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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?"
"Whatever happened to just making hardware, and making games?" unfortunately..where there's a multi-billion dollar industry, there's shady business deals.
Nvidia didnt create a card that far behind the curve - it has to be drivers.
Smooth transaction!
I thought that integrity was essential to running a good business! This can't possibly be true!
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
What ever happened to the good old days. Back when you just went out and bought a console, either Nintendo or Sega; if you pick Sega of course you where a loser; if Nintendo then you had the best games in the world...sigh
Just give me FFVI or give me..well Metal Gear Solid.
mac
are nVidia & ATI really ethically different from each other either way?
What concerns me is whether the practice of producing games that work with _nothing_ other than recent nVidia and ATI cards continues. Game after game comes out which simply does not work on other brands' video cards.
About all the article in the inquirer says is that Valve put the bundling rights for HL2 up for grabs. Makes sense.
I don't think that article says anything about one hardware platform being better than the other, and I don't doubt that had NVidia won the bundling deal, they would've had a "NVidia Shader Day" event, regardless of the performance of the product.
I still find the most interesting point being that Valve says that they had to put in a lot more time and effort making the gaming experience on NVidia cards good than on ATI cards, to the point of developing a seperate graphics path for NVidia chips.
If the solution to the performance issues was a simple driver update from NVidia (WITHOUT degrading quality in any way), then surely Valve would've left it to Nvidia to handle and proceeded to spend their time working on the game iteself...
N.
"Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence." - Charles de Gaulle
that gaming hardware is a billion dollar industry. In circumstances like these, combined with the collapse of the dot-com "everything should be free" mindset there is little chance of specs being made available for open-source developers.
Maybe I'm just dumb but it doesn't seem to make much sense to release new hardware without drivers optimized to take full advantage of the hardware. If you (or a hardware site) has to wait for a new driver to get the performance the vendor specifies for the hardware, I would be real leary of buying hardware from them. From what I saw of the ATI/NVIDA test, the NVIDA card was trounced, so maybe NVIDA should hold off on releasing new cards until their drivers catch up to the hardware.
I'm starting to wonder if HL2's numbers are going to be quite as good as HL1, considering the aggressive marketing, shady practices, tie-ins with the less-friendly-than-advertised Steam, and a lot of other publisher-related snafus. Sierra and Valve seem to be regarding Half-Life 2 as such a massive potential success that they can get away with pretty much any customer-abuse they want.
Weapons of Mass Analysis
the 45.xx detonator drivers were used for the Nvidia cards because that is the final working driver Nvidia released. The 50.xx which NVidia says should have been used doesn't show fog, which they call a bug and just so happens to create better results. Also the 50.xx drivers were still beta last time I heard. So Valve chose a stable driver over a "bugged" one. Not to mention NVidia's earlier actions surrounding "driver enhancements" wouldn't make them suspicious.
Don't accuse Valve of any foul play. Even Carmack has said that unless you use Nvidia specific extensions for pixel shaders, the performance will not be very good, due to the FX series of cards using 32bit percision by default.
Let's see how Half Life 2 will run on my 3DFX Voodoo 1 & S3 Virge!
Hate me!
personally I could really care which card has better DX9 support then the other.....im just worried about their linux drivers and Nvidia has definantly got ATI beat.
BitBoys will come back I tell you!
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
And let us take a crack at them. Suddenly you'll have NetBSD running directly on the card, twice the framerate in Linux as in windows, and (worst of all) both companies' products will be advanced, eliminating the advantage over one's competitor by tossing more money at the problem.
Betterment serves no profitable purpose unless it is unatainable by one's competitor. If someone can show how they'll make more money by making a better product while also aiding their competitor in the same endeavor, they might help us out a bit more.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
it's going to be difficult not to find things like this happening what with only two real companies.
here's hoping that the same thing doesn't happen in the future with doom.
however, as long as the games work, regardless of which card you choose, doesn't matter in the end. i think this might be one case where microsoft is helping rather than hurting- were it not for directx, i think we'd be in a really confusing situation. i sure don't miss dos games.
i can't believe i said that about microsoft. ah well.
stored on computers from birth to the grave
What scares me is people doing those benchs in DirectX, and most, people doing games using DirectX. Nvidia certainly didn't made its card to perform good in DirectX's new API, and I don't see the problem.
What's about OpenGL; I only purchase OpenGL games, because I mostly can make them run in Linux, and WineX is only a ugly workaround to run games in non native enviroment. If I'd a game company, I'd take care of potential Linux customers.
Silly technical politics like this shows why consoles always manage to trump the PC games industry. What good is an open system if nobody can agree what works?
Is a powerful system with no cohesive graphics standard really that much better than a consistent, albeit more primitive piece of hardware?
"Come on, let's go drink till we can't feel feelings anymore."
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.
Let's face it, both vendors have top-end products that are screaming fast. They'll put up more polygons per second than anything that came before, and just about any game that's currently out there is going to look fantastic on either brand. Provided you run Windows...
Which I don't. So when it came time to upgrade my system (about 2 weeks ago), Nvidia won hands-down -- and it was because they are Linux friendly, not because some rigged benchmark somewhere said they are a few frames per second faster than the other guy. Nvidia has been providing quality Linux drivers for their products for a long time, and I hope they'll continue to do so.
I've been playing a lot of Neverwinter Nights on my 5900 and it looks beautiful. I'm planning to purchase more Linux games as soon as my budget permits. Yes, there are people out there running Linux who appreciate high-end graphics cards. Probably more than the marketing types think; after all, most hacker types I know are also hardcore gamers.
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http://www.3dgpu.com/modules/wfsection/article.php ?articleid=74&page=0
I wonder why they had to decrease IQ if their shader support was as good as you claim.
