AMD and intel Profits[comic]

KlavoHunter · Post by **KlavoHunter** » 2007-10-28 03:46pm

At this point in time I'm throwing my hands in the air and saying "Fuck it!" to my support of ATI. The next video card I'm buying will be nVidia - every single fucking last game has nVidia splashed all over in an intro video, and in my mind I keep seeing game developers' saliva dripping off of nVidia's cock.

So congrats, nVidia, you've won another customer, because nobody supports ATI anywhere near as much as they support you. Because I'm tired of having stupid graphical errors in my games because I'm not using the superwonderful nVidia card which all the games are designed to use, because ATI doesn't have Pixel Shader wotsits or whatever minor feature which is a requirement because the programmers were too lazy to make it an option to play without it (SEE: BioShock requiring PS3.0, and in less than a day some fellow hacked together an unofficial graphics patch that made the game compatible with PS2.0).

Ace Pace · Post by **Ace Pace** » 2007-10-28 04:27pm

KlavoHunter wrote:At this point in time I'm throwing my hands in the air and saying "Fuck it!" to my support of ATI. The next video card I'm buying will be nVidia - every single fucking last game has nVidia splashed all over in an intro video, and in my mind I keep seeing game developers' saliva dripping off of nVidia's cock.

Fuck.You. Thank you for doing ZERO to actually study the matter.

In my five years at NV I was responsible for bringing 120+ titles into the TWIMTBP fold. Do you know how many of those actually received a payment of any kind? The answer is ONE. And that was a special case where we ran a promotion aimed at a mass market family title to try and encourage low end consumers to shun integrated graphics in favour of GPU's. We paid a contribution towards the time involved in making nice shader things happen.

Sure, we ran advertising for a dozen titles in the first 2 quarters of the campaign, as we aligned it to a campaign at retail to teach consumers to recognise what GPU, aswell as what CPU, they had, so they could then be surer of compatibility issues. But those ads were short lived and low cost.

So not if TWIMTBP did not have cash as a cornerstone then what was it?

How about the $M's the company spent building a completely state of the art test lab in Eastern Europe. So that developers and publishers can get their titles tested on around 500 different PC configurations (GPU, CPU, OS, Motherboard, API etc etc). Yes, compatibility. It was not about benchmarking or running faster that ATi. It was about making sure the consumer could buy the game and run it without crashes. Every time a gamer takes a PC version of a game back to the store and says "It doesn't work, give me the console one" NVIDIA potentially loses a customer.

Once that was established, the great team of engineers NVIDIA has in Europe would work frame by frame with the developer to analyse glitches, slowdown and bugs and help fix them (at the developer and and in NV's drivers). That alone was usually enough to lift the framerate above the other lot. Just good, solid due care and attention.

The Tomb Raider issue you mention was the exception that absolutely proved the rule. The issue you reported lasted for one day, before NVIDIA brought out a driver that fixed it. Of course we were not good enough to fix it in a day, we had been fixing it for weeks. We were just a day late this time, so it was noticed. That type of issue happened many times. Tomb Raider was the only time that the game shipped ahead of the driver fix that meant nobody noticed the problem had been there at all. That's how good we were!

So, once a game clears the lab and gets the green light, it then gets the NVIDIA messaging that its a title we recommend our consumers to consider buying.

The two biggest ways this messaging is carried is:

a) The Nzone website. 11 million hits per month across 7 natural language sites. Push the buttton marked "Test my system" and we fully compare our test results against the users PC to see if the game will run at minspec, recommended and optimum. We tell them exactly what hardware they need to run it best (not just GPU, but memory, all sorts) and then we link them to local etailers where they can get a special deal on the game or a game hardware mix.

b) and this is where I guess my biggest legacy lays within NVIDIA. "The Way" magazine, which I created as a 40,000 print run, 8 page supplement in Edge magazine and ran within Europe for the first 10 issues, building to a 32 page, 7 language magazine with just short of 1 million units printed. The Way was always written by independent journalists, so whilst never critical of partner titles (they wouldn't get in if they did not deserve to), it never became a corporate brochure, but always remained an interesting read. It was nominated for a number of awards, publishers are very keen for their titles to be featured and I was recently told by an MD of a major distributor than he used The Way magazine as his guide to what titles he should focus on in his consumer offerings. I will be very proud when my new companies offerings are considered technically excellent enough to be featured in the future issues.

So there you have it. TWIMTBP in a nutshell. If you can understand and trust what I say here (and I have no reason to lie to you), you will see that the dirt thrown at it by a thoroughly defeated ATi over the years were so far off the mark they were laughable.

