Have we forgiven Nvidia?
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There is no equal.
Word. 8)DaveBaumann said:
Richteralan
Regular
bashing company is fun.
especially big and successful companies...
very satisfying....
especially big and successful companies...
very satisfying....
I wasn't specifically referring to you in any way. However, if the cap fits...Entropy said:
Such is the nature of capitalism and advertising. Really, is there any company that advertises their products totally honestly? Turn on the TV and you'll lots of adverts for toothpaste or wide-screen TVs, and all claim to be "the best". It would be great if all companies were totally honest, but that's not going to happen (and if it did then reviewers would be out of business). The idea that you can polarise manufacturers into "honest" and "dishonest" is a fallacy.
So long as you're not an early adaptor and rush out and buy a new card as soon as it's launched you won't have a problem. If someone is misleading or using "cheating" optimisations then it always comes out. Simple logic dictates that if a company is cheating then either someone will notice, and the cheat gets detected, or the cheat is so good that no-one notices and hence it isn't really a cheat at all (if my card runs Doom 3 at 50FPS and it looks as good as the next card do I care if AF algorithm isn't the same?). Whilst I feel kinda sorry for people who rushed out and bought an FX card, if they had waited they'd have seen the reviews of DX9 performance and saved themselves some money. No amount of marketing crap can ever really deceive a sensible consumer, so long as they're not blinded by a false sense of loyalty.
Of course, it's your choice. However, I'd say that if you were exact in your application of standards then you'd find it hard to buy any product, let alone a graphics card. As you say, it's not life support systems, so really is it that important?
After all, how long do you hold a grudge for? Suppose company X has cheated in the past but for the last two generations has released a superb product that is better than the competition? Do you still boycott it and buy an inferior product by company Y?
I don't believe anyone has called you a f-boi - no need to be so defensive! If you don't want to support Nvidia, that is your prerogative. However, in the end your just limiting your options.
Like several posters said here, I believe that the feeling towards a company is only one criterion in choosing a card, and usually not a very significant one. Features, performance and price are more significant factors. When they are close enough, it's possible for the feeling to be a deciding factor.
Personally, I don't like NVIDIA's practices, and I don't like Microsoft business practices, but I still use Microsoft software, and if I hadn't received a free ATI card (thanks, B3D), I might have been using a NVIDIA card right now.
Personally, I don't like NVIDIA's practices, and I don't like Microsoft business practices, but I still use Microsoft software, and if I hadn't received a free ATI card (thanks, B3D), I might have been using a NVIDIA card right now.
Actually I'd say you're taking a pretty sophomoric attitude.Diplo said:
While most PR try to emphasize the benefits of whatever product they try to sell, there is a world of difference between this and actually covertly manipulating the measuring systems by which the products are evaluated.
And for your information, there are quite a few people who run (and work in) businesses whose idea is to provide good value and service to their customers, and by your attitude you belittle the work of all these people. I guess you simply don't belong to that group, nor plan on ever doing so, since you apparently don't even believe such people exist.
Yes, I do find that "everyone is equally dishonest" attitude to be damned offensive. Speak for yourself.
"someone will notice"... How? On what grounds do you assume that? And noticed by whom? What was disturbing about nVidia was they assumed that even though some people knew, they would shut up. (And they did.) Even when nVidias practices became publicly known, they still assumed that the relatively few who constituted that part of the public wouldn't suffice to matter either way in terms of sales. And maybe they are right about that as well, I wouldn't like to speculate just how much their loss of credibility has actually cost them in sales. Judging by many people here, who are almost all informed enough to know part of what has been going on, it can't have cost nVidia all that much.
That's an attitude you share with a number of athletes competing in the Olympic.
Some win.
Some lose anyway.
Some get caught. These are expelled, unlamented by peers and public.
A particularly nasty aspect of nVidias tactics is that it strikes against the ability of the consumer to inform his-/herself. Even the consumer who makes an effort to get objective information by seeking out reviews in magazines or on the web, get graphs and conclusions based on doctored data. The consumers were deceived by proxy, the reviewers who (at least in some cases) were probably unaware of nVidias policy of manipulating the tests.
