Valve Skewers Nvidia (1 Viewer)

[Joe Szott]

Not good for the latest Nvidia cards, great for ATI:

http://www.tech-report.com/etc/2003q...e/index.x?pg=1

Basically, the 5900 ultra performs at half the ability of the 9800 pro in Half Lif 2, and valve thinks this is a dx9 problem, not HL2 specific. Ouch for Nvidia!

 

[Peter Loan]

Didn't Nvidia recently get nailed for adding code to their drivers to artificially boost certain 3D benchmark scores? I was a complete Nvidia supporter up until a year ago. ATI has really come on strong.

 

[Joshua Moran]

I'm glad I got an ATI 9700 Pro.

 

[Graeme Clark]

Yikes! I'm probably getting a new computer soon, and was seriously looking at the 5600.... but maybe I'm back on the 9600 bandwagon again.

And not to take this horribly off topic, but MAN, Gabe has put on a lot of weight the past few years. That picture was almost as much of a shocker.

 

[Joe Szott]

Gabe has been overclocking his lunch hours recently, yes

I really hope Nvidia can address this in their next generation parts. I'm an ATI fan from the first Radeon (own a 7200), but competition is always a good thing. Not performing well in Half Life 2 or Doom 3 could really kill a video company.

 

[Max Leung]

Geez, even the Geforce 4600 Ti out performs the FX cards!

Screw nvidia. But...are ATI drivers stable now?

 

[JamesHl]

http://www.3dgpu.com/modules/news/ar...hp?storyid=374

NVIDIA's response.

The truth probably lies somewhere between the two extremes...

 

[Joe Szott]

I guess they have until November to fight it out. I don't care which is better, as long as they are both good and cheap by the time the game actually ships (that'll be my next upgrade timeframe.)

 

[Joshua Moran]

James if you read Gabe Newell's comments he says that they are using the drivers that now ship with the card. The reason behind that is some users do not upgrade their drivers. Also Gabe Newell even brought up the fact that NVidia was working with them and with special tweaks to the drivers and game they were able to get playable framerates. He then stated that this would not be possible for the little guys and that future DX9 games could oppose problems on the FX brand of cards.

 

[Joshua Moran]

Oh Direct from NVidia

Since we know that obtaining the best pixel shader performance from the GeForce FX GPUs currently requires some specialized work, our developer technology team works very closely with game developers.

That is what Gabe was warning about. That most little guy game developers or games being developed with a small budget would have problems with in future DX9 games.

 

[JamesHl]

I guess my thoughts are that the performance in Half-Life 2 won't be as horrible as it's made out to be (NVIDIA can't afford any more screw ups), but that your points about the 'specialized programming' are probably valid. It will be interesting to see how future DX9 games that don't get special attention from NVIDIA do.

 

[BobV]

I won't put an ATI video card into my own system until their drivers are reliable and solid. I have put many ATI cards in systems (I own an electronics store) and they are a pain in the butt to get to work with every game you have. Crash here, fix, that creates a crash there, fix, another crash over here now, fix, crash, fix, crash, fix... argh. Nope, ATI get yer act together with driver stability and I'll jump onto the ATI bandwagon.

 

[JamesHl]

I've been using ATI more extensively since the 9x00 series came out, and I've had good results so far. Specifically I've recently had a lot of experience with the 9600 and am quite pleased.

 

[NickC]

No problems with my ATI 9700 PRO

 

[Dalila]

The old line about ATi's drivers not being stable has been put to bed a long time ago. Their Cats, are every bit as stable as anything from nvidia. This game should rock. Now time for me to go hug my 9800 Pro

 

[Jay Mitchosky]

Moving to Hardware.

 

[Max Leung]

Heh, I still hear plenty of complaints from consumers of ATI products (the 9x00 line) to this very day. It's not so bad now though, but then they've had 18 months to deal with it.

I'm still paranoid...ATI's installers have been complete nightmares whenever I had to deal with them. "No, it is not a fucking All-in-Wonder Rage 2 Pro without video-in dammit! Arrggh!".

 

[BobV]

The old line about ATi's drivers not being stable has been put to bed a long time ago.

I wish it was as line. This is my real-world experience. I deal with a lot of gamers being a huge gamer myself, the locals know that and come to my store for their systems to be built. I have built many gaming systems with ATIs and many with Nvidias and it is no contest at all, ATIs have tonnes more issues than the Nvidias in my experience. I wish it wasn't so, I wish the fastest card, by far, was also the most stable, but it ain't... not from what I see.

 

[JamesHl]

I've built plenty of systems myself and as of late (very recently, say this spring) I've seen pretty much zero trouble from 9x00 series cards. I also prefer that their linux drivers are open source, instead of stupid closed source nvidia drivers.

 

[DaveGTP]

The old line about ATi's drivers not being stable has been put to bed a long time ago.

So I felt as well. Most of the other I/S folks around here that are hardcore gamers have converted to 9700/9800 cards of some sort. Even our formerly die-hard Nvidia/Intel guy has gone to ATI/Intel.