ATi interview. (bit light & too short)

[2senile]

http://www.ukgamer.com/article.php4?id=256&page=1

How much additional time and effort, above that put into the normal driver development regime, is/has been put into making sure ATi products "fit" into Vista's DRM? Would I get an honest answer if we asked whether you're in favour of the whole DRM thing?

There has been a lot of effort that has gone into supporting the entire DRM strategy, but users shouldn't think of it as taking resources away from working on more "useful" features. DRM is something that the whole industry is moving towards and something we need to support. And no you wouldn't get an honest answer from me ;-)

Wish they'd put him on the rack & got some more out of him.

 

[ERK]

I like the way they asked that question. No doubt what his position is, is there?

 

[2senile]

I don't think there is any doubt about the position of any sane person regarding that particular issue.

The only good thing about DRM I'm looking forward to is all the surprised, whining threads.

....... & I'll post "I told you so" to every bloody thread.

2007 should be a good year for my postcount.

To be a little serious tho: The idea of dynamically adjusting !Q upwards depending on a slowdown of action in a game seems to have been totally debunked.

Would it be possible to gain something by going in the opposite direction?

What popped into my mind was that when the game becomes frantic, lots of action etc, things like view distance could be dynamically reduced.

Going off topic: Hi ERK, another former MadOnion?

 

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

To be a little serious tho: The idea of dynamically adjusting !Q upwards depending on a slowdown of action in a game seems to have been totally debunked.

Would it be possible to gain something by going in the opposite direction?

What popped into my mind was that when the game becomes frantic, lots of action etc, things like view distance could be dynamically reduced.

Problem is you don't know where the player is looking. There could be lots of frantic action on screen, but the player might want to know what is happening in the distance, for instance chasing flag carriers in CTF or incoming vehicles in ONS. There might be lots of action happening, but your job would require the draw distance.

IIRC, didn't Shiny try this approach in the form of software tesselation in Messiah? It didn't really catch on, as it was an extra CPU drain, and basically degraded graphics to reduce polygon count. Since then, hardware support for tesselation never really took off, and cards have got powerful enough to push a lot of polygons. It just ended up being more trouble than it was worth.

 

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

I don't think there is any doubt about the position of any sane person regarding that particular issue.

The only good thing about DRM I'm looking forward to is all the surprised, whining threads.

....... & I'll post "I told you so" to every bloody thread.

Digitial Restriction Management is Satan's offspring, but I can see why ATI are supporting it - they don't want to be the point of failure when people can't play movies on their Vista PCs because MS won't allow any non-DRM hardware to work. Nvidia will do the same, because even if people never use the DRM, they won't buy a card that won't allow them to do so if they want to at some point in the future.

 

[2senile]

I don't blame them for supporting it. They have no choice from a business point of view imo.

I'm wondering if, over the years this has been in the works, things have changed & simple momentum is carrying it all forward even tho a better approach might now be possible.

The total incompetence displayed in the recent Sony fiasco should be a warning to all in the industry.

Thanks for the input on the graphics side of things btw. I still think that there must/should be some way to to get a bit extra by doing dynamicic in game adjustments to the workload on the GPU.

Alas, I'm a simple user & lack any understanding of what would be required.

 

[kyleb]

Yeah, the first thing I do when I find a game running bad is turn down the AA and AF. It would be great if I could just set the drivers to do that for me and only while the game is running under a given framerate. I have been asking for that feature for years.

 

[Ali]

Dont ATI alrady have half the code for that? With their T-AA they have a fps limit so that when you get to slow they stop doing the AA dont they? Ive never used it cos I only have a laptop with a 9700mobile, but Im sure thats what all the reviews were saying when it first came out.

They could add a T-AF and T-LOD etc to the mix pretty easily I guess. For those of us on slower hardware it would be a real boon. Also make them look good in screen captures in reviews

Ali