In fact I would go as far to say that one of the main reasons TWIMTBP was so damn damaging to them was that they simply never understood it. What is stood for, what it intended to do, they simply saw it as a threat that had to be dismissed. They grabbed the first (incorrect) facts that came to hand and simply threw them time and time again, however often they proved incorrect and however badly they were getting hurt. MO< So my parting message to the Inquirer is, for goodness sake, do not repeat their mistakes. Don't keep spouting the same old "It's only cash, NVIDIA bought developers, and shock horror, Game x ran 2FPS faster on ATi (just before it blue screened) so could not be TWIMTBP anyway" rubbish.

The inaccuracies did for ATi, and when repeated on these pages, do you guys no credit either.

Good luck. I hope we come across each other in future.

Darryl Still

So congrats, nVidia, you've won another customer, because nobody supports ATI anywhere near as much as they support you.

See above, other way around. nVidia provides testing labs. nVidia provides on site engineering support. ATi has nothing on that level. Also, at DX10, you're going to see more of that. You know why? nVidia delivered ON TIME and provided developers with a DX10 benchline. Where the FUCK was ATi then? Maybe developers prefer nVidia not due to money, or due to having a torrid love affair, but because nVidia treats them better?

[qute] Because I'm tired of having stupid graphical errors in my games because I'm not using the superwonderful nVidia card which all the games are designed to use,[/quote]

Complain to the ATi driver team, not to the developers. Developers are not beholden to deal with every fucking driver bug.

because ATI doesn't have Pixel Shader wotsits or whatever minor feature which is a requirement because the programmers were too lazy to make it an option to play without it (SEE: BioShock requiring PS3.0, and in less than a day some fellow hacked together an unofficial graphics patch that made the game compatible with PS2.0).

ATis fault, not nVidias, because hey, when SM3 came out, ATi made a strategic decision that SM3 is not worth supporting. The problem was, their Xxxx lineup survived for abit longer then they expected, and they got stuck with a user base that was on Sm2 while the industry was moving to SM3, THREE YEARS LATER.

At some level, it's more ATi sucking and you annoyed at betting on the wrong horse then any problems with nVidia.

Fingolfin_Noldor · Post by **Fingolfin_Noldor** » 2007-10-28 05:15pm

I'm probably gunning for a 8800GT when it comes out. Just waiting for it in a couple more weeks. If cheap enough, I might consider an SLI option.

Uraniun235 · Post by **Uraniun235** » 2007-10-28 08:10pm

KlavoHunter wrote:At this point in time I'm throwing my hands in the air and saying "Fuck it!" to my support of ATI.

well hopefully now you've learned that irrational brand loyalty isn't the best way to go

Aaron · Post by **Aaron** » 2007-10-28 08:20pm

I've always had ATI cards, more due to coincidence than any real loyalty but after reading Ace's article I'm glad that my new PC has a NV card and when it's time to upgrade I'll stick with them because of this info.

MKSheppard · Post by **MKSheppard** » 2007-10-28 08:32pm

KlavoHunter wrote:So congrats, nVidia, you've won another customer, because nobody supports ATI anywhere near as much as they support you.

After a rather bad run of experience with the ATI All In Wonder, and the early Radeons (hooray Dell, lets make the ATI cards that ship with our rigs only be upgradeable with specific Dell Drivers; and then not update the latest ATI drivers to work with our shitty cards!) I'm a pure NVIDIA man.

ATI has always managed to make technically interesting pieces of hardware; but they always fall down flat when it comes to executing them; whether in drivers, or whatever.

KlavoHunter · Post by **KlavoHunter** » 2007-10-28 09:00pm

Ace Pace wrote:Fuck.You.

Your big-dick debater attitude is really unnecessary here. This is not you smashing some trek-wanker into the ground, or grinding some hilariously ignorant religious fundie's nose into the dirt.

I already changed my mind to support nVidia a good while back, because I'm tired of ATI's problems in general.

Yes, I was ignorant. I do not involve myself in brand wars, but this time it seems I should have, before I went to go buy my current graphics card (ATI x800, it's about two years old now, I think?). I compared the benchmarks, instead of comparing all the other 'soft' values, like drivers and how they interact with game developers.

The only time I really paid attention to graphics cards was when I was due for an upgrade. That's coming around awful soon, and I'm thinking about an 8800 or whatever is the latest and greatest nVidia card when I go to get my wallet.

Phantasee · Post by **Phantasee** » 2007-10-28 09:15pm

If you can't stand the heat, get the fuck out of the kitchen, KlavoHunter.

