3D Settings
Ah yes, 3D settings. Most likely the place where gamers will spent most of their time tweaking image quality and / or performance. Both drivers offer real time previews of image quality setting changes. AMD is actually on their second version of the preview here, which many think is a significant improvement to the old one. For this page, we stitched together screenshots for the 'All Settings' page on the Catalyst Control Center and 'Manage 3D Settings' on Forceware Control Panel so you could see all of them together in one image.AMD
Catalyst Control Center is definitely more friendly to less tech savvy users. In addition to offering a preview on the Standard settings with various preset default profiles, you can also see a preview with each image quality enhancement feature - anti aliasing, anisotropic filtering, mipmap detail levels and adaptive anti aliasing (or anti aliasing that's aware of transparent textures).
Though informative, more tech savvy users will likely go directly to the All Settings page or even use the Customize View to set the Catalyst Control Panel to show only this page in the 3D section. Although you can force anti aliasing and anisotropic filtering from the driver panel, the consensus is that you should always apply these settings in game whenever possible. This is one area where we think AMD could make some improvements - we actually would like temporal anti aliasing settings and anti aliasing filters (on the Radeon HD2x00 series) to be more like the adaptive anti aliasing setting. That way, we can select anti aliasing levels in game and let the Catalyst Control Center 'enhance' that setting with temporal, adaptive AA or anti aliasing filters. NVIDIA have already use a similar scheme like this in their Forceware Control Panel.
[Previous Page]
[Go to top]
[Next Page]