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NVidia Fight Back Against ATI At Editor's Day
Thanks to FiringSquad for their feature covering NVidia's recent editor's day, discussed in context of the graphics card company's continuing rivalry with ATI. The writer suggests: "It's become rather trendy to bash NVIDIA lately. People like winners and people love underdogs. ATI is both right now - they've climbed their way out of the abyss and even disregarding the NV30 production delays, their timetable was catching up to NVIDIA's." But, after an interview with Tim Little at Ion Storm Austin and technical questions answered by Tim Sweeney of Epic, the writer concludes: "What the benchmarks have proven is that NVIDIA's hardware is as fast as ATI's, depending on the game. Yes, it does take more work - NVIDIA admitted as much. The NV3X platform isn't as easy to program fast as R300 and R350 are."
Were I a game developer, I have the option of supporting ATI, which produces fine performance and is easy to develop for, and nVidia, which produces find performance and is a pain to develop for.
I can see already that I would terribly unenthused about working on nVidia specific performance enhancements.
Canthros
argh, original article /.'ed.
NVidia got some very unexpected competition while sitting on their laurels. I think that this was a real wake-up call and lesson for them, not in the realm of technology so much, but in the realm of promotion and advertising. Their FUD actually got turned on them, and hard, when drivers were shown to be tuned for benchmarks and such.
However, once they accepted ATI as a real contender, it seems they started working on their technology again, instead of whiny press releases and bad pr.
And though consumers took a hit with hastily-released drivers and hardware, it looks like things are turning around for the good of us.
Given the lack of control over the end user environment, and the general capability of modern cards, one wonders if it is worth trying to squeeze the 1M frames a second out by writing vendor specific code or if its better to go for minimal extensions to the standard API to enhance compatibility. Does anyone really have a justification for more than 50fps?
Asmo
I always gathered that ATI was best for DirectX, and NVIDIA best for OpenGL, though that might be wrong. Surely though regardless of what is easy to program for, simple raw performance under GL/DX is pretty important, for all the apps that dont optimise for the major graphics cards?
Does anyone really have a justification for more than 50fps?
50 is sort of a silly number - most people have their refresh at 60 or 72. To a seasoned FPS gamer, 60 is distinguishable from 50. Whether 130 is distinguishable from 120 is another question - the answer to which is definitely no, even if you had a monitor capable of such silliness.
However, these numbers are really not what we're worried about a lot of the time - we're worried about absolute minimum framerate. Often a game will be chugging along at 51, then hit 11 right when the player wants fine control. It sometimes takes a rather large average framerate score to yield a game that plays smoothly at all times.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
ATI is just the best all around. Modern Radeon series cards can render faster with better image quality than Geforce FX cards, regardless of API or rendering features in use.
To be fair, it was their turn I guess. Next year it will be NVidia's turn no doubt. The person that busted them this time was Tom at Tom's Hardware Guide.
The accusations leveled against ATi at NVIDIA's Editors' Day two days ago thus become that much more serious. Epic's Mark Rein confirmed that in some cases, high-res detail textures were not displayed in some areas by ATis drivers and that standard, lower-res textures are used instead. Randy Pitchford of the Halo development team also mentioned that there were optimizations present in ATi's drivers which are detrimental to Halo's image quality.
The relevant link is here.
Now that NVidia seems to be the image quality kings and owning the mid-range card market again with the FX5700 Ultra, It makes me wonder how the ATI performance would measure up if they didn't cheat.
For every annoying gentoo user, are three even more annoying anti-gentoo crybabies. Take Yosh from #Gimp for example.
As I recall, visual research indicates that humans can successfully discern fluid motion from frame based motion up until about 400fps. Of course, no one has a monitor that goes up that high, but still, the point stands.
I did try to find a cite, the closest I could find was this page which notes that framerates of 220fps have been proven distinguishable.
An excerpt from ATI's Response to recent allegations of benchmark cheating
AquaMark3: We are currently investigating our rendering in AquaMark3. We have identified that we are rendering an image that is slightly different than the reference rasterizer, but at this point in time we are unable to identify why that is. We believe that this does not have any impact on our performance. Our investigation will continue to identify the cause and resolve it as soon as possible. One point to note is that we render the same image using our latest driver (CATALYST 3.8) as we do with a driver that pre-dates the release of Aquamark3 by almost six months (CATALYST 3.2). Also, in all of our dealings with the developer of Aquamark3, at no point have they advised us that they are unsatisfied with the images that we are rendering. We do not have any application specific optimizations in our driver and we are not cheating in this application.
As many are aware of, Tomshardware is the "Weekly World News" of the computer world. The only consistent factor in their reporting is the misleading nature of their articles. Furthermore, describing any Geforce FX as an "image quality king" is an outright lie, as image quality is noticeably worse than a Radeon even on the games that ATI supposedly "cheats" at. Go look at some screenshots for yourself if you doubt this. nVidia has still not stopped cheating, as their cards still will not enable Trilinear filtering, even when requested by the game and enabled in the drivers. nVidia's recent driver upgrades that purported to increase Pixel Shader 2.0 performance merely drastically reduced image quality, still failing to achieve performance parity with ATI products.