Raw power, eh. That must be why the Radeon 9700 Pro, with a GPU clock of 325MHz, was equivalent to the GeForce FX 5800 Ultra, with a GPU clock of 500MHz. The Radeon 9700 Pro was so focused on raw power that it put out a whopping fifty-seven watts of heat to the 5800 Ultra's mere eighty! The 5800 Ultra had a far more sophisticated cooling system, of course, which consisted of a copper heatsink that stole a PCI slot and a banshee-like fan. Now that's what I call finesse! Do your homework before you post :P
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.
Valve made a great game four or five years ago, and someone else made an even better game by modifying it. However resting on their laurels all these years and then coming out with a windows only game, selling themselves into a hardware vendor fight, and trying to tie the game into a subscription service has me really steamed. Chances are they won't have lightning in a bottle the second time around. As a matter of fact, I'm starting to think that Savage(www.s2games.com) might really be the next Half Life. It's a first time release from a small start up that supports Linux and Windows on the same retail Cd. They are also promising heavy support for modding the game and after just a few days of playing I'm completely hooked.
if Valve did ptimize HL2 for ATI
:P
then how come these programs also show Nvidia shader performance as pathetic
halo PC
tomb raider angel of darkness
shadermark
3dmark03
and why have the det 50 drivers which nvidia recomended that valve used been proven to reduce image quality by a substantial amount?
is ATI really rich enough to buy off all of these companies and also manage to sabotage Nvidias drivers and PR team?
There written for some type of graphics API, DirectX and/or OpenGL. The days of writing to bare hardware were over more then a decade ago.
First, I think it's important to note that Anand was instructed to not use the Det50s in his tests because they failed to render fog in the demos, which would obviously impact performance.
Second, check out this image quality comparison over at DriverHeaven with Aquamark 3. It sure looks to me like nVidia is back to their old tricks again.
Both ATI and nVidia are guilty of trying to stack things in their favor dishonestly. ATI making deals with Valve to get HL2 to work better on the ATI cards by design is just the most recent example, and while it might be a major example, both sides have done this before.
At the same time, both card makers are really putting out insane results that wouldn't have been thought of even a couple of years ago.
My decision in graphics cards is based on my past experience and driver support. In this area nVidia still winds hands down. If ATI wants to sell me a card, they're going to need to beef up their Linux driver support big time.
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
Perhaps it's because the OpenGL specs weren't finalized until late into HL2's development cycle, DirectX gets full support from Microsoft, and there are less Linux gamers than Mac gamers, and we all know how much respect Mac users get.
I'd hardly call "bundling rights" shady business deals. Unless there are facts missing from the article, this is a bullshit take on an otherwise innocent business deal.
That said, if I was a game development company, I would be putting the boots to nVidia any way I could right now. Today, it's "We'll get around to making your game work with our drivers when it's popular" but tomorrow it could be "You want your game to work well with our drivers? That will be $3,000,000 please." The shit that nVidia are pulling is a threat to Valves bread and butter, and they'd be fools if they took it lying down.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Parent is on crack. Absolutely nothing in your post is true. ATI has had a superior gpu architecture since the radeon 9700 pro hit the market a year ago.
The Nvidia FX series has been plagued with problems from the get go, with Nvidia resorting to a
massive pr blitz and outright cheating in their drivers to compete with ATI.
Parent post is truly laughable and shows an ignorance of what has transpired over the last year in the video card industry.
They made a deal with Valve, eh? Then why is it that many independent sources (including the developers of AquaMark 3 and John Carmack) have noticed that NV3x has a lot of trouble with PS2.0 and that to get good performance out of it you have to program a special path? And why is it that NV3x clearly only has 16-bit and 32-bit precision when the DX9 specs call for 24-bit? Don't you think this could account for NV3x's terrible "real" DX9 performance? Don't be so quick to jump to conclusions. That having been said, ATi's Linux driver support is shameful, although they ARE working on it. I think they're both fine companies, it's just silly to accuse one of cheating when there's so much evidence to support what Valve is saying.
...when a gaming company pulls down a graphics hardware manufacturer because it doesn't "accelerate" a particular API well.
From the point of view of OpenGL, this sucks completely. NVidia's hardware and drivers render OpenGL stuff incredibly well, and this is the only thing that keeps the Linux/Unix drivers at an acceptable level.
If these guys decide to optimize their hardware and software for DX9 alone, we're probably heading towards a time when only one API is followed, for good or bad. And that is Bad(tm).
"Whatever happened to just making hardware, and making games" I'll tell you what happened, a little thing called market growth. The more the market grows the more this stuff will happen, in maybe 1-2 years the games industry will become much like the movie/music industry. With games taking 3-5 years and 20-200 people to create only big studios will be able to foot the bill and suck up the costs if the game tanks. Not to mention ad costs. This will lead to higher quality titles, but less of them and they will be even more of the same crap (just like the movie industry today). In 2-5 years the games industry will surpase the movie industry in tearms of sales and revenue, because games cost 40-80/copy and movie just can't hang with that. When that happens expect this sort of stuff to happen daily.
Why? Well, one stated reason was a policy to test only with "publicly available hardware, and publicly available software". Laudable enough, considering that non-public drivers could have any number of bugs or "optimisations" that could render the game incorrectly and thus misrepresent its performance.
Indeed, Valve referred to an issue where fog was completely left out of an entire level, and though they didn't point any fingers, it was later revealed that yes, the beta Det 50s were the culprit.
For further info, you should read this report on the performance of the beta Release 50 Detonators. Summary: not much difference - at least for DX8-level games. DX9 is where the focus supposedly was, and there is a 25% gain in the PS2.0 test in 3DMark03, which is something.
However, who knows if it'll translate to a 25% gain in HalfLife 2 - probably not, in itself. And given recent 3DMark/nVidia events, even that much is uncertain, until the drivers are released for public examination. In any case, it's a long way short of the 100% gain needed for the 5900 Ultra to just draw even with the 9800 Pro.
nVidia apparently have a strong lead in Doom 3 scores, though (admittedly with the partial-precision NV3X-specific code path), so they will no doubt be hoping that Doom 3 outsells HalfLife 2... Myself, I have a 9600 Pro in my sights, just in time for the HL2 release :-)
BTW, regarding the release delay? According to Gabe Newell, "First I've heard of it". So there you are. Only 16 days to go...