Well, it's important to me that I don't support that which I find both offensive and against my interests. That they don't produce anything of greater consequence just means that it doesn't require any real sacrifice on the part of the consumer to avoid them.
I'd say that it would be best if such companies where simply weeded out of the marketplace. I was around before PCs even existed - I've seen quite a few PC graphics companies rise and fall, their patents and able employees dispersed among other players in the industry. I wouldn't mind if it happened to nVidia as well.
Yup.
I limit myself to buying from corporations that do not demonstrably and consistently work against my interests as a consumer. I'd say that's a pretty reasonable thing to do.
I have been reading these forums for years now but i never bothered registering and post a reply. This thread was a little too much for me not to reply. Its been over 1 year since i bought my 5900 ultra based on blistering fast early benchmarks that 5900 had at that time. Everything was pointing out that nvidia managed to do a comeback and it was on par with ati. So i bought it, only to regret it a few months later when nvidia cheating was coming to surfice.
I will only forgive nvidia if someome comes out and publicly apologise, especially to the nv3x buyers for their illegal tactics and misleading PR. I am actually suprised that noone sued them(americans tend to sue everything for anything). Especially those poor people that bought 5800.
As long as there is a decent competitive product to nvidia's products, i will never buy an nvidia product again in my life. Maybe i am naive to expect multibillion companies to have ethical values, but thats just who i am(an idiot).
Sorry but you cant wait 5 years for a graphic card to get old. At some point, you need to upgrade. And even after many months after 5900 came out, things werent clear. And all the misleading PR from nvidia, made things even more confusing for the consumer. Thats what nvidia did, they kept the consumers "on hold". "New dx will come out soon", "New magical drivers will come out soon", "New patch for the game will come out soon", etc.
So should someone wait for 1 year before he buys something? But when that 1 year has passed, new products will have come out. New games, new drivers. And everything has changed again. Not to mention that that 1 year old graphic card, might be outdated(compare my 5900u with a 6800 or even 6600).
Everything moves so fast so honesty is ESSENTIAL. Nvidia pretty much said "Everyone is wrong, we are right. Our cards are faster" and threw mud towards anyone that said otherwise.
Just look how ATI reacted after the quake scandal and what nvidia does now. 1 company shows to me that I can trust it, while the other doesn’t.
I will only forgive nvidia if someome comes out and publicly apologise, especially to the nv3x buyers for their illegal tactics and misleading PR. I am actually suprised that noone sued them(americans tend to sue everything for anything). Especially those poor people that bought 5800.
As long as there is a decent competitive product to nvidia's products, i will never buy an nvidia product again in my life. Maybe i am naive to expect multibillion companies to have ethical values, but thats just who i am(an idiot).
Sorry but you cant wait 5 years for a graphic card to get old. At some point, you need to upgrade. And even after many months after 5900 came out, things werent clear. And all the misleading PR from nvidia, made things even more confusing for the consumer. Thats what nvidia did, they kept the consumers "on hold". "New dx will come out soon", "New magical drivers will come out soon", "New patch for the game will come out soon", etc.
So should someone wait for 1 year before he buys something? But when that 1 year has passed, new products will have come out. New games, new drivers. And everything has changed again. Not to mention that that 1 year old graphic card, might be outdated(compare my 5900u with a 6800 or even 6600).
Everything moves so fast so honesty is ESSENTIAL. Nvidia pretty much said "Everyone is wrong, we are right. Our cards are faster" and threw mud towards anyone that said otherwise.
Just look how ATI reacted after the quake scandal and what nvidia does now. 1 company shows to me that I can trust it, while the other doesn’t.
