs. AMD 6970: more similar than not?

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magellan said:
I've always read to buy as much GPU as you can afford to get, because for the past 5 years (10 years?) it seems like the GPU is the far and away the greatest determining factor in gaming benchmarks. I've "upgraded" in the past and ended up w/no noticeable difference in performance (when I went from a 9800 XT 256MiB to an x850XT 256MiB for example).
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How many games did you make this comparison with? One? :rofl:

Sorry but the same question applied. :D

A more powerful GPU will give you more performance. You might not have checked it out with enough games. You definitely should buy the best single GPU you can afford. SLI is, in my opinion, only if you're using multi monitors, or, say you buy one GPU now and another in 2 (when they're bargain bin parts) years to extend the lifespan of your system.
 
magellan said:
I've always read to buy as much GPU as you can afford to get, because for the past 5 years (10 years?) it seems like the GPU is the far and away the greatest determining factor in gaming benchmarks. I've "upgraded" in the past and ended up w/no noticeable difference in performance (when I went from a 9800 XT 256MiB to an x850XT 256MiB for example).
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well... Makes sense doesn't it? The thing that actually draws the picture on the screen making the most difference in gaming benchmarks... :cool:

Being serious, its been nearly 10 years but I recall the x850xt handily beating the 9800. There could be a slew of reasons why you didn't 'see' a difference, from the person behind the keyboard being oblivious to your pc holding it back, to me being just plain old wrong and maybe they are the same speed. Can you notice the difference between 50 and 60 fps? Likely not and that difference is 20%! What about 20 fps and 23? That is 15%. So yeah.. slew of reasons that arbitrary mention could be true. ;)
 
Bad Company 2, Oblivion, Farcry 2, etc. There were a lot of games I couldn't compare since their in-game AA only went to 4 (this was well before I figured out how to force AA in my Nvidia Control Panel).
 
Just for the record, I had a better experience when applying 8xAA in older games -- especially w/super-sample. Textures became much clearer and details I couldn't notice before became noticeable, sometimes text that was previously unreadable became readable.
Doom3, Quake4, Vice City and JAMP are examples of games where this was true.
 
Janus67 said:
Texture improvement tends to be AF not AA.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anisotropic_filtering
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Absolutely Janus!

AA removes jagged lines by BLURRING the lines (sorry, I was mobile when I posted that above).

Here is the link on how AA works:

FXAA: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Anti_aliasing_comparison.png

Example: https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&rct...2o0HlhkeVpNHz5wuH1_XOO0Q&ust=1383831793369383

These days, the penalty for AF is VERY little so that should always be on 16x. AA of course is a different story.
 
Indeed, AF should most definitely always be kept at x16.

However, just FYI, AA actually causes blurring of textures, thus losing clarity / definition. I usually keep AA at 2x to reduce this effect (especially in games like Skyrim).
 
It depends on the AA used as to what it blurs. Some, like MSAA, only works on the edges (IIRC) while a different algorithm, like FXAA actually blurs a bit more than that.

EDIT: Here is a great post I found that should help "clear up" :rofl: the confusion...:
MSAA is an optimization of FSAA where multiple pixels are sampled together rather than each individual pixel in the case of FSAA. MSAA greatly reduces jagged lines and comes at a much lower performance cost than FSAA.

FXAA is something different as it is a post-processing AA, meaning it applies a smoothing effect after the image is already rendered. Hence this comes at a pretty much zero performance cost as it doesn't require the sampling of any pixels. However the image quality is far below MSAA/FSAA as basically all you're getting is blurring to hide the jaggies.

If your setup is powerful enough then I'd say MSAA is essential and FXAA is not a replacement. You can also have both turned on as they're not in conflict with each other, but some people dislike FXAA especially in shooting games like BF3 because it makes small objects more blurred (not helpful when you're trying to shoot someone from a distance). In BF3 MSAA is called "Antialiasing Deferred" and FXAA is "Antialiasing Post". I'd say turn up MSAA to the maximum level while still maintaining an acceptable framerate then turn on FXAA if you like the effect (FXAA has minimal performance impact).
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I wrote super sampled AA. Don't know the difference, too bad for you.
 
I missed that part... My sincere apologies. :)

After reading up on it (thanks for the links! :p), it seems that there is a HUGE performance hit because it actually, depending on your settings, doubles/triples etc the res you are on then down converts it. Quite interesting, that uncommon AA. Was it used a lot back in the day or something? I do not recall it being used much at all then either...
 
EarthDog said:
I missed that part... My sincere apologies. :)

After reading up on it (thanks for the links! :p), it seems that there is a HUGE performance hit because it actually, depending on your settings, doubles/triples etc the res you are on then down converts it. Quite interesting, that uncommon AA. Was it used a lot back in the day or something? I do not recall it being used much at all then either...
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The only way to eliminate aliasing is supersampling. Basic DSP theory.

Everyone was so sure I was wrong, why should I correct them?
 
Because you are better than that? You want to help the community present facts like we all thought we were doing, but ended up wrong in this case. ;)

The only way to eliminate aliasing is supersampling. Basic DSP theory.
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Please elaborate on this. Doesnt MSAA do the same thing and eliminate aliasing (links above, LOL!)? SSAA as I understand it, Alaises the entire scene/frame, while MSAA only does edges (where this is the most visible aliasing). SSAA really kicks the arse of GPUs and isn't used much at all it seems. WHile there is plenty of MSAA options to go around.

Here is a link I found: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/anti-aliasing-nvidia-geforce-amd-radeon,2868-2.html
 
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EarthDog said:
Because you are better than that? You want to help the community present facts like we all thought we were doing, but ended up wrong in this case. ;)

Please elaborate on this. Doesnt MSAA do the same thing and eliminate aliasing (links above, LOL!)? SSAA as I understand it, Alaises the entire scene/frame, while MSAA only does edges (where this is the most visible aliasing). SSAA really kicks the arse of GPUs and isn't used much at all it seems. WHile there is plenty of MSAA options to go around.

Here is a link I found: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/anti-aliasing-nvidia-geforce-amd-radeon,2868-2.html
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I only know about the theory of supersampling when applied to DSP:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist_frequency

Supersampling -- sampling your data at a rate higher than the highest
frequency of your input, to avoid aliasing.

From an accuracy standpoint it's the best.
 
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