Starglider · Post by **Starglider** » 2007-10-28 09:23pm

KlavoHunter wrote:Your big-dick debater attitude is really unnecessary here. This is not you smashing some trek-wanker into the ground, or grinding some hilariously ignorant religious fundie's nose into the dirt.

Yeah, I whined like you a bit when I first turned up, but really there's no point. Some people are going to have fun insulting you whether it seems reasonable to you or not. Some people are just looking for cues to rant about something that's been bugging them. On SDN they can do that without caring whether it's excessive or reasonable or whatever, and so can you - that's part of the forum's attraction. Unless you have an amusing comeback, you might as well just ignore it when you're on the receiving end.

Fingolfin_Noldor · Post by **Fingolfin_Noldor** » 2007-10-28 09:35pm

Phantasee wrote:If you can't stand the heat, get the fuck out of the kitchen, KlavoHunter.

Why was there any need for heat in the first place?

Or did you perhaps over fry the turkey and now it's reduced to carbon?

Uraniun235 · Post by **Uraniun235** » 2007-10-28 09:43pm

Klavo busts in here with attitude (basically implying that he used to be an ATI fan and seemingly expressing bitterness toward nVidia) and when someone throws that attitude back in his face all of a sudden it's "waaahh sdn is full of meanies wahhhh"

call the fucking WAHMBULANCE already

Drooling Iguana · Post by **Drooling Iguana** » 2007-10-29 12:35am

Wait, people have brand loyalty toward ATI? I've been buying nothing but Nvidia cards since my first Geforce 2 since they're the only ones with decent Linux support, and I had no idea there were people on the other side. I always assumed the people buying ATI cards did so because they got better benchmarks or had lower prices or flashier ads or somesuch. I never realy looked into whether that was true or not since my getting an Nvidia card was always a forgone conclusion.

Shame to see what's happened to AMD, though. I always liked them.

Fingolfin_Noldor · Post by **Fingolfin_Noldor** » 2007-10-29 12:48am

Drooling Iguana wrote:Wait, people have brand loyalty toward ATI? I've been buying nothing but Nvidia cards since my first Geforce 2 since they're the only ones with decent Linux support, and I had no idea there were people on the other side. I always assumed the people buying ATI cards did so because they got better benchmarks or had lower prices or flashier ads or somesuch. I never realy looked into whether that was true or not since my getting an Nvidia card was always a forgone conclusion.

Shame to see what's happened to AMD, though. I always liked them.

I bought my last card, an x1900XT, based on better benchmarks. Personally, I look at benchmarks and reports of driver bugs etc. before buying anything.

KlavoHunter · Post by **KlavoHunter** » 2007-10-29 02:36am

Fingolfin_Noldor wrote:
Phantasee wrote:If you can't stand the heat, get the fuck out of the kitchen, KlavoHunter.
Why was there any need for heat in the first place?

That's what I was wondering.

Drooling Iguana wrote:Wait, people have brand loyalty toward ATI?

Yes, my current card and previous card were ATI because I was only looking at benchmarks. Not so much "brand loyalty", really...

Hotfoot · Post by **Hotfoot** » 2007-10-29 02:41am

What I'm really curious about is this:

While related in some respects, Intel and AMD are not Nvidia and ATI.

So, with all due respect, what the fuck?

Starglider · Post by **Starglider** » 2007-10-29 02:55am

Hotfoot wrote:While related in some respects, Intel and AMD are not Nvidia and ATI.

ATI is an AMD brand at this point. Nvidia is a direct AMD competitor. So yeah it's still on topic. AMD isn't just fighting Intel any more.

Uraniun235 · Post by **Uraniun235** » 2007-10-29 03:16am

Hotfoot wrote:What I'm really curious about is this:

While related in some respects, Intel and AMD are not Nvidia and ATI.

So, with all due respect, what the fuck?

AMD bought ATI awhile back.

AniThyng · Post by **AniThyng** » 2007-10-29 09:33am

KlavoHunter wrote: That's what I was wondering.

Going all rolley eye over the NVIDIA logo on nearly all game intros and saying that game devs suck nvidia cock surely had nothing to do with it at all, right?

I personally own an ATI card(s) and AMD CPU And yeah, it is irritating to see all the niggly little ATI driver issues. Ah well, my next purchase will be an XBox360 anyway. Though ATI always seemed to have a better laptop platform, at least before the GF8.

Dooey Jo · Post by **Dooey Jo** » 2007-10-29 10:40am

Starglider wrote:
Hotfoot wrote:While related in some respects, Intel and AMD are not Nvidia and ATI.
ATI is an AMD brand at this point. Nvidia is a direct AMD competitor. So yeah it's still on topic. AMD isn't just fighting Intel any more.

