3Digest:
Quality Control
July 2005
|
In this section of 3Digest we control changes in rendering quality in selected applications after drivers updates.
Contents
- What's new
- Graphics cards
- Galleries
News of July
We changed the testbed to a PCI Express based machine. The transition was conducted as follows: GeForce 6800 Ultra AGP (NV40) → GeForce 6800 GT PCIE (NV45); Radeon X800 Pro AGP (R420) → Radeon X850 Pro PCIE (R480). Our tests indicated no quality difference between AGP and PCIE cards.
Since July is the first month of the 3rd quarter, we updated Radeon X850 Pro galleries.
July also brought us ForceWare 77.76, a bugfix release eradicating numerous bugs missed in the 77.72. We decided not to test quality of 77.76, because it's unlikely to differ from quality indicated by 77.72.
In July we also witnessed alpha version of ForceWare 80.40, which introduced the support of hardware MPEG-4 AVC decoding on G7x GPUs as well as awful instability and numerous bugs. That's why we decided to wait for some more stable 80.xx release to test quality with.
Graphics cards
The following graphics cards were used to make the Quality Control section:
Besides, the following cards have been tested before:
Galleries
Galleries are updated a) in case of new patches introducing noticeable changes to rendering quality; and b) accordingly with new drivers releases. In the first case we remake the gallery for all drivers anew.
Considering that ATI releases new, but rather similar drivers every month, we perform quality control for ATI graphics cards on each first month of the quarter (January, April, July and October).
In case of NVIDIA we examine just new official drivers which also happens about once in three months.
Anyway, we reserve the right to examine drivers, official or leaked, out of turn, if we are just interested in it.
- Doom 3 v1.3
- Far Cry v1.31
- Half-Life 2 (the latest version)
|
|
