Image Quality Comparison: Radeon Gallium3D vs. Catalyst

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Image Quality Comparison: Radeon Gallium3D vs. Catalyst

Coming up in the next few days will be benchmarks of Mesa 8.0 with Morphological Anti-Aliasing (a.k.a. MLAA) plus some other imaging-oriented work/announcements to come in the near future. With that said, this weekend prior to leaving for Munich I ran some tests of the Radeon Gallium3D and Catalyst drivers when comparing the image quality...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTA1NzI

[Drago]

I like the FOSS enemy more.

[jakubo]

on the purple bot (the second image) there is a redish cloud around the belly and the feet on the radeon driver, which doesnt appear on the catalyst. what is that? a bug, a feature?
and why is the crack on the floor on the first picture different when using the r300g driver?

a propos image quality
is there any news about S3TC and its alternative S2TC? would it be useful to have a performance comparison between them? IIRC S2TC was faster, but of lower quality.
-S3TC
-S2TC
-no compression
how about the legal side? maybe a short statement on ACTA?

will there be a quality difference with finished HiZ support?

[AlbertP]

I'm afraid there's also some apparent differences caused by using JPG images - the images in the article are all JPG.

[[Knuckles]]

I'm afraid there's also some apparent differences caused by using JPG images - the images in the article are all JPG.

Indeed -- normally you are only showing some glaring visual issues, and jpg is enough, but please consider using png when you are comparing different renders.

[acrazyplayer]

Its hard to say which one looks better because they both have good and bad aspects to my eyes at least

[DanL]

are you kidding? the catalyst only do have wrong colors on the "warrior" picture.

How do you know which one is "correct"? I use the open-source driver, but the Catalyst one looks better to me.. (not that you would ever admit that).

[LinuxID10T]

I personally tend to agree with Q on this one. Catalyst tends to be faster because it uses shortcuts, lots of shortcuts. It used to be even worse. I mean, back in the day, you could see glaring graphical differences between say ATI and Nvidia cards.

[GreatEmerald]

Hmm, to me it seems that fglrx doesn't render reflected bloom. It makes things sharper, but that's probably not what was supposed to happen...

As for using software renderer as a reference... If my experience has taught me something, is that software renderers take a lot more shortcuts than accelerated ones, in order to overcome the fact that they are a lot slower. The software renderer of Unreal couldn't do basic things like transparency and pixel smoothing...

[pingufunkybeat]

I think they are talking about using the same OpenGL renderer, but running through a software OpenGL implementation in the driver (swrast or softpipe).