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
I really don't know why, but your post had me laughing repeatedly. Humor through repetition I guess. Weird...
The newest DX9 benchmark is Aquamark3 which uses a real game engine also. The official release is 15-Sep but here are some early benchmarks: http://www.guru3d.com/article.php?cat=article&id=7 6&pagenumber=9 testing both nvidia's current 4523dets and the upcoming 5175dets.
Whenever the offence inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigour of penal law is obliged to give way...
This is akin to activision deciding to release dod on 1 website exclusivly...Great for the website, horrible for the game itself.
Know what I'm going to say if halflife 2 runs crappy on nvidia videocards and well on ati's because it was coded to run on ati's cards? Simple, if I'v got an nvidia card I'm not going to run out to buy halflife 2 and go for something else. If I'v got an ati card, then I might buy it. I'm not investing another $400 to run 1 game, period.
By going with ati, they've also alienated the linux community single handedly becuase ati doesn't have linux drivers. Not that a linux dedicated server software won't exist, just the gamers on linux rigs won't go out and buy the game.
Neither Nvidia or ATI are guiltless as far as PR campaigning goes and bullshitting people. I don't trust either company nor do I trust the propaganda machine that is the enthusiast community. I look more at options and major performance defects and what the company does.
As a gamer, I could care far less about them selling cards becuase of major games. UT2K3? I think it sucks, along with a large number of other "major release" games. If they optimise the drivers to run halflife but not tribes2, I'm not buying the card period. I'm more conserned with if it can run what I'v got at my expectations.
Options are also good; I want to know if the card is quality. Right now, I picked an nvidia card becuase nvidia has apparently good linux drivers and being able to run linux games in the future is important to me. ATI has no support for linux. I also consider the nvidia drivers to be superior to ati's drivers feature wise, but that may change.
This is basically an orchestrated scam inwhich ATI pays valve to make a public endorcement of ati's cards. They'd be telling us months before that nvidia's drivers suck or something to that extent, trying to get both card makers' drivers working. For people who code such nice engines I'd doubt they'd have the lack of brains to make an engine that would screw a large part of their demographic, but they would have the brains to come out and lie for a big cash incentive.
Candy-Coated Knowledge
Whatever happened to just making hardware, and making games?
In a word. Business.
This illustrates perfectly the potential pitfalls that lie before us as Linux makes progress in the "Business" market. It's not beyond the realm of possibility that one day we'll see articles and press releases about how much faster Oracle runs on Red Hat than it does on Debian.
It's called a conflict of interest people, when someone has a financial interest in one particular version of the truth you can't expect them to work against their own interests.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
ATI bought the guys who did the chip for the Gamecube, and they did clean paper DX9 design for ATI. ATI went from being a year behind NVidia (DX8 generation) to being a year ahead.
In the R300, ATI decided to do all their calculations in 24 bit floating point: essentially a pure next-gen chip. The NVidia Geforce FX design was based on their DX8 chips, which were far and away industry leaders in fixed-point calculations; NVidia didn't figure that floating-point performance would be very important this generation and tacked it on. What they ended up with was a chip that had a high transistor count, was very good at legacy, fixed-point operations but could not keep up with ATI in floating point. Even then (about a year ago) NVidia's chip might have been competitive but they had process problems that made the chip clock slower than expected and about 9 months late.
ATI's superiority in floating point shaders has been demonstrated by various benchmarks (including some open-source benchmarks, which are the only ones I really take seriously) time and again. NVidia can only be competitive this generation when they 'tweak' their drivers for particular benchmarks. These tweaks sometimes consist of rewriting floating-point shaders to use their legacy fixed-point functionality, and on some occasions of even using pre-generated shadow models to replace the dynamically generated models of benchmarks that run over a known scene.
NVidia's NV3x generation seems weak, compared to ATI, and very weak unless game coders ignore API standards and write custom shaders that do as much as possible in NVidia's legacy hardware. Of course, by historical standards NVidia's NV3x isn't weak at all--they blow away all their competitors and ATI's pre-R300 products. It's just that the design choices made by ATI's new designers allowed them to leapfrog a generation.
It's pretty impossible to develop a new graphics card in your basement, so hardware has always been a "big business" topic whereas game producers used to be a few guys in college with little or no capital. Now, Valve, EA, etc have grown big like Nvidia and ATI.
So whereas people made their games to jive with graphics cards, now games are so huge and complex the tide has turned.
BTW, where is this "proof" of reduced image quality to which you refer? All I'd heard of was some incorrect fogging (which is obviously bad, and is doubtless a bug that we can hope will be fixed before the Det50s are out of beta).
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Word.
As Valve has said. If the driver isn't an official release, it's not appropriate to bench with it. NVidia may turn their driver around, but given the industry's history it's a reasonable expectation. Valve knows and has stated a number of times in a couple of recent interviews that the majority of their customers are NVidia users. Hence the great deal of time optimising of their code.
The auction is just good business.
>Saying that Nvidia's shader support is behind that
;)
>of ATI is absolutely ludicrous,
Quite the contrary, the recent Half-Life 2 numbers only confirm what DX9 benchmarks have been showing: That the NV3x architecture is flawed. It needs nVidia-specific coding to run worth a damn, and lags behind significantly in some areas. There would be no sense for Valve to intentionally sabotage many of their customers.
>Competitive darwinism needs to happen based on >rendering muscle, not on marketing muscle.
Exactly, yet the marketing muscle seems to hold sway over quite a few people, like the one I just replied to.
The title of this post says it all, really.
The videogame industry ALREADY generates more revenue than the movie industry (at least in the u.s).
