Image quality compared: ATI vs NVIDIA

Of course, frame rate isn’t everything, especially if your PC’s primary mission is something other than gaming. If you use your computer for editing video, watching movies, or manipulating digital photographs, you’re much more interested in visual quality. Judging image quality, however, is much more difficult because it’s necessarily a subjective task.

But we’ve been hearing whispers from sources (who wish to remain anonymous, although we can tell you they represent neither AMD nor Nvidia) that ATI GPUs deliver better image quality than what Nvidia has to offer. ATI product managers made a similar claim while rolling out their AVIVO technology initiative, but neither AMD nor Nvidia have had much to say on the topic for quite some time.

Never ones to let sleeping dogs lie, we decided it was time to settle this issue Maximum PC style: We gathered a bunch of our game-playing, movie-watching, photo-editing colleagues and challenged them to a blind taste test. Would the consensus opinion favor AMD or Nvidia, or would anyone be able to discern any differences at all?