NIB said:
There is a fundamental principle at work in all more or less "free" economies, and that is Caveat Emptor (Buyer Beware.) It even applies to heavily socialist economies, too, but to a much lesser extent since these economies are either planned from the top or else heavily regulated and taxed so that consumers have far fewer product choices to begin with (don't know the Latin there but it translates roughly to "Beggars Can't Be Choosers" or "The People's Choices as Selected for Them by Handfulls of Government Bureaucrats"....
)Basically, it means that as a consumer you are responsible for "getting the skinny" on the products you are thinking of buying before you purchase them. There was plenty of in-depth, quality information on the Internet about nVidia's problems with nV3x that was abundantly circulated prior to nVidia shipping the 5900 last year (much of that info was available through B3d articles and forum threads throughout the year), a condition further enhanced by the fact that nVidia's yield problems prevented them from shipping nV35/8 until late '03 in any kind of "quantity." So, there was plenty of time, and plenty of readily accessible info for you to have considered last year prior to your purchase apart and distinct from the PR hyperbole and propaganda nVidia itself was spinning.
To a great extent, then, you have to take responsibility for your own purchase decisions. Another adage comes to mind here, too: "Haste makes Waste"...
Based on my following things as they progressed last year I'd have to say that if you were a regular reader of B3d last year you must have chosen to disreguard much of the info available here at the time you made your purchase. I do sympathize with you because often the issues aren't clear even when spelled out until you face a "hands-on" experience, and experience is certainly the best teacher of them all (and also the costliest, initially.) But take a positive attitude about it and consider what you've learned, because I guarantee that this lesson will undoubtedly save you a lot of $$$ and frustration in your future purchases--such that this one bad purchase will pay for itself many times over by virtue of what you've learned from it. There is a distinct positive side here, in other words, that you walk away with.
This is where this kind of experience accrues and becomes invaluable: things didn't seem "clear" only to the inexperienced, but to experienced people they seemed abundantly clear...
By virtue of your experience here, you have now joined the ranks of the "experienced," and *in the future* things will undoubtedly seem much clearer to you than they did at the time you made your 5900 purchase last year.Yes, and the "quake scandal" was as literally nothing compared to the "nV3x scandal" saga perpetrated for all of '03...
In fact, the *only* people who ever saw any similarity between the events were people who thought they understood the issues much better than they actually did, or else people who were unabashedly a part of the nV3x propganda PR machine last year.But cheer up--unless nVidia management is as dumb as a rock, they couldn't have failed to learn some lessons from last year--because nVidia got hammered on a number of fronts last year--and hopefully they've learned that "all the king's propaganda, and all the king's slurs, couldn't put nVidia together again"....
Usually, if a company doesn't quickly learn that PR propaganda/spin is no substitute for shipping competitive products, they just don't get too many chances to repeat the mistake and the curtain inevitably falls and ends their Act in the play. Another adage which seems apt to me as concerns nV3x last year is: "You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear," which hopefully nVidia learned very well last year. Too bad for them that they evidently were unfamiliar with this truism before they decided to play Russian roulette with their market position last year.
I'd say it's realistic.Entropy said:
Might point is that it's commonplace among virtually every large corporation to selectively use statistics to present your product in the best light. When you see MPG figures for cars they are always an artificial "best case" scenario of driving at a constant 56 MPH on level roads in one gear. Cheap stereos tend to give their output figures in APP (Peak Power) rather then the standard RMS format. There are millions of examples from all types of industry of statistics being carefully manipulated to place products in the best light. As a consumer, especially one willing to spend hundreds of pounds/dollars/euros, you have to make an effort to inform yourself so you can see through the marketing bullshit.
Oh please, spare the indignation. I'm talking about large corporations and their marketing divisions. If you can find me one honest person in a large corporate marketing division I'll eat my motherboard.
Your logic is baffling. No, I don't intend to belong to this mythical group of honest marketing people since that isn't my career and probably never will be.
You must have a low toleranace threshold for being offended or else you've completely failed to understand a word I said. I never said "everyone is equally dishonest" I merely pointed out that most large corporations will do whatever it takes to market their products aggresively in a cut-throat market. If they don't they loose money, share prices fall and they go bankrupt. We're not talking about Bob's Pie Shop in some little backwater town, we're talking about large multi-national corporations. You think Enron are an exception? No, they just got caught.
