Bouncing Zabaglione Brothers
If its so good, why has it remained hidden from the public and not marketed as "ATI SmartFilter" or somesuch? Surely if its as good as you say (better quality, faster speed), ATI marketing should be crowing about it? One of the issue here is that it *looks* like ATI is trying to hide things, even if what you have is a genuine improvement for the customer.
Andy/Raja
The engineering team at ATI is constantly improving our drivers by finding ways to take better advantage of the hardware. These improvements happen during all the catalyst releases. We might have missed an opportunity to attach a marketing buzzword to this optimization!
Hanners79
Can you give a more detailed explanation as to why the use of coloured mipmaps shows the use of full trilinear, which doesnt correspond to what seems to occur in a normal, real-world situation?
Andy/Raja
Coloured mipmaps naturally show full trilinear as our image quality analysis reveals that there could be visible differences in the image. It should be noted that trilinear was originally invented to smooth transitions between mip-levels, and in the original definition mip-levels should be filtered versions of each other, as coloured mip-levels clearly are not. Despite this, we understand that people often make use of hardware for purposes beyond that originally envisioned, so we try to make sure that everything always functions exactly as expected.
Cthellis
From previous comments, there have been mention of this technique used for a while (~12 months?) in the RV300 series of chips, but most as with R420. can you tell us which cards, which Catalyst versions, and/or which games exist where we can see similar tendencies.
Andy/Raja
We had new filtering algorithms in places since Cat 3.4 or so. Note that the image quality improved over various driver updates since. Also, as noted earlier, X800 provides better controls than earlier parts. It will be hard to find an exact match with our earlier hardware and drivers
Mabru
Dont you think such a tradeoff is inconceivable in a 500$ graphic card?
Andy/Raja
We think that what we do is expected of all our cards, in particular the more expensive ones. Our users want the best looking results and the highest quality results. They want us to go and scratch our heads and come up with new ways to improve things. Users of ATI cards from last year want us to come out with new drivers that improve their performance and maintain the image quality. We have dedicated engineering teams that work hard to improve things. It's an ongoing effort, exploring new algorithms, finding new ways to improve the end user experience, which is what all this is about. And we are listening too; if you don't like what we offer, let us know and we will strive to improve things.
anonymouscoward
Image quality is a relative term. The real question is, "does the claimed 'trilinear filtering' produce a byte-for-byte replica of 'true trilinear filtering'?" Whether or not the image quality is "the same" or "essentially" the same is irrelevant to this questions
Andy/Raja
Byte for byte compared to what? "True trilinear" is an approximation of what would be the correct filtering, a blending between two versions, one which is too blurry and one too sharp. An improved filter is not byte for byte identical to anything other than itself, but that doesn't mean it isn't a better approximation.
wild_neo
Do you think that you still can compare the benchmarks with other brands, even if you use that different approach (non-equivalent technique)?
Andy/Raja
We've answered this, and yes, we feel we can compare ourselves to any brand, as we believe our quality and performance are higher. Perhaps at times we should be upset about people comparing us to lower quality implementations
Toaster
Whats the patent number and filing date of this algo?
Andy/Raja
This is in the patent pending process right now. So we will not put out the actual patent information at this time. Once approved, anyone can go read the patent.
Chris
What performance boost does this give you, anyway?
Andy/Raja
It's a very mild optimization at the default levels, so of the order of a few percent. But this is a neat algorithm - we encourage you to take the texture slider all the way towards "performance" - we don't think you'll be able to see any image change until the very end, and the performance increases are significant.
Moderator
Thanks for your time. We appreciate your persistence through the technical difficulties.
----------------
全盤否認....