Seems to me Nvidia has a crap card and they have been covering it up for a while now. 1. Bad Future Mark results Nvidia: We stopped participating a while ago, thats a ATI benchmark. 2. Poor Tomb Raider Performance. Nvidia: Who cares. 3. Poor HL2 Performance. Nvidia: You should of used our 50.xx drivers that don't render fog, and aren't out yet. Someone posted this picture. I think it says it all... http://myweb.cableone.net/jrose/Jeremy/HL2.jpg Apoptosis
It seem's to me that valve is a company of the people for the people. It also seems that nvidia has made it a pain in the ass for dx9 to be used on their card in a way that creates good performance. Valve is just going for a company that will help out their game, and their customer base, which happens to be huge.
Most people aren't thought about after they're gone. "I wonder where Rob got the plutonium" is better than most get.
While this is a rather pathetic instance of a corporation buying thier way towards being number one (I hate this sort of propoganda for products). They did have a point about a few things, the NVIDIA card needed updates before it was anywhere near compedative, if NVIDIA had gotten thier technology correct the first time they wouldn't have had such an increadibly lousy showing. That still begs the question of wether or not the ATI card had it's latest drivers installed, in which case this was a complete and total waste of time on ATI's part as most people buying video cards are extremely savvy (unless your rich you don't put down 600 dollars for a video card in ignorance) about the latest developments and would find the real story behind such a blatent bullshitting about performance very quickly. I hate it when companies underestimate our intelligence, they can't get away with it with this crowd of people, and none of us are likely to forget thier little benchmarking crap fast (both ATI and NVIDIA)
Cash, cold green cash.
the way i understand it, Nvidia tried to change the direction of how things should be done, they built a completely different architecture then the radeon R300, touted there CG shader language, and built there hardware to work with that.
they deviated from the dx9 spec. (this sounds like a conspiracy but it could be over the sour deal nvidia and microsoft had with the xbox?) Either way it was a bad move for nvidia. I'm absolutely sure that if games were made from the ground up to work with the nv30 architecture that they would beat ATI's generic DirectX9 architecture. well at least the FX5900 with 27Gb/sec bandwidth would
it reminds me of the playstation 2, when the first lot of games were only slighlty better looking than the PS1, then after a year or so the developers really learnt how to use the obscure architechture and the games visual quality increased 10 fold. It also reminds me of the p4, and how games didn't really get much out of the p4 until they utilized SSE2.
nvidia wouldn't make such a stinkin piece of silicon on purpose. If nvidia want top spot again there next card would have to be made to work optimal with the direct x standard and not obscure archtectures like the nv30.
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.
Most developers will find at some point that they need to optimize their graphics API code for specific chip sets.
Oh, and mentioning DirectX before OpenGL in the same breath is what Microsoft WANTS you to do.
If you look at the FX architecture, it has a serious problem.
It can't run "true" DX9 spec games worth crap.
Why?
Because to save die space, nVIDIA engineers decided it'd be best to use 32 bit FP units, compared to ATi's more numerous 24 bit FP units. DX9 specs call for 24 bit precision computations, which is the ATi native precision (which can then be mapped to 16 or extended to 32 bit precision, if asked for) whereas the FX which has to operate in 32, 16, or 12(?) bit modes basically loses half its registers (or more, if you are comparing to 12 bit registers) because it must run in 32 bit mode to be compliant.
End result? Less high speed registers on the FX part, more swapping from ram and less FP computational power to go around.
And this is only a simple example. I believe it has been noted that that Carmack eluded to many ugly optimizations in using lower precision math or proprietary shader paths he had to make to the D3 engine for the benefit of the FX not sucking utterly in terms of performance. It isn't really a playable DX9 part, all in all.
If valve says they spent serious time working for the Geforce codepath (and indeed, it is quite a bit faster in hyrbid mode, but now they are making it well known that it isn't running "true" dx9, which it the truth. It should also be noted that this hybrid mode is what the D3 benchmark was run in which offered the nVIDIA part such stellar performance, specifically noted by Carmack.) then they probably did so. Either that or they would have mentioned nothing.
Drop the "it must be corporate scandal" bit. If you read some of the specs and dev notes you will note that they more or less universally have their gripes in getting DX9 performance out of the FX part.
the way i understand it, Nvidia tried to change the direction of how things should be done, they built a completely different architecture then the radeon R300, touted there CG shader language, and built there hardware to work with that.
they deviated from the dx9 spec. (this sounds like a conspiracy but it could be over the sour deal nvidia and microsoft had with the xbox?) Either way it was a bad move for nvidia. I'm absolutely sure that if games were made from the ground up to work with the nv30 architecture that they would beat ATI's generic DirectX9 architecture. well at least the FX5900 with 27Gb/sec bandwidth would
it reminds me of the playstation 2, when the first lot of games were only slighlty better looking than the PS1, then after a year or so the developers really learnt how to use the obscure architecture and the games visual quality increased 10 fold. It also reminds me of the p4, and how games didn't really get much out of the p4 until they utilized SSE2.
nvidia wouldn't make such a stinkin piece of silicon on purpose. If nvidia want top spot again there next card would have to be made to work optimal with the direct x standard and not obscure architectures like the nv30.
Check out this comment a few posts above yours. Looks like ATI is cleaning up its act when it comes to Linux.
After nVidia's falling out with them over the Xbox chipset pricing, its likely MS changed the DX9 spec mid-development and only gave the new specs to ATI. Thats why ATI's cards are perfectly designed to run DX9 but nVidia's specs are off. For example, DX9 calls for 24bit FP, which ATI does, while nVidia only supports 16 or 32bit, forcing developers to choose between correct rendering or improved performance.
Also nVidia is to blame for their driver cheating fiasco, which makes developers especially weary to trust beta or "optimized" drivers, and for expecting every game company to optimize for their cards just because they're the biggest.
"Whatever happened to just making hardware, and making games?"
