Different Brand Video Cards Change What You See in Games

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Apoptosis
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Different Brand Video Cards Change What You See in Games

Post by Apoptosis »

Different Brand Video Cards Change What You See in Games

One video card bug that has bothered me for months can be found in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Clear Sky and it can only be found on AMD Radeon HD graphics cards. Have you ever wondered if you are actually seeing all the details in games tht you purchase? Read on to see what we are talking about!

NVIDIA:
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ATI:
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Article Title: Different Brand Video Cards Change What You See in Games
Article URL: http://legitreviews.com/article/946/1/
DIGG - http://digg.com/pc_games/Different_Bran ... n_PC_Games
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Re: Different Brand Video Cards Change What You See in Games

Post by FZ1 »

I like the article Nate
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Re: Different Brand Video Cards Change What You See in Games

Post by martini161 »

i wonder if there is anycard that wont render the spies cloak in tf2 :lol:
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Re: Different Brand Video Cards Change What You See in Games

Post by hangemhi »

I see it when I play.... using 9.3 no ccc. ati 4870 512mb.
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Re: Different Brand Video Cards Change What You See in Games

Post by Apoptosis »

hangemhi wrote:I see it when I play.... using 9.3 no ccc. ati 4870 512mb.
Interesting....

My settings are:

Image

I'm using Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit and DirectX 10.1 with the latest patch... Are you running Vista with the DirectX 10.1 patch installed?
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Re: Different Brand Video Cards Change What You See in Games

Post by pwcmed »

Does that net move. Maybe PhysX is the key.
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Re: Different Brand Video Cards Change What You See in Games

Post by Skippman »

I'm thining this might be my last ATI based build. Between the flicker issue on my PowerColors that was only resolved by downclocking the memory and this article... I dunno. I've only ever played one game that proudly announced that it was optimized for an ATi Card and that was HL2. Everything else bombards me with nVidia marking. Maybe there's more to this than just STALKER.
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Re: Different Brand Video Cards Change What You See in Games

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pwcmed wrote:Does that net move. Maybe PhysX is the key.
Nope... This game doesn't have PhysX in it and just for fun I checked the NVIDIA site and nothing on it for either of the STALKER games - http://developer.nvidia.com/object/phys ... mpany.html
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Re: Different Brand Video Cards Change What You See in Games

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Skippman wrote:I'm thining this might be my last ATI based build. Between the flicker issue on my PowerColors that was only resolved by downclocking the memory and this article... I dunno. I've only ever played one game that proudly announced that it was optimized for an ATi Card and that was HL2. Everything else bombards me with nVidia marking. Maybe there's more to this than just STALKER.
NVIDIA has a number of render issues also, so don't think this is just an ATI problem... I'm just picking this as an example as I benchmarked a number of cards yesterday and saw this issue and the fact that AMD released a press release talking about the great graphics they have in this game.... ATI/AMD makes solid cards... The point I was trying to make is two fold...

1) If someone catches a bug in a game it should be addressed or explained (I first saw this bug 3-4 months ago and reported it)
2) Game reviews and benchmarking doesn't take thigns like this into consideration, but I think it should be a factor
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Re: Different Brand Video Cards Change What You See in Games

Post by Cryoburner »

This might actually be a 'feature' you're experiencing. Both ATI and nVidia apply different tweaks to how specific games are rendered, to help improve performance with their cards. Usually this is mostly unnoticeable, but it's possible that they chose to skip rendering the netting to provide a performance boost in benchmarks.

Have you checked if Catalyst AI is activated in your video card's settings? Turn it to low or off and see if that affects anything. You also might try renaming the game's executable file, to see if that prevents the driver from applying game-specific tweaks. That might, of course, reduce performance a bit, but it should let you see whether that is the source of the problem.
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Re: Different Brand Video Cards Change What You See in Games

Post by Apoptosis »

okay.... I've gotten a ton of e-mails about this and one of our readers helped figure out what is going on... This is interesting...

