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ATI & Nvidia Duke It Out In New Gaming War
geek_on_a_stick writes "I found this PC World article about ATI and Nvidia battling it out over paper specs on their graphics cards. Apparently ATI's next board will support pixel shader 1.4, while Nvidia's GeForce3 will only go up to ps 1.3. The bigger issue is that developers will have to choose which board they want to develop games for, or, write the code twice--one set for each board. Does this mean that future games will be hardware specific?"
Now the hardware industry has moved away from that, instead giving us free drivers for windows. Which not only are crappy in their first release, but are also useless on other platforms which the vendor decides not to support.
Bring hardware standards back, and MS will lose much of the power it's able to leverage through the high degreee of hardware support their system provides. I for one would sacrifice a little technological progress for the ability to have things work together as expected out of the box.
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Its much like the choice to support AMD's 3DNOW or Intel's SIMD instructions. If you use DirectX 8 or OpenGL, the issue is usually dealt with by the graphics library and the card drivers. Some bleeding edge features are initially only supportible by writing specific code, but that is the exception.
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...is that developers shouldn't HAVE to develop for specific hardware. I don't work in the game industry specifically, but I don't see how this is necessarily good for software in general, or graphics software in particular. This doesn't give developers "more choice in the hardware they develop for" It gives them less choice, because they have to decide how to allocate limited resources on a per-platform basis. When you have a common API, you're not forced to choose in the first place. That's why hardware specific features and capabilities ought to be abstracted-out into a common API. What these guys should do is come up with a dozen or so different kinds of high-level magic (e.g. water waves, flame, smoke,bullet-holes, whatever) that they can work with their pixel and vertex shaders, lobby Microsoft to get that magic incorporated into the DirectX spec, and then supply drivers that meet those specs by sending a few pre-packaged routines to the pixel/vertex shaders, rather than have game developers worry about this stuff directly. Or am I missing something?
Oh, but you forgot the fourth option:
Say screw'em both and develop for neither, just using lowest common denominator stuff, and spend the saved time on improving the other parts of the game.
If your game cant stand on its own using that... well, maybe, just maybe, it sucks?
The Pixel Shader technology will be backwards compatable as far as the DirectX 8.0 API is concerned. Imagine that. Microsoft using an API to bring software developers together across various hardware choices. Now only if they could get Win32 cleaned up and a decent kernel, then I'd THINK about purchasing that OS. Although I'm not saying that there won't be card specific code, but as far as Pixel shader tech goes, as long as the drivers are DX 8 compatable, there's no problem with code for one card not working on the other. Besides, most systems sold in the last year have 810/810e/815E chipsets and stuck with those old i740 Starfighter chips.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
You mean like when Netscape and IE were competing? In case you haven't noticed, HTML rendering between the two browsers haven't exactly meshed.
Where are we going and why am I in this handbasket?
If so, it won't be the first time; remember the days of 3dfx? Original Unreal would only run on Glide hardware acceleration; if you didn't have a 3dfx card, you were forced to run it in software. Of course, this didn't sit well with the growing NVidia user base who consistently pointed out that Quake 2 and Half-Life both rendered on anything running OpenGL (including 3dfx cards; remember those mini-driver days?), and OpenGL and Direct3D renderers were finally introduced in a patch. That's about when 3dfx started to go down the toilet; delaying product releases and missing features (32-bit color and large texture support being two of the most blatant omissions) eventually tainted the 3dfx brand to the point of extinction.
Since then, 3D gaming has been a less lopsided world. Linux gaming was taken seriously. Standardised APIs that could run on almost anything were the rule; if it wasn't OpenGL, it would at least be Direct3D. Then the GL extensions war heated up, with NVidia developing proprietary extensions that would work only on their cards. But this wasn't a problem; you could still run OpenGL games on anything that could run OpenGL; you'd just be missing out on a few features that would only slightly enhance the scenery.
Leave it to Microsoft to screw it all up with DirectX 8. They suddenly started talking about pixel shaders and other new ideas. John Carmack has already described the shortfalls and antics of DX8. And now 3D programmers will have to program for multiple rendering platforms, but at least you can still run it with anything.
Sure, this entire disagreement between ATI and NVidia is bad for the 3D industry, but things could be worse. A LOT worse.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
This is good for hardware because ATI and NVidia will continue to push the envelope, developing more and more advanced graphics boards. Features will creep from one end to the other, just staggered a generation.
This is good for software because developers will have more choice in the hardware that they develop for. ATI doesn't support super-duper-gooified blob rendering? Ah, NVidia does in their new Geforce5. No worries, ATI will have to support it in their next generation boards.
A bipolar competition is ALWAYS good for the consumer.
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