Derek Smart on ATI Driver issues
- Thread starter antlers
- Start date
He certainly is abrasive. Doesn't mean he's wrong.
And sure of himself. Doesn't mean he's right.
He certainly offers quite a bit of his insight, though. Good reading.
p.s. I forgot about wumpus. Haven't seen him around in a while.
And sure of himself. Doesn't mean he's right.
He certainly offers quite a bit of his insight, though. Good reading.
p.s. I forgot about wumpus. Haven't seen him around in a while.
OpenGL guy
Veteran
Derek doesn't know as much as he thinks he does about our driver. More info once the new driver is released 
Well, this thread got off to a productive start. 5 messages before mud started flinging.
wow - that's a fairly reasonable op piece by DS! Who would have guessed?
Seriously, while I can understand his frustration, dev teams tend please their biggest customers first. It sucks, but it's kindof a fact of life. We do it here where I work. The question we ask ourselves when requests are submitted is always "How many other customers does this affect?" If it's just one or two customers, requires a lot of work, then the payoff is not so good.
However, this assumes we have a project manager that knows the product well, and has good staff to inform him as to just what _is_ important, and what isn't.
EDIT: Oh, and just to clarify my own position on ATI's drivers, I don't really have one since I don't own an ATI card. Getting married and can't afford a 9700 But if ATI wants to send me one to 'review'..
Seriously, while I can understand his frustration, dev teams tend please their biggest customers first. It sucks, but it's kindof a fact of life. We do it here where I work. The question we ask ourselves when requests are submitted is always "How many other customers does this affect?" If it's just one or two customers, requires a lot of work, then the payoff is not so good.
However, this assumes we have a project manager that knows the product well, and has good staff to inform him as to just what _is_ important, and what isn't.
EDIT: Oh, and just to clarify my own position on ATI's drivers, I don't really have one since I don't own an ATI card. Getting married and can't afford a 9700
But if ATI wants to send me one to 'review'.. Doomtrooper
Veteran
Username said:OpenGL guy said:Derek doesn't know as much as he thinks he does about our driver. More info once the new driver is released
Shouldn't you be working with him to sort out the issues instead of making vague posts about things to come on message boards?
That would be Developer relations people, there is one here and I pointed him to that thread.
I believe Opengl_guy would only look after the bug fixes themself.
Doomtrooper
Veteran
alexsok said:Well well well, look who is talking
P.S
Such an irony that both u and OpenGL guy replied the way u did, at least his reply was acceptable and to the point, while your reply is... look above
Have u thought of an opportunity to apply for an ATI representive? That would suit u well!
What are you going for, record number of Edits..to show the IRONY here..educate yourself..
Richthofen
Newcomer
well you know what this thread is pretty interesting and the thread at rage3d too.
It shows me one thing - nothing has changed since the Radeon8500 launch.
The same bug shit is going on. Nothing has changed.
Doomtrooper you can call people an idiot like you want.
These threads especially the one @rage3d prove that there is something wrong. I don't expect the people @rage3d getting angry about that. Most of them are fans but there will be a lot of people outside who don't like what they see.
If you read reviews and forum threads were people over and over comment on ATIs driver problems you now know why :=)
They definately have good hardware but on the driver side ... you know what i mean.
It shows me one thing - nothing has changed since the Radeon8500 launch.
The same bug shit is going on. Nothing has changed.
Doomtrooper you can call people an idiot like you want.
These threads especially the one @rage3d prove that there is something wrong. I don't expect the people @rage3d getting angry about that. Most of them are fans but there will be a lot of people outside who don't like what they see.
If you read reviews and forum threads were people over and over comment on ATIs driver problems you now know why :=)
They definately have good hardware but on the driver side ... you know what i mean.
WhiningKhan
Regular
Leaving speculations about mr. Smart's level of knowledge aside, is this sentence to be interpreted as a) funny, b) sarcastic, c)clueless?
Doomtrooper
Veteran
Richthofen said:
Did you read the above post from his own forums ?? He had better make up his mind if he wants to trash the 9700 or defend it..the entire converstation.
Originally posted by Cmdr_ Laracuente:
The Radeon 8500 doesn't compare to the geforce TI 4600 or even the 4200
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Nonsense. On many levels. Sure, the 8500 128MB may not be as fast as the Ti4600, but it certainly is no slouch. You get what you pay for.
quote:
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Originally posted by Grayfox:
now thats a shame... what about the little people that cant afford their $400 flagship but own an older model??? are they to just suck it up??? yet another reason to NOT like ATI.
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Don't listen to him. He's just talking rubbish.
Even to this day, ATI still releases drivers for their older line. I see no reason why they'd stop releasing drivers for the 8500 just because they released the 9xxx cards. Thats just ludicrous poppycock and misinformation.
Rule of thumb: IF YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT, DON'T POST!!
quote:
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Originally posted by rtoolooze:
Sorry S.C., I know your cruising around on an ATI ship, but I won't come aboard.
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Better put that crack pipe down, because you're clearly smoking some heavy sh*t to come up with such nonsense. What? I should keep slamming ATI just because it suits the agenda of a few clueless retards? ATI have come a long way, since the last time I slammed them. You don't like their cards, don't f*cking buy them. Yes, it is that simple.
