ondaedg said:
What I am sick of seeing is the same old bullcrap from the same old people who turn this into their own personal war just to satisfy their screwed up obsession with their favorite IHV.
Yea, I mean, just because an IHV publicly demonstrates an obsession with misleading its customers by way of PR propaganda designed to snow and con people--that's no reason for anyone to get involved, right? We should all just cheerfully bend over for the soap, right?...
Who *cares* if a product does what the manufacturer claims, right?
It's the same old guys who jump in these posts not with anything constructive to say but to knock the "enemy" IHV down with their own personal opinion which they state as fact. It is annoying as hell.
Excuse me, but what in your posts here is other than your personal opinion? Are you speaking of being annoyed with yourself? (If so, then I'd agree with you as to it being annoying...
) If not, then please don't overlook your own excesses in the interests of persecuting other people for what you see as theirs.
For example, if I was to start a thread praising Nvidia for making a damn good card this generation, I can pretty much count on several of the same posters to enter the thread with their own personal take on why Nvidia sucks or why ATI's new card is better.
The question I'd have for you is just what is "praiseworthy" about an IHV manufacturing the kind of product it must make in order to remain competitive? Should nVidia get a Merit Badge for doing what it's supposed to do--for making a 3d card that--gasp--actually *does* most of what nVidia
says it does?...
IHVs are *supposed* to describe the products they sell truthfully--there's nothing to praise about it. If they don't, they won't make it for very long. nVidia's at least partially cleaning up its act because it has to--its potential customers have made it loud and clear they aren't interested in anything else. I guess you don't see that it was all of the righteously earned guff nVidia took over nV3x contrasted with R3x0, and its impact on nVidia's sales and earnings, that *resulted* in nVidia producing an nV40-class product, do you?
As to your other remarks--it depends on what sort of "praise" you might decide to spew as to how it will be responded to, doesn't it? But generally I find your entire premise flawed as I see nothing praiseworthy about any IHV making competitive products--they have no choice if they wish to remain a major player in the business, do they? I
expect IHVs to make such products.
What I don't expect is an IHV to make a grossly undercompetitive product and advertise it falsely simply for the sake of misleading customers (Ex: the false 8-pixel-pipe claim nVidia made for nV30/5/8 was the first and only time I've ever seen an IHV deliberately and wilfully misrepresent such a basic specification--3dfx never did it, ATi never did it--don't know of any other IHV who ever did do it--aside from nVidia with nV3x. The kicker is that apart from nV3x even nVidia has never done that before. I'm certainly not going to "praise" nVidia for telling the truth about the number of pixel pipes in nV4x, since that's expected of them anyway.)
My question to these loooosers is who the hell cares? Noone said anything bad about ATI but you can damn well count on them coming in there.
Lots of people care as to whether manufacturers truthfully and accurately represent the products they sell, and the success of subscription-based magazines like Consumer Reports proves it. Look at all of the trade magazines revolving around the differences between automobiles, stereos, cameras, ad infintum. The suggestion that this isn't important for 3d cards is, of course, absurd. IMO, it's only "loooosers" who spin the yarn that "one 3d-card is just like another" and that "one IHV is just like another." That's no more true for 3d cards than it is for any other product class you might name.
Why do I actually give a shit?
About what? Heh...
Well, I was around back in the day when Tom's Hardware had the most visited forum on the net.
Oh, you must mean back when Pabst restricted himself to motherboards, core-logic chipsets, and cpus--which he did for years before dipping his big toe into 3d (and getting it amputated in the process)...
Yes, I liked the site a lot more then, too.
Right around when Nvidia came into the picture with the Riva128 and then the TNT, the 3dfx zealots (as they became known as) turned the forums into an all out war prompting Tom to ban many members and go to a more bulletin board style system (which sucked).
What an absurd statement. I guess it never occurred to you at the time that people who had been using 3dfx products for years saw it all as an ignorant conspiracy driven primarily by paid nVidia zealots and shills (who hadn't a clue but were dangerous because they thought otherwise...
) The issue was never "3dfx vs. nVidia," anyway--it was GLIDE versus NO-GLIDE, is what it was. D3d well and truly sucked originally, nVidia's first decent OpenGL driver was years away, and almost every 3d game shipping at the time was GLIDE only--all of which amounted to anyone recommending a non-GLIDE 3d card at the time being an utter ignoramus...
So, it depends on which side of the coin you were as to who was the "zealot" and who wasn't...
The good logical discussions became pissing contests.
Back then in that climate I remember very few "good, logical discussions"--at least the ones telling me to dump my V2 for a TNT (I actually used both for awhile), or my V3 (which adequately replaced my TNT/V2 in every capacity) for a TNT2, so that I'd
have to dump my considerable library of GLIDE 3d games that I owned at the time.
There was never anything logical about that suggestion (and no, "GL Quake" was truly not enough)...
Back then, the largest fantasy THG peddled as its party line was that "GLIDE games don't count" which they somehow thought was a relevant, rational position for people like me who owned a couple of dozen or more GLIDE games at the time (games which I considered to be worth a lot more than a TNT2, btw.) But at THG during the period GLIDE was not only an irrelevant word, it was also an ugly one. I *stopped* reading THG regularly in those days because of that kind of incredibly irrational propaganda camouflaged as "information."
This forum has had a good amount of intelligent posters contributing here. I have been coming here for a while mostly as a lurker. What I have seen over the last year is what I saw happen over at Tom's. And from what I see is mostly ATI fans who have this deep hatred for Nvidia that makes any good discussion about videocards almost impossible.
I disagree. What's "impossible" is to listen to someone state that all 3d cards are the same, the drivers are the same, and the IHVs who make and promote them are the same. They aren't, and proof of that is abundant. As long as there is competition there will be competitive differences to consider. It seems to me that's what 3d forums like this one are all about.
It is your choice if you want to dislike them. Everyone is allowed an opinion. What I am saying is that you don't have to force it onto others. And when they don't agree with you, maybe we can respect their decision and carry on in a rational manner.
Uh, stating opinions isn't "forcing" anything on anybody. People are different, 3d cards are different, IHVs are different, and opinions about all of them are therefore different. Obviously, that's why what seems rational to you may not seem rational to me, etc. (So stop trying to force your own opinions of "rationality" on other people...
)
I am not a "fan" of Nvidia or ATI. But I do use their products and I find how they design their products intriguing which is why I lurk in these forums. I enjoy reading insightful posts. Not garbage...
Welcome to the club...
It's odd that you might think that you alone are the only rational reader of B3d forum threads, though...
But who knows. Maybe Beyond3d is seeing more traffic than it ever has before and all this ATI vs Nvidia stuff is netting Dave more ad revenue than he ever dreamed possible! ATI vs Nvidia last man standing!
Snide insults directed at Dave and the B3d staff (who do more to promote objective information about *3d* than any other site on the 'net, imo) will get you half a cup of cold black coffee from an all-night diner, I suppose. But nothing else.
As to "all this ATI vs Nvidia stuff," as you put it, it's called "competition" and I'd suggest you accept it as a reality for your own peace of mind, if nothing else. The products are different, the drivers are different, the companies are different, and it's investigating the
differences among them that interests most B3d readers. If you prefer the fantasy that there are no differences then I think you might be much happier going back to THG where such yarns pacify such people as need to believe them...
But if you are prepared to accept the reality that there are indeed differences among products and the companies which manufacture them, and you find yourself interested in such differences, then stick around, by all means, as you'll learn a lot without a doubt.
