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

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.

Seems ATI got busted cheating again

[Sevn]

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.