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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?"
of Ex-Microsoft employees, well its seem they've get a few things the same, like buissness practices.
Ah, so it comes out.
I was kind of suspecting something like this when I heard the other day about the whole "Nvidia Sucks" meme that was passing around with regards to Halflife II.
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. Saying that Nvidia's shader support is behind that of ATI is absolutely ludicrous, and I think ATI's going to be back in its box when Nvidia's investment in Cg comes to fruition.
We'll see.
Oh, and shame on Valve for getting involved. This is no different than the crap that goes on every day in the music industry-- no different than the payola scandal.
Competitive darwinism needs to happen based on rendering muscle, not on marketing muscle. Screw that.
Intolerance for ambiguity is the mark of the authoritarian personality.
Game companies are probably thinking: "If they won't pay money for an operating system, why would they pay money for a game?"
[o]_O