Um, capitalism unless I missed my guess. More specifically, the relationship between gaming hardware and software is finally maturing to the point to realize one of the more advanced techniques used in making money-- Networking. Both markets are now not only making more money than before, but are increasingly reliant on one another. Something like this was only a matter of time, IMO. You may have noticed it in that "Exclusive Game Demo" story (too lazy to find the link) on slash in which companies were releasing game demos for "chosen" sites and no one else? Same concept, but something that's only been able to happen recently.
I take it as a good sign mostly. Gaming (PC gaming, at least) is finally becoming a strong enough force to actually do this sort of thing, even if it is a double edged sword.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
That must be why the Radeon 9700 Pro, with a GPU clock of 325MHz, was equivalent to the GeForce FX 5800 Ultra, with a GPU clock of 500MHz. The clock speeds of GPUs are irrelevant unless the architecture is fixed.
This isn't the first time something like this has happened. Everquest (Sony is butt buddies with NVIDIA in regards to this game) runs amazingly fast on my NVIDIA GeForce2MX 220 at 60 fps at 1280x1024 with a lot of details turned on, yet runs like garbage on my ATI Radeon 9700 Pro on a similarly configured system. Sometimes it even becomes a slideshow. I am not the only person to experience this as many other people have complained about it. The unfortunate side to this is that most people complain about the hardware rather than the software.
Now this issue is quite different. There was a write up recently on why NVIDIA hardware is so much slower than ATI hardware when using 2.0 pixel shaders. I don't remember the URL, so if anyone would be so kind to post it that would be great. Basically, it was stating that the Detonator 40 drivers needed to be rewritten to better take advantage of 2.0 pixel shaders. Detonator 50 drivers are a lot faster and fix this problem, but they do reduce image quality quite noticeably. This could be the reason that swayed Valve's decisions.
The fact of the matter is, we need next generation GeForce chips.
IF I get HL2, and I'm not sure I'm willing to fork up $50-$60 for it, it better run well on my system. I've got a nvidia card, and it's not the newest one either. Why nvidia? Simple, I like linux. I'll still run games under windows if I have to but when I go back to linux I want my card to work. So if HL2 or any other game doesn't work on my 32mb nvidia card then I won't buy it. And if paying $50+ for the game is in question then a new card isn't gunna happen.
-Tim Louden
Nice thing, those 9700 pros overclock nicely to bring the scores up, and still doesnt overheat.
Step 1. Produce crap
Step 2. Convince enough people to buy it before they realize its crap
Step 3. Profit
Now, the reason Step 2 is so difficult is that i can always download a demo, try it at the store, test it at a friend's house... etc. A movie pretty much gives you a trailer and that's it. Anywho, the main thrust of what i'm saying is that companies cannot depend on marketing to push sales when there are always other alternatives (think HL2 vs. Doom3 as opposed to a night at the movies vs. (a night at the theatre/opera/Blockbuster?) Games are very easily substituted for one another, while your night watching Gigli or whatever piece of crap is out is not so easily substituted for another activity.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
"We see 'Half-Life 2' as a new benchmark for the type of amazing experiences that can be delivered on the Windows(R) platform, and DirectX 9.0 is clearly serving as the catalyst for the development of these state-of-the-art games," said Dean Lester, general manager of Windows Gaming and Graphics at Microsoft Corp. "'Half-Life 2' emphasizes the trend we are already seeing: Games for Windows now deliver the most cutting-edge technology and immersive entertainment available anywhere."
:)
See here for the full advert
My only new computer is a Mac, and I am thinking about buying a cheapish PC just to play this game (which I will then sell after I'm done and wait for a Mac version).
HL2 is going to provide a nice bump to the whole PC industry, I think. There hasn't been a must-have game like that for a while.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
NVidia has FreeBSD drivers, ATI has not.
Slashdot whines when there is no competition in an industry. Then turns around and whines when there is.
The only thing that will come out of this is better video cards faster and cheaper. All the shenanigans? Who cares. Let the companies duke it out in the marketing sphere. You really cant go wrong with either brand.
So quityerbitchin!
Make it a malt liquor. I want to be as clever and handsome as possible.
Look at all this fuss for a game that none of us have even played and for video cards most people don't even have yet. Why don't we wait two weeks (cross my fingers) to see what's up?
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
But how many games can you list that "work with _nothing_ other" than recent cards? Certainly HalfLife 2 isn't one of them - their stated minimum required gfx card is a TNT. Even Doom 3 will work fine on an original GeForce.
Sure it'll be slower, but you just have to turn down the eye candy (resolution, AA, AF and other visual effects) to make it playable. And you can't complain about not getting the fancy picture on your 1998 hardware (well, you can, but I won't be listening :-)
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Also I noted that, while the beta Det50 image was noticeably worse (darker, more banded, and more pixelated in the yellow stripes on the ship's upper left), the 44.xx and 45.xx images were fine - but the ATi Cat 3.4 and 3.7 images both had pixelated stripes, almost as bad as the 51.75 image. To me that suggests that nVidia can get it right, and it's ATi that needs to lift their driver game.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
"Whatever happened to just making hardware, and making games?"
Whatever happened to the good ole days when people didn't believe everything they heard or read?
I'm just skeptical of an article that says we "heard from a friend of a friend." It's all too speculative, with little evidence of any real wrongdoing. Newel expressed concerns about the drivers that Nvidia was offering. He also said it took three times as long to write the codepath for NVIDIA, implying that they had to account for a lot more problems. If you want to speculate, look at the slides from "shader day."
To qoute: "During the development of that benchmark demo Valve found a lot of issues in current graphic card drivers of unnamed manufacturers:
Camera path-specific occlusion culling
Visual quality tradeoffs e.g. lowered filtering quality, disabling fog
Screen-grab specific image rendering
Lower rendering precision
Algorithmic detection and replacement
Scene-specific handling of z writes
Benchmark-specific drivers that never ship
App-specific and version specific optimizations that are very fragile"
And we know that several of these have been explicitly tied to NVIDIA.
It seem's to me that valve is a company of the people for the people.