So when one wants to rant that ATi sucks and Nvidia is great, one should post a picture of an Intel-sponsored rabbit running from an ATi-loaded turtle? It seems to allude to the fable of the Tortoise and the Hare, but that only makes less fucking sense. Does ATi actually win over Intel, as the tortoise did? Will it win in the long run? Where the fuck is Nvidia? Is it the tree? Or the "Q3 profits"-line? Is that gas coming from the rabbit Nvidia?

Hey, Ace Pace! Shut the fuck up and start making some fucking sense you goddamn like-to-fuck-whores-with-strange-hats person!

Ace Pace · Post by **Ace Pace** » 2007-10-29 10:48am

Dooey Jo wrote:
Starglider wrote:
Hotfoot wrote:While related in some respects, Intel and AMD are not Nvidia and ATI.
ATI is an AMD brand at this point. Nvidia is a direct AMD competitor. So yeah it's still on topic. AMD isn't just fighting Intel any more.
So when one wants to rant that ATi sucks and Nvidia is great, one should post a picture of an Intel-sponsored rabbit running from an ATi-loaded turtle? It seems to allude to the fable of the Tortoise and the Hare, but that only makes less fucking sense. Does ATi actually win over Intel, as the tortoise did? Will it win in the long run? Where the fuck is Nvidia? Is it the tree? Or the "Q3 profits"-line? Is that gas coming from the rabbit Nvidia?

Hey, Ace Pace! Shut the fuck up and start making some fucking sense you goddamn like-to-fuck-whores-with-strange-hats person!

Hey, why don't you notice the fucking thread title? Did it mention ATi? Did it mention nVidia? NO. It was a fucking hilarious comic about AMD and Intel financial preformance. nVidia is nowhere. Not fucking hard to understand untill KlavoHunter decided to fuck himself.

EDIT:

Uraniun235 wrote:Klavo busts in here with attitude (basically implying that he used to be an ATI fan and seemingly expressing bitterness toward nVidia) and when someone throws that attitude back in his face all of a sudden it's "waaahh sdn is full of meanies wahhhh"

call the fucking WAHMBULANCE already

Hotfoot And Uranium wins the fucking thread

Ace Pace · Post by **Ace Pace** » 2007-10-29 10:51am

Fingolfin_Noldor wrote:I'm probably gunning for a 8800GT when it comes out. Just waiting for it in a couple more weeks. If cheap enough, I might consider an SLI option.

Get it. Not sure about SLI, as it's never really worth it, but the 8800GT is amazing.

Of course, I'm not really sure about the entire G80 design long-term, the GS is kinda weak, Arrow might shed some more light there.

Bounty · Post by **Bounty** » 2007-10-29 10:52am

It was a fucking hilarious comic about AMD and Intel financial preformance. nVidia is nowhere.

I don't get it. I try to get it, but the more you explain, the less sense it makes.

Fingolfin_Noldor · Post by **Fingolfin_Noldor** » 2007-10-29 11:39am

Ace Pace wrote:
Fingolfin_Noldor wrote:I'm probably gunning for a 8800GT when it comes out. Just waiting for it in a couple more weeks. If cheap enough, I might consider an SLI option.
Get it. Not sure about SLI, as it's never really worth it, but the 8800GT is amazing.

Of course, I'm not really sure about the entire G80 design long-term, the GS is kinda weak, Arrow might shed some more light there.

Arrow hasn't stepped in for ages.

Well, it's too long a "long term" to even figure what to buy down the road.

Dooey Jo · Post by **Dooey Jo** » 2007-10-29 12:21pm

Ace Pace wrote:Hey, why don't you notice the fucking thread title? Did it mention ATi? Did it mention nVidia? NO. It was a fucking hilarious comic about AMD and Intel financial preformance. nVidia is nowhere. Not fucking hard to understand untill KlavoHunter decided to fuck himself.

Fucking hilarious you say? Even before KlavoHunter fucked himself I was going to storm in here and say that it makes no sense, because it fucking doesn't. A rabbit? A fucking turtle with a box on it? It's like someone just heard the name of the goddamn fable and went "o rite teh hare will win because it is fast haha that will make a fine anal-ogy" and drew that piece of crap in the short bus without thinking about what it really says. "The Intel-rabbit gets first to the Q3 profits" oh yeah, that is hi-fucking-larious. I am laughing my polyester pants off right fucking now and I don't think I'll ever put them on again because I'm just going to think about that image and laugh them right back off all over again.