"ATI Kung Fu better than Nvidia?"

[digitalwanderer]

A couple of posts shamelessly stolen from myself from over at EB:

Wait a second, don't yell at me yet! I'm not the one saying it; it's Rahul Sood, President and CTO of VoodooPC:

Who would have thought that ATI’s Catalyst would yield the best video experience for Microsoft Vista? I must admit I saw it coming – ATI has been working on Vista for some time now, and somehow they managed to trump the competition in a big way.

What I’m saying here is no secret – and I would have written about this sooner, but I wanted to give Nvidia the benefit of the doubt. I’m not one to hide the truth from my customers, and the truth is that ATI’s drivers are ahead of the game, and there’s no real explanation as to how or why Nvidia missed a step… or is there?

An interesting read from an interesting guy, I recommend.

Oh, two great ones from /.:

http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=222084&cid=17989982

I am not going to say who I work for, but I will say I work on drivers for one of the big two graphics card vendors.

Driver development for Vista is a nightmare. We are forced to work within rigid and sensitive specifications, wherein violations cause Windows to shut us down or restart the video subsystem entirely. In the past, delivering content to the screen was relatively straight-forward and we were free to operate as we needed to get our job done. Today, it is entirely up to Microsoft and if you dare wander outside their edicts and trigger their damned “tiltbitsâ€, you arfucked. Debugging this system is almost entirely blind so we are forced to play wack-a-mole all day. On the bright side, our driver code is receiving a thorough audit. In the mean time, you guys are getting the product of a rapid hackfast, intended to get something out the door to meet our marketing promises.

When Vista becomes dominant in the mainstream, all of you can expect loads of problems unless Microsoft learn to lighten up. Sure, they want to enforce standards on their platform. We all know Windows sucks largely because of how badly drivers are written, but they are doing it by screwing with us, the hardware vendors. My group knows what the hell we're doing. We would not be one of the top two if we didn't, but Microsoft are making our lives nearly impossible because they do not consider in the least what we need to make good products.

My advice: do not think you can buy either ATI or NVIDIA and expect Vista to work entirely as advertised. Wait a year. Stick with XP or buy a Mac.

And a good friend made this reply:

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=222084&cid=18003178

Hi Terry Makedon here and I am the Manager of Software Product Management at AMD (former ATI). I will assume you don't work for AMD since your viewpoints are absolutely contradictory to our position on the topic of Vista. Here at AMD we don't believe driver development for Vista is a nightmare. In fact I have polled many Software Engineers and Architects within AMD and they thought developing Vista drivers was quite a satisfying experience. Sure it's a new driver model and a great amount of code had to be written but it's not inherently more difficult to write or validate than the XP driver was. Granted, if you start late and don't have adequate amount of time to plan, execute, and validate then everything will seem relatively difficult and the resulting quality will suffer. This is true for any software development project. At AMD we feel that we started the project early enough and planned for it thoroughly and in fact our software engineers delivered a solid driver that made the marketing promises very easy to fulfill. On top of that it is incorrect to assume that quality can be built into any software product in a hurry after the first release. In many cases, the initial design, if rushed, would result in an inherently unstable pieces of software that cannot be fixed by solely debugging after the fact. At least not in a hurry. In such cases, it would take a major redesign to raise the quality up to an acceptable level. My advice: I strongly encourage everyone to upgrade to Vista, and with Catalyst you can expect a great experience and easy upgrade. Worldwide press have praised us on the AERO experience we help deliver, the top notch stability and gaming performance that is very close and often surpasses XP performance. In fact Rahul Sood (president and CEO of VoodooPC) wrote this in his blog today "One could probably assume that ATI's tight support for Vista may have a significant market ripple somewhere down the line - but that's just a guess." Source: http://www.rahulsood.com/2007/02/ati-kung-fu-bette r-than-nvidia.html [rahulsood.com]

SPANKED!!!!!

It made me laugh too hard not to share here too.

 

[Geo]

What Terry really meant was "I assume you either don't work here, or won't as soon as I find out who you are!"

I'm sure we all look forward to rock solid R600 Vista drivers on day one! :smile: More seriously, I think there's been a good bit of anecdotal evidence here and there over the last year that AMD was putting more effort into Vista than NV was. Presumably it cost them a bit on the way, and they'll reap a little benefit on this end. "Pay me now, or pay me later" applies here just like anywhere else.

 

[Jawed]

Hilarious.

Jawed

 

[Tim Murray]

He's trying to compare the overblown troubles that NV has had with Vista to NV30?