Try reading these forums. Ever single thing ATI and Nvidia does comes under intense scrutiny, almost to the point were people are calling "cheat" at the slightest hint of impropriety.
Try choosing an accurate analogy, not the first one that springs to mind because it happens to be topical.
This is more down to reviewers desire to be the first with "exclusive" reviews (and the lure of free hardware, of course). Did B3D ever get fooled? I don't think so.
So, given that both Nvidia and ATI have done "dodgy" things, who exactly do you buy your graphics card from? Some ethical collective in East Timore who hand craft them?
Right, so Nvidia "go away" and we are left with no competition for ATI? Do you think ATI would even be making half-decent cards now if it weren't for Nvidia giving them a kick up the arse? Do you think without the competition ATI would be pushing themselves? Nvidia have made mistakes, sure, but they have also been pioneers and visionaries. Nearly every inovation in video technlogy in recent years has been pioneered by Nvidia cards first. Your desire to see them go bust is nothing more than petty flag-waving for ATI under the guise of ethics. As consumers we benefit from the competition - remove either one of them and we're back to the virtual monopoly Intel used to have in the IBM Compatible CPU market.
I'd say not buying the best product on the market simply because you have pledged loyalty to a card manufacturer is pretty dumb myself. If ATI's next card is twice as expensive as Nvidia's but half as fast would you still buy it? Your response says you would. More fool you.
A. You weren't limiting yourself to market divisions previously.Diplo said:
This statement is simply wrong, and indicative of an attitude that are common with youth once they wake up to the fact that the world is a harsher place than their classroom experiences, but still haven't a postion of responsibility of their own, nor taken out directions in their lifes or have had cause to consider how they want to live and what they want to stand for in this world. Hence "sophomoric". You may be older though. People are different. For instance, not everyone is equally dishonest. And you might ponder that corporations are made up by the people in them. You really have no reason to assume that Enron and for instance Toshiba are run with the same corporate ethics.
B. Marketing don't write drivers, nor do they hold authority over those who do. nVidia policies in this regard are sanctioned from higher up.
Also, you should have paid more attention to the more technical discussions we had when the cheating was a hot topic. Certain kinds of cheating is essentially impossible to catch. And while the B3D forums is a good place for information, you really shouldn't assume to much....
BTW, I've taken you to task for an attitude that has irritated me here for a couple of years at least. Don't take it too personally.
I've been pondering this thread and I think it's asking the wrong question.
It asks, "Have you forgiven nVidia yet?"; but I think the more important question should be, "Has nVidia changed?".
There hardware has certainly improved this generation, but I don't think their company/policies have at all.
It asks, "Have you forgiven nVidia yet?"; but I think the more important question should be, "Has nVidia changed?".
There hardware has certainly improved this generation, but I don't think their company/policies have at all.
You seem to be baring some kind of grudge with society about something that bares little relevance to the discussion at hand. I don't really take kindly to the patronising tone that I'm somehow immature because I don't believe in a world of absolute black and white. I'm certainly no youth straight out of school (there were no video games when I was at school if that gives you any indication). You say it's not meant personally, but since it's directed straight at me then I'm afraid I can't take it any other way.Entropy said:
If you wish to believe there are honest manufacturers and evil ones, that's fine, but if you boycotted every manufacturer that had unethical policies you would be living in a tent in the woods. The downside of cheap prices and innovation born of competition is that it leads to utter ruthlessness in the market place.
Well, if someone can "cheat" to improve performance whilst under intense scrutiny and yet nobody notices any difference in IQ then what exactly is the problem? I call that clever optimising.
Well, don't take it too personally when I dismiss your comments as patronising and inherently dishonest
Nvidia had in the past(and in the present) pulled rabbits out of their hats regarding their card perfomance through legit driver optimization. And they pretty much did this again with my 5900 to a certain degree. That degree of course is still far away from the point that they promised.
