Comment What a load of drivel (Score 1) 412
Where have you people been the last year?
Year in and year out for some time nVidia have been the market leader. Why? Because they followed the old Intel route of boosting the clock speeds... and they carefully followed Id software. If it ran Id games, it would be a winner.
Except, this time they cocked up. They reckoned Doom 3 was the future, that this would be the game to design for. So they did, they put together a red hot DirectX 8 piece of hardware that worked well with all the things Doom 3 needed (stencil shadows!)... what they failed to see was:
1. ATi had a good chip in the wings, the R300
2. That DirectX 9 would be seen in action within a mere nine months of release.
The R300 was a bit of a shock to nVidia, a DX9 part that kicked ass at DX 8 as well. Well, this sent them scurrying back to the drawing board and ended with them ramping up the speed (hence the dust buster the first FX card had) and tacking on a bunch of DX 9 stuff the card was never designed to handle... hence the crap shader performance.
Of course, nVidia being nVidia they require a lot of specific code for their card... again, another advantage ATi has is that they follow the standard DX9 spec AND the standard ARB2 path. You can't optimise for an R300 card, it follows the standard paths!! That's the whole point of standards, the developers don't need to mess around with writing for hardware, they write for one path and it just works... but this isn't the case with nVidia hardware.
Once nVidia realised what a mistake they'd made, then came the cheats. The first of which was inserted clip planes (among other things) in 3DMark03. This was documented by FutureMark, and a patched issued to stop the problem. Of course, sometime went on in the background (leaks since then indicate that nVidia leaned on FutureMark), leading to a new statement that in fact nVidia had optimised for their benchmark and that this was all fine and dandy... ATi by comparison had a single "optimisation" in the benchmark, which didn't change visual output, which they withdrew (and admitted to) after online outcry. nVidia continued to deny any wrongdoing.
Of course, what this benchmark had shown was that nVidia DX 9 (specifically shader performance) was abysmal. Their followed a long campaign of "use games, not benchmarks", trying to make people believe that 3DMark03 was useless. People had been warned for MONTHS that the FX range was a poor performer, and they stuck fingers in their ears and hummed louder.
Of course, this just went on. nVidia have been caught cheating further on, to name a few:
3DMark03
ShaderMark
Unreal Tournament 2003
Splinter Cell
In every case they lower visual quality to gain frames. Even the latest Tomb Raider Angel of Darkness patch has been withdrawn after apparent nVidia leanings.
So, you see, this is not some dark conspiracy, this is something that has been building for months. Valve are pissed that they have had to spend five times as long writing for a card who's performance is STILL crap, and that nVidia PR has speant months deceiving consumers by cheating time and time again on benchmarks used across the industry.
I can't be bothered to type more. So much has happened, and every, I repeat, EVERY incident has painted nVidia in a bad light, and time and time again ATi have risen above it and come out on top... they haven't put in a single optimisation since the 3DMark03 issue was raised.
This isn't a case of taking a both positions and seeing the middle as the area where the truth comes out, the simple fact is that nVidia really have been screwing everyone for a year. A YEAR!
Anyone who had followed events would know this (and this is the tip of the iceberg, there is so much more)... yet instead so many are willing to believe the drivel in the original post.
Read www.beyond3d.com There is no better place for a history of everything that has happened.
Year in and year out for some time nVidia have been the market leader. Why? Because they followed the old Intel route of boosting the clock speeds... and they carefully followed Id software. If it ran Id games, it would be a winner.
Except, this time they cocked up. They reckoned Doom 3 was the future, that this would be the game to design for. So they did, they put together a red hot DirectX 8 piece of hardware that worked well with all the things Doom 3 needed (stencil shadows!)... what they failed to see was:
1. ATi had a good chip in the wings, the R300
2. That DirectX 9 would be seen in action within a mere nine months of release.
The R300 was a bit of a shock to nVidia, a DX9 part that kicked ass at DX 8 as well. Well, this sent them scurrying back to the drawing board and ended with them ramping up the speed (hence the dust buster the first FX card had) and tacking on a bunch of DX 9 stuff the card was never designed to handle... hence the crap shader performance.
Of course, nVidia being nVidia they require a lot of specific code for their card... again, another advantage ATi has is that they follow the standard DX9 spec AND the standard ARB2 path. You can't optimise for an R300 card, it follows the standard paths!! That's the whole point of standards, the developers don't need to mess around with writing for hardware, they write for one path and it just works... but this isn't the case with nVidia hardware.
Once nVidia realised what a mistake they'd made, then came the cheats. The first of which was inserted clip planes (among other things) in 3DMark03. This was documented by FutureMark, and a patched issued to stop the problem. Of course, sometime went on in the background (leaks since then indicate that nVidia leaned on FutureMark), leading to a new statement that in fact nVidia had optimised for their benchmark and that this was all fine and dandy... ATi by comparison had a single "optimisation" in the benchmark, which didn't change visual output, which they withdrew (and admitted to) after online outcry. nVidia continued to deny any wrongdoing.
Of course, what this benchmark had shown was that nVidia DX 9 (specifically shader performance) was abysmal. Their followed a long campaign of "use games, not benchmarks", trying to make people believe that 3DMark03 was useless. People had been warned for MONTHS that the FX range was a poor performer, and they stuck fingers in their ears and hummed louder.
Of course, this just went on. nVidia have been caught cheating further on, to name a few:
3DMark03
ShaderMark
Unreal Tournament 2003
Splinter Cell
In every case they lower visual quality to gain frames. Even the latest Tomb Raider Angel of Darkness patch has been withdrawn after apparent nVidia leanings.
So, you see, this is not some dark conspiracy, this is something that has been building for months. Valve are pissed that they have had to spend five times as long writing for a card who's performance is STILL crap, and that nVidia PR has speant months deceiving consumers by cheating time and time again on benchmarks used across the industry.
I can't be bothered to type more. So much has happened, and every, I repeat, EVERY incident has painted nVidia in a bad light, and time and time again ATi have risen above it and come out on top... they haven't put in a single optimisation since the 3DMark03 issue was raised.
This isn't a case of taking a both positions and seeing the middle as the area where the truth comes out, the simple fact is that nVidia really have been screwing everyone for a year. A YEAR!
Anyone who had followed events would know this (and this is the tip of the iceberg, there is so much more)... yet instead so many are willing to believe the drivel in the original post.
Read www.beyond3d.com There is no better place for a history of everything that has happened.
