PaulS said:
I assume you copied the above post from a different forum, since you certainly didn't sign up just for this post here
Very interesting to read the slides in full. I found Slides 6-9 pretty unprofessional to be honest, and it's very PR driven in how they've worded things in that section (although it's obviously ALL worded in favour of ATi, just to a lesser extent). They really stick the knife in there, which is suprising given how this was meant to be an internal document
?
. It was also hypocritical of them to criticise nVidia's TWIMTBP campaign, when slide 12 talks about ATi doing almost the exact same things. Oh, but that's okay because ATi are the "good" guys here
Interesting to see what people are going to say about this.
Sigh...it's really amazing how people can misconstrue the obvious...First of all, this material is really, really dated. It shows Q3 shipping in '03 and DeusX2--Invisible War shipping in Q2 '03 (don't tell me I missed DeusX2!)...
Anyway, it's been a few months since it became apparent that D3 wouldn't make it in '03...so this material predates all of that....Anyway, that's neither here nor there...
What this is is a presentation geared for new ATi employees to train them. How can that not be obvious to everyone? These are employee training pages designed to indoctrinate new ATi employees on what ATi is, where it stands in the 3d-gaming market place, what it has to offer, and what its *competitive advantages* are over the companies with which it competes in the 3d-gaming marketplace, etc.
OK, page number 7 is entitled "What Developers think of Cg"....now, what would a page like this be doing in a document
meant for Developers? Why would ATi need to tell Developers what Developers think of Cg? Heh...
Well, of course they wouldn't. But they *would* need to tell it to ATi employees whose job it is to go out and *talk* to game developers about ATi's "get in the game program," or any other facet of developer relations, wouldn't they? Besides, all of this stuff is really elementary to game developers, who know and appreciate very well what's going on in the industry, and such basic info as contained in these slides wouldn't interest them in the slightest.
I don't quite know why it is, but some people think that everyone who works for a company like ATi knows how to program 3d games and design graphics chips. Well, it ain't so!...
In fact, some hires are pimply-faced youngsters barely out of school whose sum total of knowledge about 3d consists of how to spell it. Some hires know nothing about 3d or ATi or nVidia or where ATi fits into the marketplace, don't know what Renderman is, etc., ad infinitum.
So...training materials like this are designed to bring them up to speed on the basics so that they can actually have a semi-literate conversation with someone like a game developer, or someone else invovled with the industry, and not look like total fools in the course of the conversation.
I can also add here that every company on earth bigger than a dog house has such training material for its employees. I've seen the same thing many, many times. If you're still in school and you see something like this you may not understand what it is, exactly--but believe me if you leave school and go to work for a sizable company you are going to see this kind of thing shoved in your face until you absolutely get so sick of it you will puke in your boss's lap! *chuckle* I kid you not.
I'm not privy to the details, but just guessing I'd say this is training material for people hired by the company to conduct low-level developer relations. Everything in these pages is basic and foundational, and assumes the person reading them knows nothing at all about the company or its goals or its competition. In fact, in studying the Renderman pages briefly I see notes on them referencing dozens of ancillary documents--all of which are missing from these pages--but they are plainly enumerated--so I'm guessing this is some kind of new employee training kit, or else part of presentation for new employees that is a routine part of ATi employee orientation, and the referenced documents are included in kits they get when they start.
This is entry-level, entry-grade stuff. What it absolutely is not, I'm confident, is anything at all targeted at anyone outside ATi, who would not find any of this info of any value.
Ho-Humm--another mountain out of a mole hill...Move along, nothing to see here....Yawn...
