Nvidia and AMD Anti-Aliasing and SweetFX Guide

[Ezodagrom]

@Ezodagrom

Well, okay, I'm wrong about the PS4 setting, but in my personal experience, my settings are good enough for me, even if they don't match the PS4 setting. At the very least, I'm sitting at 99-100 FPS on average with my settings, and that's at 1920 x 1200 (yes, I got a new monitor recently, and I didn't have to pay for this one). I'm happy with that. I just wanted a proper 4GB card that can be overclocked and has two fans and is within my budget, and this 960 SSC from EVGA is satisfactory for me for the price. The 970 was out of my budget, and it still is going to be for some time. The R9 270X at 4GB is more difficult to find and costs well over the price of a 960 at this point, unfortunately, and being an AMD card, I can't really use Inspector with it. But okay, the PS4 setting does indeed more than what I initially thought it would do, and I'm actually curious on trying the setting when it comes out now. But I doubt it will give us any proper Anti-Aliasing of any kind though.

As for the memory bus width thing, having a bus width of 128-bit is not the end of the world, and the thing is, AMD has larger bus widths for their cards than the 960, but that doesn't mean they're automatically faster, does it? Bus width is just one aspect, and even at 128-bit, this card can run Crysis 3 on High settings (for ME at least. Believe it or not I actually achieved this using a couple of tweaks, but I had to turn Shadows to Low and Post-Processing/Water to Medium since they're a massive CPU hog).

...Well that's really all I can say. My settings are fine as is. If something comes up, I'll post it here, but for the sake of not causing more vitriol, I think I'll just stay quiet. Later.

If you're satisfied with your settings, that's all that matters. I pretty much was only saying what could make SGSSAA be too demanding for a 960 even if overclocked.
(BTW, you mentioned dropping MFAA...I don't think MFAA works at all on PSO2, MFAA is supposedly something that matches the quality of 4xMSAA while having the performance cost of 2xMSAA, according to Nvidia).

And you're right, having a bus width of 128-bit is not the end of the world, but in the end it's still a limitation. But I only really mentioned it mostly to talk about the gap between 960 and 970 (and how there should have been something between them).

When it comes to the R9 270X, if I recall correctly, it's overall a weaker card than the 960, AMD really been "drooping the ball" these past years, rebrand after rebrand, and cards that consume more power than the Nvidia's ones while doing the same performance wise... I miss the AMD from 7 years ago... (Radeon HD4xxx era)

[A. Zerran]

When it comes to the R9 270X, if I recall correctly, it's overall a weaker card than the 960, AMD really been "drooping the ball" these past years, rebrand after rebrand, and cards that consume more power than the Nvidia's ones while doing the same performance wise... I miss the AMD from 7 years ago... (Radeon HD4xxx era)

So, so true. And that's sad too. But, at the very least, the R9 290, 290X, 285, and the R9 265 are new architecture and are improved over the other R7 and R9 200 series of video cards that they released some time ago. And their R7 and R9 300 series are also based off of new architecture I'm guessing if their technical specs are accurate, so are the latest AMD cards really considered re-brands?

You remember the GTX 700 series? They were mostly re-brands as well, weren't they? Why did Nvidia do what AMD did (I didn't say they outright COPIED them, just that they did something AMD was doing as well)? Do re-brands really sell that well?

[HentaiLolicon]

We should call it Re-fresh rather than Re-brand as they actually perfect the old architecture and put them on service for few more years. Design a totally new architecture is costly and not that easy. And AMD actually took a dangerous move for designing GCN architecture, but well, it paid off as win10 can take advantage of GCN architecture now.

[A. Zerran]

We should call it Re-fresh rather than Re-brand as they actually perfect the old architecture and put them on service for few more years. Design a totally new architecture is costly and not that easy. And AMD actually took a dangerous move for designing GCN architecture, but well, it paid off as win10 can take advantage of GCN architecture now.

