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Saboteur Launch Plagued By Problems With ATI Cards
An anonymous reader writes "So far, there are over 35 pages of people posting about why EA released Pandemic Studios' final game, Saboteur, to first the EU on December 4th and then, after knowing full well it did not work properly, to the Americas on December 8th. They have been promising to work on a patch that is apparently now in the QA stage of testing. It is not a small bug; rather, if you have an ATI video card and either Windows 7 or Windows Vista, the majority (90%) of users have the game crash after the title screen. Since the marketshare for ATI is nearly equal to that of Nvidia, and the ATI logo is adorning the front page of the Saboteur website, it seems like quite a large mistake to release the game in its current state."
It sounds like the developers choose to use the fastest and most reliable Windows version available for development.
As an avid non-gamer, mostly because PC gaming sucks and console gaming is too costly, I have to say, this is why console gaming is where it's at.
Now, if they'd standardize on an architecture and throw a hardware abstraction layer into the mix, each new iteration of a console would be backward compatible with the old (X-Box seems to be pretty damned close), and the major complaint used by PC gamers to justify their sickness will be void. Once your new machine can do everything your old machine could do, PC gaming no longer has that advantage; upgrading your console no longer means having to keep the old or lose those games.
Console gaming FTW, from a non-biased non-gamer who's able to see both sides.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
So, your card is "working flawlessly", and yet you still have to update it twice per week? Wonder why ...
On I side note, the last nVidia I had was a mayor PITA ... several games (actually, all, which isn't many) always froze up within a couple minutes of gameplay, unless I cleanly rebooted my XP machine first ... (and that was after a fresh install, too!) Switched to an ATI card which was less power-hungry, only slightly slower, passively cooled, and cheaper, and haven't had any problems since ... and that is without the need to update the drivers constantly in the hope if finally getting the stuff to work ...
Sorry for the doublepost, but I should note that nvidia deserves credit for keeping their closed driver up-to-date, and fixing issues quickly when KDE4 turned up bottlenecks in some rarely-used features. However, the future does not lie in closed-source drivers.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.