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."
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.