AMD's Radeon HD 5870: Bringing About the Next Generation Of GPUs
by Ryan Smith on September 23, 2009 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Angle-Independent Anisotropic Filtering At Last
For a number of years now the quality of anisotropic filtering has been slowly improving. Early implementations from AMD and NVIDIA were highly angle-dependent, resulting in a limited improvement to image quality from such filtering. The angle-dependent nature lead to shimmering and other artifacting that was not ideal.
As of the previous generation of cards, the quality of anisotropic filtering had become pretty good. NVIDIA’s best filtering mode was pretty close to angle-independent, and AMD’s only slightly worse. Neither was perfect, but neither was bad either.
The Radeon HD 4890
The GeForce GTX 285
However so long as no one had an angle-independent implementation, there was room to improve. And AMD has gone there. The anisotropic filtering algorithm used by the 5000 series is now truly and completely angle-independent. There are no more filtering tricks being used.
The Radeon HD 5870: Perfection
As you can see, the MIP maps in our venerable D3D AF Tester are perfectly circular, the hallmark of an angle-independent implementation. With angle-independent filtering, this effectively marks the end of the filtering arms race. AMD has won, and should NVIDIA catch up in the future the two would merely be tied. There’s nowhere left to go for quality beyond angle-independent filtering at the moment.
AMD tells us that there is no performance hit with their new algorithm compared to their old one. This is a bit hard to test since we can’t enable the old algorithm on the 5870, but certainly whatever performance hit there is, is similarly minor. In all of the testing we’re doing today, you will see results done with 16x anisotropic filtering used.
What you won’t see however is a difference, particularly with our static screenshots. When discussing the matter, AMD noted that the difference in perceived quality between the old algorithm and the new one was practically the same. After looking at matters we find ourselves in agreement with AMD; we were not able to come up with any situations where there was a noticeable difference, beyond the obvious AF quality tests that are designed to identify such changes.
Regardless of the outcome, AMD deserves kudos for making angle-independent anisotropic filtering happen. It’s demonstrably perfect filtering with no speed hit versus the previous generation of filtering; making it in essence a “free” improvement in image quality, however slight the real-world results are. We’re always ready to get better image quality out of our video cards, after all.
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Qfromchicago - Friday, November 27, 2009 - link
Windows 7 ProfessionOnkyo 805
Diamond 5870
Still no 3rd option for hd audio.
Has anyone been able to work this thing
charme - Friday, November 27, 2009 - link
same here.no 3rd option for hd audio
otni - Sunday, November 29, 2009 - link
YES, WORKING PERFECT FOR ME...TRY THIS: PLAY THE BLUE-RAY MOVIE THEN GO TO SETTING ON POWERDVD AND CHARGES TO THE 3ER OPTION FOR HD SOUND.IS WORKING FOR ME, THANKS CYBERLINK
FlyTexas - Saturday, November 14, 2009 - link
What good does it do to launch this, if there are still none for sale a month later?Yes, I know there were a few sold up front, but NewEgg has been out for awhile...
RavnosCC - Tuesday, November 17, 2009 - link
The 57xx series are readily available, they also support HD Audio.RavnosCC - Monday, November 23, 2009 - link
"As of today, new PowerDVD 9 Ultra customers will receive build 2320, which includes support for HDMI bitstreaming of undecoded (full quality) audio with ATI Radeon 5000 series graphics cards, and the Auzentech X-Fi Hometheater HD sound card. An update patch for current owners of PowerDVD 9 Ultra is scheduled to be available next Friday (11/27).Tom
Cyberlink"
Qfromchicago - Wednesday, November 25, 2009 - link
Though happy that finally we will get hd audio using powerdvd, but why limit it to new customers only. It seems to me that if you can offer it to new customers, you should be able to offer it to everyone at the same time.Qfromchicago - Sunday, October 18, 2009 - link
I have win 7, a diamond 5870, powerdvd 9 ultra version 2201 and still I don't get he 3rd choice for the HD audio bitstreaming. Has anyone been able to get bitstreaming to work with powerdvd 9. ThanksRavnosCC - Thursday, November 5, 2009 - link
UPDATE: Looks like late November for the mythical patch..."Hi everyone,
Yes... we read these forums regularly. Feedback is forwarded to the appropriate people. These forums aren't the best way for us to provide customer support, so if you have an issue, please open a support ticket through our website.
We can't always comment on new developments... or at least we like to wait until we have a definite answer. I know everyone noticed the reviews for the ATI Radeon 5000 series graphics cards, where certain reviewers were using a pre-release version of PowerDVD 9 to demonstrate HDMI bitstreaming of Blu-ray audio. Support for this feature will be in the next PowerDVD update (patch), which will be available later this month. I don't have a firm date on this, but we're trying to expedite it. Please keep in mind that each of our regular updates includes fixes for new BD titles and new (or forthcoming) hardware / drivers across the PC ecosystem, and so the feature you are anxiously waiting for isn't the only thing that we need to include in the update. Of course, each update has to go through a full quality assurance testing procedure, to make sure that none of the changes introduced any new issues.
So... sorry for going quiet on you... but I and others read every post in this thread and other relevant threads, following up as needed (in some cases, directly through private messages on these forums).
Tom
Cyberlink"
RavnosCC - Wednesday, October 28, 2009 - link
I am in the same boat, with Vista, I have powerdvd 9 ultra fully patched and still no third option for hi-def passthrough... :-/