Which is why they're going to make owners of the first Half-Life pay monthly to play online, when they've been doing it free since the game came out. It's also why they're going to make you pay a monthly fee to play any of their games on your own network... Methinks you misspelled id.
I bet if you paid Valve enough cash they would say "The Matrox Parhelia is superior in every way to OTHER company cards!!!" I personally am waiting for the game and drivers to actually be released before I declare either, "OMG OMG ATI roxorz!!!!", "OMG OMG OMG NIVIDA Own3d j00!!!"
No GNU has been Hurd during the making of this comment.
What is Linux on the PS2 for?
Please don't spread lies about a monthly fee, really.
Great. Let's stick with Valve's argument here: If the game isn't an official release, it's not appropriate to bench with it.
Oh and regarding honesty... someone should ask Valve how much money they got from ATI to show HL2 at their booth during E3 this year and not NVIDIA's, as it was orginally planned just weeks before the show. This farce has been going on for a while...
What ATI card and drivers are you using? I have a Radeon 9700 and I get massive unstability with the latest (3.2.5) ATI drivers, even though I can't get 3d accel with them. Older drivers (2.9.x) were unstable too, though less so.
On the other hand, I also own an older NVIDIA GeForce2 card and I haven't experienced any unstability at all in Linux since a long time.
NVIDIA's driver packaging is also better. ATI only provides RPMs that I have to extract with rpm2cpio (I use Debian), and NVIDIA has a proper Makefile for their kernel modules.
In my experience, NVIDIA wins the Linux driver competition by far.
-- Repeat with me: "There is no right to profits".
Tomb Raider Angel of Darkness, you ignorant fuck.
Plus Halo has just gone gold and will be here in a couple of weeks.
and since you said "program" and not "gameE, 3dMark2003.
ATI was ALMOST the first to market with a DirectX8.0 card, the ATI Radeon, which supported programmable pixel and vertex shaders when all nVidia had was the Geforce2 GTS. Unfortunately, Microsoft dropped support for the version of the DirectX8.0 API ATI was using, thus dooming the Radeon to be a DirectX7 card and making the Geforce3 the first DirectX8.0 card to market.
ATI WAS the first to market with a DirectX8.1 solution, in the Radeon 8500. The Radeon 8500's Pixel Shader v1.4 was more advanced than any nVidia product until the release of the Geforce FX. The Geforce4 Ti only supported PS1.3, which is significantly less advanced.
ATI WAS the first to market with a DirectX9.0 solution, the Radeon 9700 Pro. nVidia still lags behind, with the Geforce FX offering well below average shader performance even when using their reduced accuracy shader programs.
The best proof of the R300+ platform's superiority is that nVidia's own, in-house developed DirectX9.0 demos run faster and look better on Radeon hardware than on the Geforce FX. If that isn't a damning indictment of the poor quality of the NV30 architecture, I don't know what is.
Here's Valve's problem: They make moddable games. That's at the core of their business. They didn't just make HalfLife as a game (although they did that, and very well) -- they made it as a platform upon which anyone was free to develop their own FPS games: CounterStrike being the most famous, but there are many others, such as Natural Selection or Day of Defeat.
Likewise, they are not just making HalfLife 2, but a platform upon which mods will be made. But why is this relevant to the videocard debate? Here's where we get back to the drivers.
The drivers -- the mythological r50 drivers that noone's actually gotten their hands on yet -- might well provide a speed boost to HL2 as it stands. Maybe. But if they do, it is because they have hand-tuned those drivers for HL2. See Mr Burke's quote:
What he omits is, the best experience possible for the specific subset of vidoecard functionality currently present in HL2 at this time. A little background for those of you who haven't kept up on recent videocard technology: Modern videocards have Vertex Shaders and Pixel Shaders. These are essentially short programs written in assembler (and now a variant on C) that the driver compiles and executes on the videocard, not the CPU (taking load off of it) that customise rendering in various ways. Vertex shaders typically perform lighting, animation or mesh deformation effects, while pixel shaders provide surface material effects, such as water distortion or bump mapping.
ATI's cards appear to be able to handle any pixel shader program you throw at them. Whether this is because the cards are just that fast and general they can cope with it, or whether the compiler in their driver cunningly optimises any GPU program you throw at it (the same way a C compiler optimises CPU code, by reordering instructions to avoid stalls, factoring out loop invariants, etc) we don't know. Frankly, we don't care: The important thing is, we write code, and it works.
NVidia's cards do not work this way. NVidia's cards are fast, but only if you hand-tune your assembler to precisely match their architecture. Except we don't know enough about their rules to do this (proprietary NVidia technology blah blah).
When Valve have written shaders, found them to be fast on ATI cards and slow on NVidia's cards, NVidia have released new drivers and, lo... it's fast on NVidia's cards. NVidia go "hey, uh, our bad... driver bug... fixed now...". But make even a tiny, trivial change to the shader, and bam: it's slow again. With a little more experimentation along these lines, it's easy to come to the conclusion that there was no bug, there is no fix, NVidia simply have a lookup table of shaders they 'recognise', and when one of those comes along, they replace it with one they wrote themselves, hand-tuned for their card.
There's a problem with this, of course. For a start, if you're not as big as Valve, NVidia aren't going to set aside an engineer to go around optimising shaders for your game or release new drivers. Secondly, if you make any changes you're back to square one and need to resubmit your shader to them and get it fixed up. Thirdly, if like Valve you care about modders, you're not going to be happy with this "solution" -- because even once your game is complete and on store shelves, and NVidia have stopped making new driver releases to 'fix' it, modders can make new shaders. And suddenly find their game runs like ass. You think NVidia are going to go chasing after modders? Bwahaha.