At some point or another, I have EVERY graphics card EVER made. I judge them based on merit. Nothing more. Nothing less. All card/sound manufacturers send developers hardware so that they can ensure compatibility. I am on every single dev program you can think of (including several MS products) and I judge all of them based on merit.
When ATI released the 8500 and with crappy drivers, you saw my take on it. EVERY dev, media etc slammed them for the same thing. They've been cleaning up their act, to the extent that I have two 8500 machines here in my office and Peter, Andrei and Darrin, all have 8500 boards (as well as others I send out to them) simply because they are good cards and with stable drivers. I never thought that ATI could quite possibly top the 8500 any time soon. They proved every one wrong.
JC has always been neutral and outspoken in his views of cards and drivers. There is a good reason that the 9700 board was running DOOM3 at E3, when it could very well have been running on a Matrox Pahrelia (what a f*cking waste of time that was) or GF Ti4600. So, does that mean JC (and everyone else for that matter) are cruising around on the ATI ship?
What nonsense
The 9700 (I have the 9700 Pro) is a damn good card. In fact, currently the best there is and with drivers that I have so far found no problems with.
--------------------
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Designer/Lead Developer
The Battlecruiser Series
"The man who follows the crowd will usually get no further
than the crowd. The man who walks alone is likely to find
himself in places no one has ever been."
Matt Burris
Newcomer
Jeez, I have not seen someone flamebroil a company like that since Roscoe Sincero wrote a huge one way back in the 3dfx vs. NVIDIA days.
He has no problems... he just likes to bitch then.. even he admits it.
I no longer see the point of his posts... I think he is confoosed chappy who thinks too much of himself.. however I am positive if I were to say that to his face he would not hesitate in punching my lights out. Man he is scaring me!
Doomtrooper
Veteran
Then turns around and defends them on his own forums, calling people idiots for doing the same thing he is doing here, so what does that make him...a fair weather hyporcrite.
Richthofen
Newcomer
well i really don't care who flames this company and why.
He has some comments on their drivers from a developer perspective and together with that pretty long thread @rage3d it shows a certain picture.
He has some comments on their drivers from a developer perspective and together with that pretty long thread @rage3d it shows a certain picture.
Loved this...
"And I have no problems proving it. Quite easily actually; and thats only because, good, bad or egotistical, I consider myself to be a higher level developer than most. One of the best there is, in fact. Too bad I'm stuck in a niche and on the outside of the farce because I'm outspoken, don't take crap from anyone and are voted ...most likely to piss everyone off at the drop of a hat."
Oh yeah, right-oh! Some one has a bit of an ego going there. Not sure there's a lot of evidence to support those claims.
"And I have no problems proving it. Quite easily actually; and thats only because, good, bad or egotistical, I consider myself to be a higher level developer than most. One of the best there is, in fact. Too bad I'm stuck in a niche and on the outside of the farce because I'm outspoken, don't take crap from anyone and are voted ...most likely to piss everyone off at the drop of a hat."
Oh yeah, right-oh! Some one has a bit of an ego going there. Not sure there's a lot of evidence to support those claims.
OpenGL guy
Veteran
It does seem odd that his experience with PCBs would translate to drivers and/or 3D hardware, but I have no experience with PCBs so...WhiningKhan said:
Anyway, his complaints about Z-bias aren't really relevant. First, there's a registry key in the 7.75 driver that probably fix Mr. Smart's issue. Second, I did some investigation into the matter and found a better fix that doesn't require a registry key at all. Not a big deal, but it seems silly to base your opinions on a driver on an ill-defined feature of Direct 3D. DX9 should resolve any future Z-bias problems as MS is finally adopting the OpenGL definition, i.e. polygon offset. Plus, the DX9 reference rasterizer should support this feature so you can actually know when you've gotten things tuned correctly instead of just running a bunch of apps and tweaking until things (mostly) look ok.
And to Username, are you ever going to contribute anything useful to a thread on this forum or are you just going to attack me? I know what my job at ATi is. I fix bugs. I add features. I do optimizations. Nowhere in my job description does it say that I should interface with developers and find out what's bugging them. As Doomtrooper mentioned, we have people to do just that.
O.k sure, I can agree on that, but it's fairly obvious that the ATI drivers for R300 weren't written from scratch as was previously stated, but are based on the old drivers code.
The fact that the newest drivers for R300 released recently already work with R8500, further contribute to this conclusion.
He might have been a bit paranoid there, but most of the things he said made sense, whether u like it or not.
And the stuff that is going on right now on Rage3D in regards to this is actually pretty funny to observe!
P.S
As I stated previously, the guy is a pro in the game industry and he did spend much time with the new drivers, although the comment Doomtrooper posted kinda contradicts what he previously said...
The fact that the newest drivers for R300 released recently already work with R8500, further contribute to this conclusion.
He might have been a bit paranoid there, but most of the things he said made sense, whether u like it or not.
And the stuff that is going on right now on Rage3D in regards to this is actually pretty funny to observe!
P.S
As I stated previously, the guy is a pro in the game industry and he did spend much time with the new drivers, although the comment Doomtrooper posted kinda contradicts what he previously said...
