x-orbiter

Commendable
Apr 27, 2018
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1,510
I recently purchased a GT 710 graphics card and was disappointed by the decrease in 3D rendering quality compared to Radeon HD4670. These cards should be almost identical according to benchmarks, with GT 710 consuming 3x less power. In reality GT 710 is slightly faster, but this seems to come at the expense of texture quality. For example, in a racing game the road has fine detail in the bottom part of the screen, but farther away it gets blurrier with a distinct boundary. On HD4670 the road is rendered sharply all the way. I tried different anisotropy settings, as well as antialiasing settings and oversampling, and was able to get but a slight improvement, which is almost negligible and nowhere close to HD4670. The sense of distance and volume is gone, the picture looks flat and fake. The same impression of 'flatness' is present in almost all 3D games I tested.
Are there any detailed 3D settings to tweak so that I could make the picture rendering quality better and closer to that of Radeon?
 

sdedu77

Respectable
Dec 9, 2018
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2,040
If yoy can RMA the GT 710 then consider buying another one. If you have a budget of under $100 GT 1030 is a pretty solid choise. If you can add $20-$30 you can get a GTX 1050.
However, if you have a pc with a weak PSU (around 250 W or less), then GT 1030 might be better. It has a TDP of only 30W, while GTX 1050 is 75W or more) If your monitor has only a VGA port then you'll need an active HDMI to VGA adapter (since HDMI sends digital signal and VGA analog). It's important to be active. Though GT 1030 has a VGA version, but I don't know about GTX 1050.
 

x-orbiter

Commendable
Apr 27, 2018
8
0
1,510
Thanks for the replies. Unless I find out the cause of the blurriness, I won't consider any Nvidia product. I haven't used one since 7600GS which had perfect picture IMO.
How would I know that 1030 will not have the same blurry textures as 710? I heard that Nvidia uses some low-level texture optimization or compression, and that AMD cards do a more straightforward processing.
I am not much into gaming, just play a few old titles occasionally, but I expect them to look good at 1280x1024 resolution, that's all. My monitor supports DVI-D.
 

sdedu77

Respectable
Dec 9, 2018
325
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2,040
Try to do some tweaks from Nvidia Control Panel. Maybe those will apply better than the ones in the game's settings. Alternatively you can try to directly in the configuration file of that game. Should be a .cfg or .ini or something like that.
If this didn't worked, then it might be a driver related issue. Try to update the drivers. If you download drivers from Geforce Experience app I think you'll find the option to clean install the newer driver, though just running the standalone tool might be as efficient. If you have the latest then maybe an older one will fix it.
 

x-orbiter

Commendable
Apr 27, 2018
8
0
1,510
After some more experimenting I was able to at least partially solve this blurriness problem by overriding the following settings in the Control panel:
Texture Filtering - Negative LOD Bias: Allow
Texture Filtering - Quality: High Quality

The image still looks different from Radeon, but the picture became sharper.
Now I noticed another problem: with 60-70 fps the image looks choppy. This is especially noticeable when turning around. This happens in some games, in other games everything's fine.
These same games ran perfectly smooth on HD4670 with maybe 50-55fps.