Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Demophobe]

NOw that HL2 is released, and Doom3 has come and gone, a few issues have come to light.

HL2 is running exceptionally well on ATI hardware, and many an Nvidiot is having a number of issues playing the game on their shiny new 6800. Doom3 needed a 3rd party shader code replacement for ATI users in order to get a 10 to 20% perfomance boost out of their systems, as opposed to Nvidia users who had a great experience right out of the box.

Now, with the rise of the NForce chipset from Nvidia causing problems for some ATI users and with ATI now entering the chipset world (will Nvidia users have the same problems?), it's getting to the point where gamers are having to choose sides.

Let's face it; it's gaming and gamers that push graphics tech along to create better and faster cards. The goal of 1600x1200, 8xAA, 16xAF gaming is now attainable, and its now monitors that are becoming the bottleneck for higher resolutions, not the graphics cards themselves.

The leaders in the graphics world have changed over the years, but in the past when we were all drooling over a 16MB Voodoo, we didn't have to worry about one thing; would it run a particular game as well as another card.

Now, one has to ask themselves what games they want to play before buying a card. If you want to play HL2, ATI is the clear choice because Valve were working closely with ATI during the 5 year development of the game. Doom3 is an Nvidia game, as Id software also had a long-standing relationship with Nvidia (Carmack basically designed the card for them).

If buying a new motherboard from ATI or Nvidia, one also has to consider the graphics card, or so it seems. It is silly for either company to exclude the other's users through having Nvidia cards functioning less than desirably, as it's money lost in the end. Why should ATI users have problems if they want to use an Nvidia chipset? Will Nvidia users have the same problems if they want the new ATI chipset?

Looking at benchmarks for the latest and greatest offerings from ATI and Nvidia, one can clearly see that some titles are owned by ATI, and others by Nvidia. The 9800Pro, a two-year-old card, is besting the latest from Nvidia on a rare occasion in certain titles. This is absurd!

Who does this small war for consumers loyalty hurt? The consumer. Gone are the days when "it just works"...there are so many issues now when looking into buying a new piece of graphics hardware, it can really freak the novice buyer out of their shirts.

Of course, I am speaking of people who could be termed "geeks" or at least "geek-ish" in their research and knowledge before throwing $700 out the window for one card. There are those who don't know so much, and just buy it and are happy. These are the people who I feel are real victims in this.

They buy a new system, trusting the brand-names to deliver an impartial product, good for all purposes and all titles. They get home, fire up Doom3 on their new ATI X800PE, and get a slideshow, or glitchy gameplay. They fire up HL2 and it's smooth as silk. Thus, they have a negative opinion of Doom3, and think HL2 is a better game. If they do a ton of research and crawl around inside game folders, copying and pasting code lines, updating driver while in their "beta" stage and doing all kinds of other things that a novice would wince at, Doom3 will run well.

This is wrong. The politics of gaming has gotten out of hand, and it's the consumer who pays the company's salaries that is the victim.

ATI and Nvidia have not chosen to unify a number of issues that for the consumer, would make buying a new card simply a matter of choice. Who has the nicer box? Who has a better software bundle? Who offers better support? These are normal questions, and used to be the ones asked when purchasing a new card. Sure, speed has always been paramount, but not on such a macro level. It wasn't title-specific.

Anyways, what do you think? Has the politics gotten out of control? Should an ATI user have to choose titles based on who ATI supports in development? Should Nvidia write the next API, as they tried to do with DX8, but were passed by ATI in their smugness toward Microsoft?

We pay big money for these products and they should just work...out of the box.

Was this a rant? Yes, but couched in questions.

Trying to help a few people lately really made me realize the quandry of the consumer. It's a really tough choice these days, with people asking new, unusual questions; "I want to play Doom3. Which card is best?"

Strange to me.

[SuperFly]

This is why I will only buy console games from now on.

[Bulsajo]

[Demophobe]

Another example (and an interesting story) was what happened during the Nvidia 5xxx series of cards.

