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Half-Life 2, ATI, NVIDIA, and a Sack of Cash
Latent IT writes "If you're into games, and unless you've been living under a rock for the past few days, you've heard a bit of a rumble from Valve on the relative quality of ATI vs. NVIDIA cards. Starting with articles like this one (previously reported), Valve told the world that the ATI 9800 Pro was nearly three times faster in some cases than the formerly competitive NVIDIA offering, the 5900 Ultra. Curiously, this happened at an ATI sponsored event, "Shader Day". But the story hasn't stopped there. NVidia released this response, essentially claiming that their new drivers, that were available to Valve at the time of their press conference, would make for vast, legitimate performance improvements. An interview with Massive, the creators of the Aquamark 3d benchmark, seems to confirm this opinion - that the NV3x chipset wasn't designed around any certain API very well, and the drivers are critical in achieving good performance. Anandtech writes here about the restrictions Valve placed on what benchmarks could be run. However, the key to this whole story may be this: an article, which I haven't seen get much coverage in all this, seems to make everything a little clearer - Valve stated that their OEM bundling deal with ATI came from the fact that ATI's cards were so superior, and that they were "performance enthusiasts". However, if the Inquirer is to be believed, the bundling deal was a result of an outright auction, on what will probably be the most popular game of the year. Which year that might be, is another issue altogether. Whatever happened to just making hardware, and making games?"
Nvidia didnt create a card that far behind the curve - it has to be drivers.
Smooth transaction!
What my Rendition Verite card is old now? Come on guys, is this difference really that much at all?
Hmm, cash and industry. How does it pan out? If "Shader Day" wasn't enough for you, keep having fun trashing the chipset you chose.
"When it rains, it pours." --Morton's Salt
Let's see how Half Life 2 will run on my 3DFX Voodoo 1 & S3 Virge!
Hate me!
BitBoys will come back I tell you!
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
The view of nVidia fanboys is this: Valve and ATi are in bed together and have been for a while, and Valve sabotaged Half-Life 2 so it wouldn't run on NV3x properly in return for a whole bundle of money from ATi. Never mind that this wouldn't make any business sense-- you see, Majestic 12 are the REAL ones behind this, and we can't possibly know what they have in store for the world.
The view of ATi fanboys is this: Anyone who bought a GeForce FX is an idiot, as they obviously should have had a stolen timedemo of Half-Life 2 on hand to benchmark with. If they didn't break into Valve's offices and steal the code, that's their own fault. Also, nVidia is clearly exactly like 3dfx, because they slipped up, JUST LIKE 3DFX! Dun dun dunnn!(The Quake/Quack scandal involving ATi never existed, of course.)
The view of most sane, rational human beings is that this is just another stage of the highly competitive video card market, and that anyone who spends time arguing over which company is better needs to be tranquilized, preferably with something meant for very large animals.
You mean shader business deals; many in the pipeline, in fact.
There are no karma whores, only moderation johns
ATI has never been all that innovative. They've gone for "raw power" rather than finesse, and I think Nvidia's strategy is a little bit farther-thinking.
Yeah, when I buy a video card I want finesse, not raw power. Because games run so much faster with a little bit of finesse. Maybe NVidia's next card will be named GeForce Finesse XP++ - the card with no power but lots of finesse.
Hate to say it, but I must be one of those people living under a rock.
:-)
Not such a bad life really. It does have its advantages. Now if I could only get a humidifier small enough.
Because we all know that what makes a game really successful is having a linux port...
-- taking over the world, we are.