I suspect this is why Valve were careful about the benchmarks they let be
If you really read all the articles and understand the subject material you will realize that the problem is that nvidia's pixel shader 2.0 implementation SUCKS. To compensate for this nvidia has been releasing what I would call "cheat" drivers optimized for certain games to make them run faster by lowering the quality. Even The Carmack has said nvidia pixel shader 2.0 has severe speed probs....
http://tinyurl.com/na9o"> http://tinyurl.com/na9o </a>
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
From what little I've read, both companies have fantastic hardware that's rendered useless by software. ATI apears to have an advantage at the moment because it's drivers work with Direct X 9 from Microsoft. If all the best eyecandy is dependent of Microsoft junk, we might start expecting better performance from the free software world with 5 year old equipment.
Microsoft stuff is a pain in the ass. If I want the Nvidia stuff to work well, I have to use Direct X 8? WTF? Can you even have DX8 an DX9 on the same box? Will my next game screw all my old ones? How long will I be able to use my nice new $200 video card with stuff like that going on? In the free software world, things are modularized and live together without a problem. Combine those issues with big fat M$ security problems and you have the reason gaming boards and software are not selling like they used to and the market is never going to grow. Most people would rather spend $200 for a PS/2, which also has awsome hardware, that just works. I know this is the reason I have not bothered with games recently, I'm just not willing to sift through the bullshit to get performance that won't be there after the next Windoze update.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
(SARCASM)
Half-Life 2 won't sell well at all, considering that everyone I know hasn't heard about it.
Yeah, I am ecstatic for the new Dave Mirra game to come out.
(Sarcasm off)
And now I get the news that my Nvidia card sucks ass. This half-life thing is gonna run my budget into the ground. Crap.
Valve and ATI have pulled off an excellent publicity stunt. They could not buy better publicity than this for millions of dollars.
If you just ignore all the marketing bull coming from these companies, than yes, they are just making hardware and making games.
This is, perhaps, just a flip-flop of the "status quo" situation we've had in computing all along.
Game developers were always forced to restrict their development to what the hardware manufacturers gave them to work with. Those willing to "push the limits" by buying the most expensive video hardware they could get their hands on were rewarded by having the games with the most "state of the art" graphics when they finally came out. (Some of you may recall the game publisher, Origin, who was among the first to leverage this strategy to great advantage with the whole "Wing Commander" series and the like.)
Now, video drivers and hardware have gotten so complex, their performance depends *greatly* on how they're implemented by a given software developer. His/her method of coding can "make or break" the reputation of the card. So we have rampant cheating on benchmarks and "under the table" deals with game developers to ensure they "embrace and extend" their particular piece of hardware - so it doesn't fail in the marketplace.
It's not really fair to say that ATI is sleeping with vavle and that Vavle is making optimisations for just ATI cards. Think about it, this is a game company and it wants to get the best customer base, so there are defintely more Nvidia cards then ATI, and besides Valve would gain nothing if they leave out like 70% of what brand of video card the population had. Besides look at the number of games which have the logo "Nvidia the WAy it's meant to be played" I don't see many people complaining about that? Besides the point that still the ATI has a small lead or loss compared to the 5900 ultra in these games (such as UT2003). I both have a geforce 3 ti 200 and a ATI 9800 i must admit, whatever problems ATI had with drivers, they have done a really good job so far (windows drivers of course, i'm not sure about Linux/Unix). And ATI have had a new driver every month Cat 3.7 is the 12th driver so far. Besides it's really hard to say, Nvidia maybe able to catch up with ATI performance- wise in HL2 with their drivers. But as end users it's better to have 2 companies battle it out as this will get them to get better products (and prices down). So until the 50 det drivers arrive and the HL2 benchmark arrives. It's still too early to say.
That is maybe the most moronic statement of the year.
huh?
What kind of yellowpaper conspiracy bullshit is this? Are we supposed to believe that Core/Eidos is in on this too, since the FX cards suck ass at DX9 features in Tomb Raider AOD? How about Bungine/Microsoft/Gearbox, since FX cards have been shown to perform poorly on the new features in Halo PC? Let's see, who else... oh, obviously FutureMark is in on it too, since FX cards can't compete in 3DMark03!
e x. htm
How about doing some research before posting crap like this. According to Valve, nVidia not only put HL2 benchmark-specific hacks in their 5x drivers (like camera-path specific occlusion culling), but they also put hacks in the 5.x 'press beta' that they never intend to release. THAT's Valve's reason for demanding that reviewers only use publicly available drivers.
And for information on NV's "magic" 5x drivers, here are some links:
Driverheaven confirms nVidia 'cheats' in Detonator 5x drivers:
http://www.driverheaven.net/article...mark3/ind
See last page for image quality comparison.
See this for detonator 5x driver improvements:
http://www.athlonmb.com/article-dis...57&PageI D=1
Around 3 fps. WOW
Posting some ignorant fanboy's conspiracy theory e-mail is pretty lame. Yes, ATI and Valve have a business relationship. That certainly does not preclude the fact that FX cards suck at DX9!
You are supposed to say "whitey"
For every annoying gentoo user, are three even more annoying anti-gentoo crybabies. Take Yosh from #Gimp for example.
...it still just lacks the pure numbers of Windows, or even Mac.
Ah, the wisdom of Lord Dreamer!
Not quite sure how you make the case for dropping development of Linux drivers, on the grounds of a "BAD BUSINESS IDEA". I have these observetions:First would be that of Atari & Bioware's business model. Neverwinter client was Linux beta LONG before the Mac. Even now, Shadows of Undrentide is available for Windows and Linux as non-beta, but not at all for the Mac.
Be it NWN, Quake, or foobar, the best games designed for networked play come with, surprise surprise, Linux servers.Looking at some of our website stats for browsers used (UK-Jive, >1,000 page visits per day), I get the following:
- 0.3 % - Win 3.1
- 1.0 % - Win 95
- 1.4 % - Win NT
- 1.4 % - Mac
- 4.0 % - Linux
- 4.5 % - Win ME
- 10.9 % - Win 2000
- 18.2 %- Win 98
- 22.8 % - Win XP
So we have Linux more popular than the Mac, and even in direct competition with Win NT and ME (and before you lump all the Windows platforms together, remember that most of them require seperate drivers). So, in summary, there are no hard feelings. The Linux platform is no longer a minority, and R+D on the platform is time and money well spent. As soon as hardcore gamers realise that their game will run faster under an optimised Linux platform than Windows (if drivers and clients are available), then you will see an explosive growth in the Linux market. This, however, is dependant purely upon the synergy between ATI / NVIDIA / whatever, and the companies with a realistic view such as Bioware.Okay, I tell ya what... You take a single AND gate able to switch at 2000Mhz, and I'll pull out my old 16Mhz 386. Which is going to be able to do real computations faster?
