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."

Comments

Competition is usually good for the consumer

[bugnuts]

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.

Re:Cross platform compatibility

[DrEldarion]

Does anyone really have a justification for more than 50fps?

People try to justify it, saying they can notice a difference, but personally I think that's a load of bull.

There is a reason for those hyper-powerful graphics cards, though. Go play a game like Final Fantasy XI at full detail in 1600x1200 with full antialiasing and ansiotropic filtering - simply breathtaking. You need one HELL of a lot of hardware to back something like that up, though.

Re:So, this is what I'm getting out of that:

[PainKilleR-CE]

The article also made a few other things fairly clear, though:

1) nVidia has fewer hard-wired limitations on the complexity of the code being run and the accuracy of the calculations being made, though each could come at the cost of speed if used heavily

2) nVidia might be easier to develop for under OpenGL because you have better access to the hardware, whereas DirectX9 in certain areas tends to more closely follow the ATI hardware (which was available to developers and MS before DirectX9 was complete)

3) As the two companies progress, the performance difference will diminish as nVidia's drivers are more heavily optimized and both manufacturers release new hardware which, on nVidia's side, means more speed to throw at the existing feature set, and on ATI's side improvements in the feature set to better leverage improvements in the speed of the hardware.

In other words, this is the closest things have ever been in this particular race, and neither company is out of it yet. The winner won't be determined by the current crop of games or hardware, but instead by what developers (and the 2 manufacturers) do after UT2004, Doom 3, and Half-Life 2.