That's right! It's all about how fast a video card can crunch numbers not quality - at least for the most part.
Heck, there's even a poll that
FutureMark took and asked would you rather quality, frames-per-second, blah...blah...blah....and the number one thing people voted for was FPS (how much a card will push rather than what it looks like) voted 2nd was quality.
Looks like quality has taken a back seat ever since 3Dfx kicked the bucket. Sure the new cards can handle
speeds in 32Bit color that 3Dfx (Voodoo 5500 -- the last card I got from them to compare) couldn't BUT to me I would sacrifice FPS for quality (though not to the point of the game dragging it butt).
Sure you got 2xFSAA, 4xFSAA (not as good as 3Dfx
) and AnisoTropic filtering, but those are worth anything if you don't have quality -- you can anti-alias a piece of dog crud and apply an anisotropic plane to it all you want , but it still doesn't look that good - as compared to a nice piece of art (That being 3Dfx
)
I want my quality
dangit! Do you know that Nvidia changed the naming in their "Quality and Performance Settings" From "application controlled", "balanced" and "aggressive" to something different that I have only noticed in the 45.23 detonator changed to "high performance", "performance" and "quality", can get confusing if they keep switching around this kind of stuff, and it kinda makes you wonder "why?", until you turn it to quality and 2x FSAA and watch it all slow to a crawl, even on a PIII-1Gig machine! (this is with the GeForce2 Pro 32MB, using DirectX 6,7,8 and OpenGL games.
At
least 3Dfx was
consistent, and they let you tweak the card to your preference, you could disable v-synch (,etc.) without searching for hours on the 'net for the correct registry key (depending on what detonator version) or having to use 3rd party utilities to force it to do what is
should do natively -- provide a quality image w/excellent performance. Now this is just with the Nvidia cards, so I can't say much about ATI - but I get the feeling from what I read/researched, that it isn't any different.
But most everyone is only concerned about FPS more than quality it seems.