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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.
What my Rendition Verite card is old now? Come on guys, is this difference really that much at all?
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
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.
The problem lies in the way the FX deals with Pixel Shader 2.0 instructions. AFAIK, the ATI card follows DirectX standards pretty well and the Microsoft DirectX compiler will produce code that the 9800 will process quickly. ATI's drivers can rearrange the pixel shader commands a little bit to improve performance.
The Geforce FX processes PS2.0 instructions in a whole different way. Using Microsoft's compiler produces slow code when using PS2.0. Nvidia still doesn't have a JIT compiler in their drivers to reorder the PS2.0 instructions for maximum performance. The Detonator 50 series drivers are supposed to fix this. How well it's fixed is still up in the air.
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
But then.. ATI hasn't always given a shit about OpenGL, while NVIDIA has.
"And thats why I'm with NVIDIA"