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?"

Comments

Deja vu.

[AFCArchvile]

"Does this mean that future games will be hardware specific?"

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.