I recently got hold of some ATI marketing slides. I can tell you, I am all for uncovering how we all might be used or abused. I find this very important. However, I have just come to the conclusion that I myself have been used and abused. I don't have to state the name of a specific person or company, but only tell you that things are probably worse than they seem for nVidia. The chance that things are so bad that something such as this are procured and leaked goes to show how much faith we should have in such a company right now.
I will not point fingers, but I will say that nobody should know business better than nVidia and that is what disturbs me about these slides being leaked. I doubt you will see many moves like this from ATI due to their comfortable position. The simple fact that these slides were leaked shows a lot of nothing until something can be made out of them. We would rather not instigate, but investigate and speculate.
I'd like to share some of my thoughts on the events surrounding it and the weirdness that was/is my morning.
I've been poking around a lot and have firmly concluded to my satisfaction that those slides were leaked to me from a certain person from a certain company that is in direct competition with ATi and was leaked specifically for the purpose of trying to discredit ATi's reputation.
Note I said "trying" as I do NOT think this in anyway implicates ATi in any wrong-doing. All the slide says to me is that ATi is getting a bit more aggressive in their marketing, which I think they really should do since they have a very strong product and I think they should push it harder.
I'm very angry and disapointed in myself for the way I went about putting those up, I really should have made more of an effort to contact ATi before I put them up. Not to see if they would "allow" it or not, but to give them a heads up that it was coming and to see if they were indeed genuine or not. In that I do feel I made an error by rushing it out, and for that I truly am sorry and apologize to all those I offended by it. My initial disapointment with the "Influence benchmarks in ATi's favor" has been corrected by a number of people on a number of forums as they've pointed out to me that is a very valid and legitimate concern for a PR department. It does NOT mean nor imply that ATi plans to 'cheat' or optimize for any benchmarks, it merely means that ATi should try and get the benchmarks to show their hardware in the best possible light; ie, try and get dx9 benchmarks to push PS 2.0 since ATi's hardware runs it very well while nVidia's can't, try and get benchmarks to avoid the dreaded "PP hint" that allows nVidia's hardware to run in FP16 rather than dx9's specified 24FP, etc.
I was wrong, and for that I humbly apologize.
