jjayb said:
Pete said:
And Lars has posted his take on the matter over at THG. It's an even-handed editorial touching on every recent battle in the war against marketspeak. He makes two interesting points. One, that ATi ("A 3D chipmaker who prefers to remain unnamed") was responsible for the first (ExtremeTech, B3D, eventually FM) investigation into 3DM03 cheating (clip planes, etc.)--the same "unnamed" IHV who tipped TR off to the nV 3DM03 aniso iregularities. Two, that nV's "adaptive" aniso is, according to nV's own replies, only "adaptive" if nV spends time "adapting" it to an application (paging radar1200gs ). Worth reading, IMO.
Pretty good read Pete. Thanks for pointing it out. I really liked the end of his article. Where he talks about reveiwers being pawns for the IHV's PR machine, by publishing spoonfed stories without adequately researching them, in order to be the first to publish a story. (Man, that was one heck of a run on sentence.)
I think you should be a bit more careful with praise.
What the article looks to me is an excellent example of fact use for agenda support.
What agenda? In this case, I think it is the agenda of stating facts to maintain readership trust. Is that an "unacceptable" agenda? Actually, no, and that's a refreshing change...in an imperfect world, I wish this was an "average" article. What is bad is that the agenda does not necessarily equate to reporting without bias...and the statements aside from the facts have some issues (IMO) with that criteria.
For instance, there are a lot of substantiated and useful unique tidbits about ATI and nVidia, but there are also statements that stand out for a lack of substantiation and their incongruous fit with the facts surrounding them.
To be brief, I'll post one example of what disturbed me:
on the second to last page said:
We also have some information which holds that ATi is keeping a list of all of NVIDIA's "sins." Apparently, ATi is happily distributing this list among the press. So don't be surprised to find some sensationalist stories of the "NVIDIA's Dirty Tactics Revealed!" variety in the near future. Probably, the race is already on behind the scenes to see who publishes the next story first... That's not to say that NVIDIA doesn't keep a similar list. At present, the company is not planning to publish it, though, since such mud-slinging battles tend to end up damaging the entire industry.
So, nVidia isn't slinging mud because they are "looking out for the industry", and
not because of a lack of mud to throw or their already established decision not to call this cheating and minimize the impact on consumer awareness concerning it? Note the implications about what ATI is "happily" not "looking out for". This isn't exactly subtle.
Is that interjection logical at all? If you don't mind paying Tom, et al, some more money, read through the article again and look at the comments between the (admittedly thorough) collection of facts. If you work on the assumption that providing facts are a baseline and minimum for decent journalism, instead of comparing to examples of journalism completely devoid of facts, do you still think it is a "good article"?
Or maybe your standards for "good" depend more on the availability of information for you to evaluate, and you care less about whether there is an apparent attempt for lacing fact listing with spin that might not be supported by those facts? I guess I can see that, and in fact I don't feel too bad for giving them hits for sharing all the useful things they seem to have supported. My problem is with calling it "good article", I guess.
). Worth reading, IMO.