Nice try, though.
I would never have guessed it would be that high. I'd like to see the experimental apparatus - not because I doubt the results, but because I'd be interested to see how this was implemented.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
Perhaps nVidia could spend more of their valuable time fixing the bugs in their OpenGL drivers, and less of it whining.
For example, I'd appreciate it if they could fix it so on my GeForce 4MX, antialiased lines with width >1 pixel draw properly, rather than being drawn as width 1 lines with no antialiasing. You know, little details like that.
I know I'm hardly likely to spend time trying to use nVidia-only optimizations when even core OpenGL doesn't work properly.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
So, the article seems to think that after the next gen of games (farcry, d3, HL2) NVIDIA's hardware might be gaining a performance edge if developers decide to put extra work into programming for their cards.
That's all very nice, but last I checked by the time those games and their wonderful exngines are available the next gen of cards, R420 & NV40 will be released.
Also, NVIDIA has stated that they will be cutting back on driver releases to one or two a year. So you can either enjoy your games now. Or buy a card and say, "In 9-12months this generation card will beat your card of the same generation"
Makes no sense. Buy the card that has the best support on your system and runs your games the fastest for the best bang/buck ratio. (9600XT right now by the way $200 for the card & a copy of HL2)
If programmers wanted a card that was complex to design for but gave them power they would've pushed 3DLabs P10 which was fully programmable.
HAHAHHA some dumbass that forked out a gabillion dollars for a radeon 9 million modded this perfectly balanced and unbiased post as a troll.
And a Nvidia fanboy who paid for a card by a company lies to and cheats its customers is claiming that they are unbiassed?
See, but it's not just that nVidia can be as fast as ATI in some games...
ATI cards are quiet, take up one slot, and now in some cases can get all necessary power from the AGP.
They even freaking overclock themselves.
So who's got the better engineers?
Keep this phrase in mind. I've owned nVidia cards back to the GeForce2 MX (although I'm sure many of you go back farther than that), but the point is, I'm no fanboy when I have negative things to say about NV30+ architecture. It just doesn't have the DX9 horsepower. The high-end cards score quite well in 3DMark03 despite this, which I cannot account for without making shaky claims. However, NV30+ simply falls on its face when forced to do pure DX9 gaming environment instructions, particularly with the latest Lara Croft game, Max Payne 2, and Half-Life 2. I hope the NV40 line turns the tables, because we've been waiting a long time for a definitive answer to the 9700 Pro, which even ATI has not clearly toppled, IMO. But I would not count nVidia out. Recall where ATI was shortly before the 9700 Pro: nowhere important. nVidia has huge R&D behind them, and once they've managed to move the slow beast on their manpower in the right direction, you better look out. This is the company that made the Ti4200, which stood as the best band for the buck for a long, long time and can still manage most games with aplomb.
You nvidia fanboys need put in your place. Your company is dead. It's over. You can't defend them anymore. They are dead dead dead dead dead. Only a shit for brains would buy nvidia now. ATI is the best. ATI cards are 3 times faster than the best nvidia cards. That's the truth. Get over it. So you get modded troll. Hopefully some more mods will mod this bullshit ATI bashing post down also. Get rid of your toy GEEEFARCE and get a fucking radeon you twit.
nVidia chose not to go to the initial meetings on DX9...That was their loss. DX9 has Y amount of features...designing in any more are just wasted space because the chip is out-of-date in 9 months anyway! In a sense they got bit by their own gringing machine. ATI was catching up, and nVidia management lost the chance to keep pushing the specs...ATI turned down the heat just enough for them to come out on top RIGHT NOW...
But this is just 1 round...Aside from what nVidia did to 3DFX, ATI is just gaining some turf back. What NOBODY is saying is that it's not R350 & GFX duking it out anyway...it's the built in stuff [compaq, HP, etc] the el-cheapos that are still buying TNT & 128 [should be banned I say!] where both companies sell their units. The stuff we play with is just icing on the procuct lines. This is just one round in the long-term match...but it serves to keep nVidia honest...and that's a good thing!
THG has had a poor reputation for years now. I personally don't trust his site. I know that many, if not most, feel the same way. You may find your arguments more successful if you avoid mentioning THG as a source.
I will never buy another ATI card, unless they are the last video card company left on earth.
I was repeatedly burned by them with how quickly they would drop support for their older cards once they came out with a newer product line.
Their included video tuner/capture software was bloated and poorly designed, and their drivers were constantly failing me.
This was about five years ago. I do not intend to change my mind despite any improvments they've made. They *really* pissed me off back then with constant crashes and no helpful support.
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