A PC capabile of playing HL2 at, well, half-power should be dirt cheap - and then I'll use it as a file server probably instead of sell it, which is a little rediculous come to think of it.
:-)
And if you're wrong about that, then your siding with VI might be equally mistaken...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This is no great mystery and no surprise in the graphics community, this is the bloody break everyone has been waiting for! The FX's shortcomings have been known for quite some time and have been analysized/discussed to death within the quiet confines of such places as www.beyond3D.com and www.nvnews.net, in fact the latter site's mods/admins are the ones who are shutting up the remaining nVidiots who seem to still think this is some big conspiracy.
;) )
It IS a conspiracy, but entirely of nVidia's own doing and creation...their hardware simply can't do DX9 well as it was never designed to. There's many reasons for this, but it mainly comes down to nVidia tried to redefine the standards of the graphics industry and failed and now are paying the consequences for their hubris.
The only thing surprising here is the size of Gabe Newell's balls to come out and directly address this in such a fashion, and I truly respect and admire him for it. He HAD to, the game is going to come out and if he didn't customers would be blaiming him and Valve for FX's shortcomings!
I'm terribly disapointed in the coverage I've seen of this on slashdot, I really thought you folks would be able to appreciate the subtle (and not so subtle) aspects of a giant company that has been resting on it's laurels and using PR fud to make up for it's hardware's shortcomings...it's just now there is really a game coming out that will highlight this and the rest of the world seems to be noticing it.
There is excellent coverage of this at www.beyond3d.com for in depth analysis, and www.nvnews.net has the best of the fanboys/ex-fanboys discussing it. (Our team at www.elitebastards.com is still the best at keeping up with all the latest stories though...
- "When I say dance, you'd best DANCE motherf*cker!" -Violent Femmes
GeforceFX - The dawn of cinematic computing starts here. (Actually, it started with the R300 - maybe nVidia forgot to set their alarm. Or perhaps it's just the time zone difference between California and Canada. Still the sun continues to shine). All current indicators (not that there are many) shows that the ATI's cards are the best of the bunch, and nVidia have had a bad year what with dubious driver optimizations and inferior image quality / performance. They're really struggling to save face and it's a nice change to see the tables turned. NV40 had better be a big improvement.
Where have you people been the last year?
Year in and year out for some time nVidia have been the market leader. Why? Because they followed the old Intel route of boosting the clock speeds... and they carefully followed Id software. If it ran Id games, it would be a winner.
Except, this time they cocked up. They reckoned Doom 3 was the future, that this would be the game to design for. So they did, they put together a red hot DirectX 8 piece of hardware that worked well with all the things Doom 3 needed (stencil shadows!)... what they failed to see was:
1. ATi had a good chip in the wings, the R300
2. That DirectX 9 would be seen in action within a mere nine months of release.
The R300 was a bit of a shock to nVidia, a DX9 part that kicked ass at DX 8 as well. Well, this sent them scurrying back to the drawing board and ended with them ramping up the speed (hence the dust buster the first FX card had) and tacking on a bunch of DX 9 stuff the card was never designed to handle... hence the crap shader performance.
Of course, nVidia being nVidia they require a lot of specific code for their card... again, another advantage ATi has is that they follow the standard DX9 spec AND the standard ARB2 path. You can't optimise for an R300 card, it follows the standard paths!! That's the whole point of standards, the developers don't need to mess around with writing for hardware, they write for one path and it just works... but this isn't the case with nVidia hardware.
Once nVidia realised what a mistake they'd made, then came the cheats. The first of which was inserted clip planes (among other things) in 3DMark03. This was documented by FutureMark, and a patched issued to stop the problem. Of course, sometime went on in the background (leaks since then indicate that nVidia leaned on FutureMark), leading to a new statement that in fact nVidia had optimised for their benchmark and that this was all fine and dandy... ATi by comparison had a single "optimisation" in the benchmark, which didn't change visual output, which they withdrew (and admitted to) after online outcry. nVidia continued to deny any wrongdoing.
Of course, what this benchmark had shown was that nVidia DX 9 (specifically shader performance) was abysmal. Their followed a long campaign of "use games, not benchmarks", trying to make people believe that 3DMark03 was useless. People had been warned for MONTHS that the FX range was a poor performer, and they stuck fingers in their ears and hummed louder.
Of course, this just went on. nVidia have been caught cheating further on, to name a few:
3DMark03
ShaderMark
Unreal Tournament 2003
Splinter Cell
In every case they lower visual quality to gain frames. Even the latest Tomb Raider Angel of Darkness patch has been withdrawn after apparent nVidia leanings.
So, you see, this is not some dark conspiracy, this is something that has been building for months. Valve are pissed that they have had to spend five times as long writing for a card who's performance is STILL crap, and that nVidia PR has speant months deceiving consumers by cheating time and time again on benchmarks used across the industry.
I can't be bothered to type more. So much has happened, and every, I repeat, EVERY incident has painted nVidia in a bad light, and time and time again ATi have risen above it and come out on top... they haven't put in a single optimisation since the 3DMark03 issue was raised.
This isn't a case of taking a both positions and seeing the middle as the area where the truth comes out, the simple fact is that nVidia really have been screwing everyone for a year. A YEAR!
Anyone who had followed events would know this (and this is the tip of the iceberg, there is so much more)... yet instead so many are willing to believe the drivel in the original post.
Read www.beyond3d.com There is no better place for a history of everything that has happened.