Uhhhhh....

 

[trinibwoy]

Bwahahaha .... that really is hilarious. That was one eloquent rendition of "stop being such a n00b, n00b!"

Granted, if you start late and don't have adequate amount of time to plan, execute, and validate then everything will seem relatively difficult.

I completely agree with Makedon. I hope Nvidia reigns in its whiny developers for their own sake cause if that guy is legit it really makes them look incompetent more than anything else. Like everyone says, Vista didn't sneak up on anybody. But then again, this could just be Makedon covering for a whiny AMD developer who's not towing the company line. I still vote that it's an Nvidian though - since they need all the excuses they can get at this point.

 

[SuperCow]

And this is why employees are not allowed to post anything regarding the company they work for if they haven't been officially authorized to do so. Regardless of the vague anonimity statement referred to as the "big two" concerning the first poster's company the external perception will most probably favor the reply from Terry Makedon.
If the original poster works for nVidia then I'm sure he pissed off a lot of people

 

[Geo]

If the original poster works for nVidia then I'm sure he pissed off a lot of people

You mean at Nvdia? If he doesn't work for NV then he annoyed *even more* people at Nvidia. Looking it and its parent over, it appears to me it could just as easily have been written by an MS/DRM hater out to scare people away from Vista.

 

[John Reynolds]

"Everybody was kung fu fighting,
Those cats were fast as lightning,
It was a little bit frightening. . . ."

Couldn't resist.

 

[Geo]

Damn you! GET OUT OF MY HEAD.

 

[digitalwanderer]

"There was funky Billy Chin and little Sammy Chong
He said, here comes the big boss, let's get it on
He took the bow and made a stand, started swaying with the hand
A sudden motion made me stiff, now we're into a brand new trip"

Just to keep it in Geo's head.

 

[CATALYST MAKER]

But then again, this could just be Makedon covering for a whiny AMD developer who's not towing the company line.

Nah, Makedon didnt do that.
Why would our guys whine? Everyone here is quite happy with the condition of our Vista driver.

Oh and there are benefits to be had for XP as well. You know that really improved and tight CCC that Rahul mentions? Well thanks to Vista development, that efficient code has been ported over to XP. So XP users will get that benefit in the next Cat.

 

[digitalwanderer]

And when exactly would that be? It is Valentine's Day tomorrow after all, and drivers are one of the best things to give to geeks to show 'em how special they are to ya.

 

[Geo]

Just to keep it in Geo's head.

You know what they say about payback! With a Soul Train '74 'fro-fest twist of the knife! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Rp8FR7p_Is

 

[John Reynolds]

Soooooooooul Train!!

Thanks for the link, I've got my Klipsch's cranked now enjoying the song. Ahhh, childhood nostalgia.

OK, I think I've taken the thread OT enough now.

 

[PeterAce]

While it's very clear AMD(ATi) D3D driver(s) in Vista have had more work put into them, it's certainly not clear that their OpenGL drivers have had the same treatment.

Is NV further ahead in it's Vista OGL stability/performance?

Have different priorities been set wrt current development of each IHV's drivers?

 

[tabs]

While it's very clear AMD(ATi) D3D driver(s) in Vista have had more work put into them, it's certainly not clear that their OpenGL drivers have had the same treatment.

Is NV further ahead in it's Vista OGL stability/performance?

Have different priorities been set wrt current development of each IHV's drivers?

I could understand OGL being a focus for Quadro / FireGL drivers, but not so for Forceware / Catalyst, as D3D usage is far more commonplace in games.

 

[Blazkowicz]

I could understand opengl to be botched or not working in the ATI rage pro and riva 128 days, but not since quite a few years
I wouldn't tolerate a bug with the quake1, hl1, quake3, dopm3 engines.

 

[zsouthboy]

dw: thank you for posting that here, that was awesome.

made me chuckle here at work.

Speaking of, maybe i should get back to doing work.

 

[Mark]

And when exactly would that be? It is Valentine's Day tomorrow after all, and drivers are one of the best things to give to geeks to show 'em how special they are to ya.

I'm thinking it's overall efficiency. The Vista CCC pops up almost instantly for me, and the interface is a lot more responsive. Not only that, but it has a noticably smaller memory footprint as well. Even just 2 of those 3 would be a drastic improvement for the WinXP version.

The only complaint I have about the Vista version is that the default skin in Vista is the fugly "system" skin, I hope they keep the Quicksilver one as the default for WinXP.

 

[neliz]

Finally got something to do at Frankfurt local time. thanks digi.