http://www.maximumpc.com (^) | FEB 08 (^) | MAXIMUMPC 33
Which company delivers the best visual
experience: AMD or Nvidia?
W
e rely mostly on objective benchmarks here at
Maximum PC , especially when it comes to evaluat-
ing videocards. It’s just easier to defend a verdict
that’s based on frames per second because—assuming
you’re using a good benchmark and the same parameters—
you’ll get pretty much the exact same number with every run.
Of course, frame rate isn’t everything, especially if your
PC’s primary mission is something other than gaming. If you
use your computer for editing video, watching movies, or
manipulating digital photographs, you’re much more interest-
ed in visual quality. Judging image quality, however, is much
more difficult because it’s necessarily a subjective task.
But we’ve been hearing whispers from sources (who
wish to remain anonymous, although we can tell you they
represent neither AMD nor Nvidia) that ATI GPUs deliver bet-
ter image quality than what Nvidia has to offer. ATI product
managers made a similar claim while rolling out their AVIVO
technology initiative, but neither AMD nor Nvidia have had
much to say on the topic for quite some time.
Never ones to let sleeping dogs lie, we decided it was
time to settle this issue Maximum PC style: We gathered a
bunch of our game-playing, movie-watching, photo-editing
colleagues and challenged them to a blind taste test. Would
the consensus opinion favor AMD or Nvidia, or would anyone
be able to discern any differences at all?
BY MICHAEL BROWN
dariusz
(Dariusz)
#1