ATI Talks Game Support, Future Of Graphics Cards

Sergio writes "Slo-Tech have posted an interview with ATI's representative in game developer support, Richard Huddy. He touched on many subjects, including the evolution of DirectX and OpenGL, why ATI doesn't provide much information to Linux driver developers, and the most common mistakes of game developers ('Nine out of ten games under-use the graphics card. That's amazing, and it's been true for the last three or four years.')"

Comments

A couple of clarifications

[Yeechang Lee]

The reason I don't know what kind of card I have is that, although I purchased a brand new, shrinkwrapped Radeon 9500 Pro retail box, I noticed that the card looked somewhat different from the OEM (I think Sapphire) 9500 Pro I'd used for a few days previously. Didn't think much of this until I started seeing indications in places like the XFree86 log that the card might be a 9700, instead of a 9500 Pro (I do realize the two cards both use the R300 NE chipset). Also, that Antalus flyby score is meaningfully higher than what Tom's Hardware found for 1280x1024x32 on a much faster system than my two-year old Athlon 1.4GHz. Haven't bothered to crack the case open again since, so until I do I'll happily enjoy the illusion that I somehow ended up with a 9700 for the price of a 9500 Pro.

The driver I use is a binary-only one from a German reseller. They appear to be betas of forthcoming versions of ATi's own drivers. As I have XFree86 4.3.0 this has been a great blessing, as ATi's own Web site only has drivers for XFree86 4.1 and 4.2.

Nine out of ten games under-use the graphics card

[Screaming Lunatic]

Well duh. It's called the lowest common denominator. The game has to run well on the minimum requirements machine. And the game has to be solid on the recommended requirements machine. It's called scale. You have to support the greatest number of users by putting in a reasonable amount of effort.

Newer features are exposed in newer drivers. So they may be buggy and perform sub-optimally. There's a learning curve. And enough newer hardware is difficult to get for the developer, how many users will have it?

Build a modular engine. And try to squeeze in that feature in the next iteration.

Pot! Kettle! Black! Pot! Kettle! Black!

[Anonymous Coward]

What balls! ATI were the first to do 'application specific optimisations'! And their DX table fog (or was it vertex fog?) still doesn't work properly!

Re:Anyone find it ironic....

[Anonymous Cow herd]

One of the most annoying things about ATI is their drivers. I'm not talking Radeon series here, b/c I have no experience with them

ATI has really cleaned up their act with respect to drivers. They've moved to a unified driver architecture (CATALYST) for their Raedon series, not unlike NVidia's Detonator drivers. So they might be a little slower with driver rollout currently than NVidia is. ATI has impressed me with the speed at which they caught up with NVidia architecturally, and given the bad rap they've had in the past with driver support, I think that they probably realize that this is the one issue that's really holding them back. Checking the web site, the latest driver update was posted yesterday. The oldest driver I could find was from less than a month ago. NVidia hasn't updated their RIVA 128 series of drivers in 4 years either. The point is, ATI might have been a little slower to get their shit in gear, but they're obviously doing it, so holding a grudge from a card you bought years ago isn't really sensible. Things change very quickly in this market, not only hardware, but company strategies and support, as well.