QuotePosted on Friday, 3 October, 2003 by Hexus:
We have just had a look at the QTR4 earnings for ATi, and there was a sum mentioned in it which confirms the payment to Valve.
"A non-recurring charge of about $6.0 million, consisting of incentive compensation and other charges associated with the signing of a development agreement"
Whilst we know that every company works closely with developers - NVIDIA with EA for example this is something which you guys really need to keep your eyes on. It is similar to optimised drivers for certain games like Quake3 - if you play Quake3 this is great for you. Buy the hardware which runs the games YOU want to play.
So if you want to be 'optimised' for Valve software then ATI will probably run Valve games better. Then again, isn't Valve the same company that have only ever issued one game and have yet to release a second? Maybe the headline should have been "ATI runs nonexistent Valve software faster than nVidia".
TL.
I read an interesting article last week from a pretty pissed off NVidia exec. All of Nvidias work at the mo is on the 50.xx series of drivers. Allegedly these are designed to improve a lot of FX performance (the card and chip were designed to be programmable so you can change the way things work in software). They are particularly working on the shader engine.
Obviously I do not know how much of this is bull and how much is true but it is true that the GPU/card is programmable in this way and NV have a decent track record in performance improvement through drivers so I'll wait and see.
I still think that at the end of the day the ATI will beat it but wo can say why - there seems to be a lot of dirty tricks and smoke 'n' mirrors in the graphics world just now.
And for once it is NVidia being brought down by their own dirty tricks. You can't get away from that the card isn't made for DX9. Now NVidia will try and salvage what reputation they have by releasing new drivers. They should focus on releasing a REAL card instead of ripping the customers of their money.
I say go ATI and kick NVidia where it hurts while you can. :P
Found the article:
http://www.neoseeker.com/news/story/2767/ (http://www.neoseeker.com/news/story/2767/)
My post was simply an 'of note' post, not trying to hype up an nVidia v ATI argument. FWIW I actually think that ATI are on the better path at the moment. I was a huge nVidia fan, but they seemed to lose their way from about GF4 and onwards. Up until that point (the GF3) they were market leaders - my last nVidia purchase was a GF3-Ti500, but now I buy ATI. In terms of bangs per buck you can't beat them IMHO.
The problem is that ATI and nVidia have gone down different paths in the development of the GPUs. This 'split' happened at a time when PCs reached a stage where the emphasis was no longer on frames per second, but on 'eye-candy', ie image quality. My GF3-Ti500 can give me 100fps in CS which is what was then the main issue - 'how many frames per second can I get with this card' was what everybody was asking. But nowadays the questions has changed - it is assumed that *all* cards will give good fps and so the focus is on picture quality. It is on this fundamental difference that nVidia falls down.
When nVidia launched the NV34 (in the fx5200) and the NV31 (in the fx5600) both gfx cards came out with only 4 pixel pipelines, as a result, the chip has had to do without IntelliSample. They also came up short with the memory interface where they put in what is arguably GF4 technology, meaning that you could expect a big loss in fps when you turned on FSAA and anisotropic filtering. This was earlier this year when they were already behind the faster GPUs and 8 pipelines of the top ATI 9700 cards (and the 9500's that you could flash to soft open the extra 4 pipelines to make it 8 in total). Hardly a resounding response to the competition from nVidia.
nVidia had to make software tweaks to their drivers to run a 32-bit DX9 piece of software (HL2) because their own hardware couldn't cope with the full DX9 requirements. The result is that in order to keep up a playable level of fps they had to make changes to their drivers to run some of the 32 bit shading as 16 bit shading. Now they argue that this degradation of processing quality will not mean any loss of picture quality in HL2. OK, maybe that's true in this instance, but what about the next game that is around the corner? Are they going to issue tweaked drivers for that too? Will you have to roll back to your CS driver and then reinstall a Quake4 driver when you swap games? Sorry, this just doesn't wash.
ATI still has a hardware design that is better able to cope with DX9 games without the need to run optimised drivers (optimised in this case being tweaked to run a specific game better).
Now colour me cynical if you will, but this tells me they got it wrong at the hardware design stage. nVidia have been behind since the ATI 9000 series came out and have not yet caught up. When they do I'll be one of the first to shout about it - I don't care so much about who makes the gfx card I own, just whether or not is does the job I bought it to do.
After the orally invasive vacuum cleaner previously known as the fx5800 was launched (it was too expensive, too slow and too loud) nVidia have just started to catch up with their fx5900 Ultra - but they want almost £400 for it compared to £280 for an ATI 9800Pro. No sale!
nVidia has only managed to close the performance gap by moving to a 0.13 process with a 450MHz GPU and 435MHz RAM. But ATI have pulled their better performance out of an older and soon to be replaced 0.15micron process with a 380MHz GPU and 340MHz RAM. I wonder just how much better their new process GPUs will be?
The choice is simple - a good ATI card will run DX9 games fast without any tweaking. NVIDIA´s FX cards rely on optimised code paths or drivers. So if you are going to spend some money on a new gfx card which one would you go for? Do you trust nVidia to release new driver optimisations for new games as they come along? Remember that they have been working with Valve for a very long time on HL2, so why has it taken the release of driver performance figures with the R45 driver to get them to say 'woops, sorry, but the R45 drivers we gave Valve are not our best, our new R50 drivers are meant to be the really good ones but we're still workign on them'. Sorry, but nVidia had enough time, they had their chance and imo they blew it.
Food for thought.
TL.
*chomp*
Looks to me like the FX series were rushed, just so that Nvidia could have *something* to challenge the 9700 series. And basicly they screwed it up. God save ATI.