When the NV35 or GeForce3 came about, Nvidia was undisputedly the king of the 3D market. They enjoyed huge success with Voodoo gone, S3 fading and ATI producing competant, but overall inferior chips. This carried through to the GF4 line, which was a small reworking of the GF3 core, and they owned the DX8 market.

DX is a graphics API produced by Microsoft for the Windows platform. It was a kind of unified instruction set for developers to write for, giving a universality to Windows PC gaming/gamers.

At the time of the GF3/4, Nvidia was sittling on top of the DX API through their hardware, and they felt as though they pretty much were going to dictate what Microsoft were going to do with DX9. This would have been true, if they had not been so smug and secure in their beliefs.

They were absent from all of the DX9 development meetings, believing that their NV codepath would be adopted by Microsoft, or that DX9 would at least be written with them in mind through the entire process. Well, it didn't come to be, and guess who snuck into the meetings? ATI.

They were there through the entire process and little did Nvidia know, but the DX9 API was being developed in a totally different direction than Nvidia believed. Nvidia had their next generation almost taped out by the time the meetings for DX9 ended, and when they found out that ATI were making the perfect core for the job, they were faced with a lose/lose situation.

They could either scrap their entire line of what were doomed to be under-performing cards, and lose all of the development money, as well as any retail sales that would go to the only pther produced out there; ATI. Well, they weren't going to have that, so they fabbed and marketed hugely inferior chips. Chips that were running super hot, underperforming in any DX8 title, and wouldn't handle the DX9 codepath well at all.

The consumers were duped, and when Nvidia halted production of these horrid beasts at 100,000, the public outcry was huge. They were lambasted from all sides; reviewers, shareholders and customers. All because they believed that they were a giant that couldn't be ignored.

ATI meanwhile, had a killer card; the 9700Pro. This card was the giant-killer that nobody saw coming, least of all Nvidia. This core is still being re-worked today in their X800 line, and is proving to be one of the greatest cores produced in 3D graphics history.

I guess this tale isn't so much to do with the OP, but it's a good example of how exclusive these companies think they are, and how Nvidia, through selling such a garbage card, has no scruples or value in their regard towards the customers.

This comes back to us as how companies are trying to make us decide by forcing their hand; they work with the biggest developers to ensure that their cards will be up to snuff, and be the best, if not only, answer to playing certain games.

Thankfully, Microsoft are still developing their DX API without much external influence. This is the single thread that will hold all of the producers to a subtle single-mindedness regarding their hardware, and gives us some guarantee that whichever card we choose, it will work to some degree.

Without this "unification", who knows what would happen? 2 companies writing their own exclusive APIs, forcing us to choose both cards and games...the competition's products just wouldn't run the game at all. The NV codepath would be solely Nvidia's, and devs would write for that, leaving ATI customers out of the loop, or at best, stuck with a 3rd-party set of instructions to convert code paths through software, killing the speed and benefit of the card.

Id software still code in OpenGL, which is in opposition to MS's DX API. It used to be vastly superior, but the DX API has come a long way. Personally, I still like OGL as opposed to DX, but I thank goodness that MS have kept DX alive, as it has served as a bit of a leash to keep these grahic dogs on and at bay.

[Bulsajo]

The timing and the subject of this thread is perfect, as I was going to start a thread on the following article but it fits in here nicely:

[mack the knife]

[Bulsajo]

[dogbert]

A game like GTA:San Andreas is really as much a film as it is a game. If you would not want your children to watch a film containing liberal use of the "N word" , or the type of language/situations portrayed in rap music and ghetto films, don't let them play it and don't play it in front of them.

But don't censor it or make it unavailable.

[Bulsajo]

[kprrok]

[Demophobe]

Hijack alert.....

I think we are talking about different politics Bulsajo....

[Bulsajo]

Yes, well, maybe I should have gone ahead and started a new thread, but to my mind at the time I posted it did seem to be pertinent given the thread title...

You could always ask a mod to split the thread.