Anandtech have thown up their Image Quality Analysis Fall 2003: A Glance Through the Looking Glass Guide! which looks at image quality between nVidia's GeForce FX 5950 and ATI's Radeon 9800 XT! Here's a snip.
The question of image quality is much more complicated than determining which video card renders a scene the fastest. Years ago, we could say that the image that came out of two different computer systems should be exactly the same because developers controlled every aspect of how their program ran with software, rather than leaving some decisions to the hardware on which the program was running. With the advent of hardware acceleration, developers could get impressive speed gains from their software. As a side effect, the implementation of very basic functionality was defined completely by the designers of the hardware (e.g. ATI and NVIDIA).
For example, a developer no longer needs to worry about the mathematics and computer science behind mapping a perspective correct texture onto a surface; now, all one needs to do is to turn on the hardware texturing features that they want and assign textures to surfaces. In addition to saving the developer from having to code these kinds of algorithms, this took away some control and made it so different hardware could produce different output (there is more than one correct way to implement every feature).
Image Quality Analysis Fall 2003
The question of image quality is much more complicated than determining which video card renders a scene the fastest. Years ago, we could say that the image that came out of two different computer systems should be exactly the same because developers controlled every aspect of how their program ran with software, rather than leaving some decisions to the hardware on which the program was running. With the advent of hardware acceleration, developers could get impressive speed gains from their software. As a side effect, the implementation of very basic functionality was defined completely by the designers of the hardware (e.g. ATI and NVIDIA).
For example, a developer no longer needs to worry about the mathematics and computer science behind mapping a perspective correct texture onto a surface; now, all one needs to do is to turn on the hardware texturing features that they want and assign textures to surfaces. In addition to saving the developer from having to code these kinds of algorithms, this took away some control and made it so different hardware could produce different output (there is more than one correct way to implement every feature).
Image Quality Analysis Fall 2003