Okay, sure, let's call it a Re-fresh. And I actually really like what AMD did with the GCN architecture. It's a hell of a lot better on energy efficiency than the architecture for the HD 7000 series (was it Pictarian? Can't remember).

[Ezodagrom]

So, so true. And that's sad too. But, at the very least, the R9 290, 290X, 285, and the R9 265 are new architecture and are improved over the other R7 and R9 200 series of video cards that they released some time ago. And their R7 and R9 300 series are also based off of new architecture I'm guessing if their technical specs are accurate, so are the latest AMD cards really considered re-brands?

You remember the GTX 700 series? They were mostly re-brands as well, weren't they? Why did Nvidia do what AMD did (I didn't say they outright COPIED them, just that they did something AMD was doing as well)? Do re-brands really sell that well?

AMD is doing it far worse than Nvidia in the GTX 700 series, not only are all the AMD 300 series rebrands, one of them goes back to the HD7000 series...
The only new cards from AMD this time are Fury, Fury X and Nano.

Also in the GTX 700 series, Nvidia brought the older cores to lower tiers, AMD kept the tiers mostly the same in the 300 series...

Spoiler!

Nvidia GTX 700 series:
GTX 750/750 Ti - GM107 (new core)
GTX 760 - GK104 (stripped down 670)
GTX 770 - GK104 (680 specs)
GTX 780/780 Ti - GK110 (Titan core)

AMD 300 series:
R7 360 - R7 260 core (GCN 1.1)
R7 370 - R7 265/HD7850 core (GCN 1.0)
R9 380 - R9 285 core (GCN 1.2)
R9 390/390X - R9 290/290X core (GCN 1.1)

[A. Zerran]

I see, I see. Will the Fury X still play games at 1200p at High settings though?

[Ezodagrom]

I see, I see. Will the Fury X still play games at 1200p at High settings though?

According to this review, it does fine at 1440p (sitting a little bit behind the 980 Ti), and kinda hangs on at 4k (trading blows with the 980 Ti).
http://www.guru3d.com/articles-pages...-x-review.html

Despite disliking AMD pretty much rebranding their 200 series for the 300 series, this only happened because 20nm fab nodes were a failure, so both AMD and Nvidia have been stuck with 28nm technology (which has been around since 2012) until 14nm arrives.
I'd say there's a very good chance that the next gen of cards will be major upgrades when compared to the current gen, for both AMD and Nvidia.

[A. Zerran]

That is the hope, Ezo. But, I think I know why the re-brands happened with the 200 series of R7s and R9s for AMD and the 700 series of GTX for Nvidia...

The biggest possibility is that gaming console technology was holding back graphics hardware developers due to their constraints with how they play games. But this is more of a conspiracy theory than anything, though there's some valid sources to suggest something similar was happening. Why do you think they did a re-brand?

[Ezodagrom]

That is the hope, Ezo. But, I think I know why the re-brands happened with the 200 series of R7s and R9s for AMD and the 700 series of GTX for Nvidia...

The biggest possibility is that gaming console technology was holding back graphics hardware developers due to their constraints with how they play games. But this is more of a conspiracy theory than anything, though there's some valid sources to suggest something similar was happening. Why do you think they did a re-brand?

The rebrands are because they needed something new in the market but the 20nm fabrication process failed to meet expectations.
Nvidia was able to make some improvements and create new efficient and powerful cards for the mid-high end range in the form of the 900 series, but AMD just doesn't have the resources that Nvidia has. Though when it comes to the high end, both AMD and Nvidia ended making huge cores, I'd say they're pretty much at the limit of what they can do with the 28nm process (at least without bringing power consumption and heat to extremes).

Smaller circuits (14nm fabrication process) is pretty much a must for them to be able to have any meaningful improvements moving forward.

[A. Zerran]

Very good information. I'll have to remember that.

I'm sitting here with my 960 running PSO2 with my AA settings, Anisotropic Filtering, HBOA, and SweetFX, and it's really pretty. I'll have to post a video eventually. And I'm still sitting at 99-100 FPS, surprisingly.