App Detection

Heh, I doubt it. ATI was caught with their pants down back in the Rage Pro days.

 

Ah yes, i remember it well. One case in particular sticks out in my memory. After our reference 5700 Ultra review i received a less than calm call from NV UK's new PR bod requesting that i re-write my conclusion to be more favourable to them and demanding that i dont use TRAOD or Shadermark 2 in reviews of their cards...because "both were bias in favour of ATI"... his rant lasted a full 45minutes and was more than entertaining... i'm sure he also guaranteed that NV wouldnt be specifically targeting either for optimisations as they were not seen as fair tests at that time...

 

Chal just used some "humor detection" to substitute a (hand-typed) personality-optimized interpretation.

 

Yeah, I think I need to update my humor detection algorithms again. Bah.

 

Don't we all?

 

Two things:

1. I've never, ever, EVER met a "typical" family....all of 'em seem to be somehow unique and special to me.

2. I'm not sure I understand the difference between the green-lensed captain of industry and the disfunctional family comparison...could you please elaborate a bit?

Nope, all systems good here. Green lights across the board. 8)

 

Geez, DW, if anyone needed the volume turned down........

 

That's quite an interesting and worthwhile recollection and illustrates well your own first-hand experience with the actual corporate PR mindset ruling nVidia at the time. I could only guess those attitudes prevailed from analyzing their many PR statements of the time--but you actually experienced it (and lived through it, too, I might add...) Thanks for sharing the memory as it's most informative.

I actually never understood the mindset behind that kind of heavy-handed intolerance. Nobody who was anybody within nVidia PR at the time seemed to understand that the course of trying make silk purses out of pigs' ears was intrinsically self-defeating for the company. No amount of screaming, ranting, raving and frothing at the mouth, or else of distortion and exaggeration, would ever suffice to turn nV3x into a worthy competitor to R3x0, and you'd think cooler heads somewhere in nV at the time would have understood it.

Instead, far better for nVidia to have given credit where credit was due, concentrated on the value segments and in the other areas where it could compete, and to announce that the "race was on" and that nV was working to mount its own competitive 3d technologies ASAP. IE, a more "humble pie" PR approach would have been far more effective for the company in that period and would have indicated that nVidia could be as graceful a loser as it had been a winner. It would have shown a little class, too, which is an extremely valuable PR impression for any company to make. It certainly would have done wonders for the nV trust factor overall in nV's 3d markets.

Had the company done so I imagine we could have been spared the whole sorry FutureMark-is-Satan and "DX9 is the antiChrist" period that was so infuriating to most of us because it was so devoid of redeeming social benefit and technical veracity... nV could well have taken a few pages from the ATi and Matrox playbooks of previous years on coming in second place and doing it gracefully at the same time.

But I think nV PR may at last have learned some valuable lessons from the nV3x-R3x0 saga, and I certainly hope so. We'll all benefit by such lessons learned.

 

I don't know, Walt. The only other thing that nVidia could have done was publicly state that their products really weren't competitive. I think that, financially, they would have done a lot worse if they had stated this.

At least, they would have done worse in the short-term. But then, public companies have a hard time thinking long-term much of the time, and I guess they may have assumed that once they had a product that was competitive in all areas nearly every company they alienated would seen the green and forget the past.