On NVIDIA GeForce cards with these settings you get the mesh, but not on ATI:

Image

In order to get the camo mesh on ATI cards you have to set the image quality down one more to Enhanced Full Dynamic Lighting (DirectX 10)
stalker_ati_dx10.jpg
stalker_ati_dx10.jpg (73.48 KiB) Viewed 7154 times
Once you have it set to Enhanced Full Dynamic Lighting (DX10) the camo mesh appears on all of the ATI Radeon HD 4000 series cards again. This is interesting as it means that benchmarking ATI versus NVIDIA with the 'Enhanced Full Dynamic Lighting' setting means that the cards will be rendering different objects in various parts of the game.

Mystery solved, but why?
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Re: Different Brand Video Cards Change What You See in Games

Post by DMB2000uk »

Isn't the DX10 version the better rendering method of the two anyway?

But yeah, strange discrepancies.

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Re: Different Brand Video Cards Change What You See in Games

Post by Apoptosis »

Seems another site has backed our story up:
I've ran a story about the issue you discovered during testing of Radeon HD4890:

http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/20 ... nd-no.aspx

Just to let you know, you're not alone out there ;)

BTW, yes, this is my new site, we're getting it up to speed, plan to add news alert next week.

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Editor-in-Chief, Bright Side of News
Long time industry veteran Theo agrees that running different DirectX rendering paths for different branded cards isn't right.
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Re: Different Brand Video Cards Change What You See in Games

Post by gwolfman »

Very interesting find. I have both an AMD/ATi-based gaming computer and an nVidia-based gaming computer but usually don't play the same game on both computers so I haven't found anything like this. I like how you're attacking this as benchmark and also more importantly fully immersed gaming experience issues. Nice touch.
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Re: Different Brand Video Cards Change What You See in Games

Post by cantdance »

Hello, nice article. Reminded me of an issue I noticed with Crysis- Demo
I don't have Stalker CS, but I did notice a difference when running the Crysis benchmark.
Using my now dead Nvidia 8800GT and now my Ati 4870, when running the GPU benchmark. As the Camera flies around the building atop the hill, and the red flashing beacon comes into view. There is a mountain in the background.
On the 8800GT, as the camera flies nearer to it, you can see the textures change, as if it has low AF. On the 4870 the mountain looks the same as the 8800 close to it (ie: better AF) even when the mountain is far away. Looks like Nvidia has some strange AF going on.
I cannot show a screen shot of the 8800GT , but would be willing to take screens with the 4870, if people would like to compare.

Always wondered what was going on as the settings in the game were the same for both cards. Just the Nvidia card seems to load the higher texture as you get nearer, but ATi loads it straight away, not updating it as you get nearer.
It was a very big difference seeing such a low texture and then watching it change to high res. So not really AF, not sure what to call it.

Will take a screen and post it so you can see which part I am talking about.
Can grab the Crysis demo if needed by some to test. http://www.gamershell.com/download_21700.shtml


Here you go. Someone with an Nviida card do the same, see if it's the same for all model.

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Re: Different Brand Video Cards Change What You See in Games

Post by InspectahACE »

I may not know the whole shindig on video cards here, but IMO , I wouldn't be surprised if the 4870 showed more than the 8800GT since it's rather newer and better. I know that's what you have but I'd be more inclined to see what similar cards high and low end from both companies do. (ie. gtx285 to a 4870) ..Like said, I don't know alot and I didn't read too much into the article. I remember a few years ago seeing some difference between the 2 brands in their cards so I was more like "damn..it still happens?" and I stopped readin lol
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Re: Different Brand Video Cards Change What You See in Games

Post by Cliffro »

I took a few on my GTX 260 both with and without AF

With AF @ 16x
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Without AF
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Re: Different Brand Video Cards Change What You See in Games

Post by ratNukit »

While playing stalker clear sky on my current rig, it's not only the mesh at the start thats missing, but a lot of fences everywhere in the game. I can only see the posts of the fence and if I try to walk there I'm stopped by an invisible wall, so I figured there's something missing. haven't looked at it in DX10 yet, but will later today.
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Re: Different Brand Video Cards Change What You See in Games

Post by ratNukit »

So I've tested all of the settings and I only get the mesh and the missing fences on "Statische Beleuchtung"/ static Lighting, which is the lowest setting and "Erweiterte Dynamische Beleuchtung der Objekte" / Enhanced dynamic lighting of objects, which is the highest setting I can choose, if the drop down list is ordered that way. I don't exactly know what settings these are in the english version.
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