Ever wondered about those settings in the Catalyst Centre? This article sheds light on perhaps on of the most misunderstood.. The Catalyst A.I. setting:
Atomic investigates NVIDIA’s long-ignored accusation: Is ATI using FP16 demotion to artificially inflate benchmark scores?
The graphics processing world is ever-turbulent. Arguments appear cyclical in nature from both ATI and NVIDIA, and bickering over issues
like physics engines isn't uncommon - bringing about phrases like: 'They've been cheating with their so-and-so', or 'We offer the better solution without a drawback like
theirs!' from both sides.
It's all part and parcel of competition. However, when Atomic received the
recent NVIDIA GTS450 card, press release and included reviewer's guide, we noticed that it came with a page that implied certain unfavourable things about their competition, ATI.
We discovered that this page had been included in every reviewer's guide sent to hardware reviewers since the launch of the GF100 'Fermi' family: the GTX480, GTX470, GTX465, and both GTX460 cards. It had been included with the GTS450 and five other cards, but it seems no-one has paid it much attention, dismissing it offhandedly - as we admittedly dismiss most guides that attempt to dictate our testing methodology.
This page, as it appears below, claims many things. Prime among these is an assertion that ATI were utilising a technique in their drivers called 'FP16 Demotion' to boost their graphical performance at the cost of image quality. It names a number of older gaming titles as the only ones affected by this so-called hack, and welcomes reviewers to work it out for themselves. So, that's what we did.
Read on:
http://www.atomicmpc.com.au/Feature/...ys-nvidia.aspx