At the summer of 2003, everyone was talking bs. Nvidiots were saying that FX cards will kick butt later on, fanatics were saying that nvidia cards suck. On all sites, even on this one, this dispute was huge and no side had any arguments to back it up. ALL debates ended to "Lets just wait and see what will happen in 1 year from now when all the drivers/games/updates are out".
At that point i needed an upgrade. I just couldnt stick with my geforce 2 gts for much longer(games were unplayble). I was dissapointed by the 5800 and i actually ordered a 9800pro but then the first benchmarks of 5900 started to hit the light and many were saying that nvidia did a comeback. And on those results which was pretty much testing basically dx7 games and 3dmark(hacked to death by nvidia), 5900 looked like the nvidia card that could beat 9800(thus cancelled my ordered and waited for the 5900).
At that time, ati was still struggling on some games with driver incompatibilities. Sure after a few weeks a new patch/driver comes out which fixes the problem but still(i have a 56k modem and i cant dl 200mb patches all the time).
Was my decision hasted? Yes probably but i had no other choice at that time. The whole thing with the failure of the fx series was apparent many months later. Till then, it was only rumours.
Things on the graphic card market change all the time. I remember when 9500pro came out and every1 was saying that it was inferior to 4200. But now 9500pro is considered 1 of the best cards ever made. It beats the entire ti series, it beats 9600xt, it even beats 5900 on some occasions. Why? Cause things have changed. That mystirious yet useless(back then) "dx9 compliant" feature now actually started to show how important it was and what a good job ati did back then implementing it.
Except we are talking about graphic cards. You know the hardware that becomes obsolute within 1 year? How can you not haste when buying a graphic card? I mean sure 9700pro is a card that proved a solid purchase even after like 4 years but you cant know this when a card is made. Just look the huge leap in perfomance from 9800pro to x800.
Sometimes you get huge leaps in perfomance, sometimes you dont. And cause of all that PR bs, you dont know what to expect. Cause sometimes that huge leap in perfomance isnt obvious when a card is introduced to the market.
I spend literally hundreds(maybe thousands) of hours reading articles, benchmark results and forums about graphic cards in the last couple years. I might not be a graphic card guru, but at least i know some things that the average john doe doesnt know. And that john doe is who gets screwed even more than me from all this PR bs.
Yes and? Shouldnt we criticize them? Should we just accept the "reality" that some multibillion dollar companies want to enforce to us? Might as well join the "Matrix", put a plug in us and suck our money/life out since "Resistance is futile". I say burn them. I dont care if every1 is doing that cause i know the truth. I know that I have the power. I am the consumer and i can think for my own. If i dont buy, they wont earn any money. And if i educate everyone else, then they will have serious problems and then they will start doing what the consumer wants and not what they want.
The basis for a real democracy is education(all kinds of education). We have no education thus we have no democracy. We only have an illusion of democracy and we actually have an oligarchy where few ppl can manipulate the mass according to their interests.
SPREAD THE TRUTH, THERE IS NO SPOON
NIB said:
No, they *said* they were pulling out rabbits--which turned out to be skunks, instead...
The thing about magician's tricks is, of course, that they are illusions.Well, the information that I saw persuaded me not to touch nV3x with a ten-foot pole...
Agreed, though, that if you don't have enough experience to filter the legit info from the bad that it was certainly possible to reach conclusions similar to yours at the time. Well, you seemed to have learned from your mistakes and that will do you a lot of good in the future and that's a positive.
I've been running ATi and the Catalysts since 9/'02 and haven't run across these "incompatabilities"--but then, I know how to set up my machine, too...
Shows you how worthless scuttlebutt is, doesn't it? BTW, what do "200mb patches" for games have to do with ATi? If you had a nVidia card you'd still have to download them. Try broadband.Actually, from what you wrote you initially made the right decision--the R9800P--but were persuaded by bad information to change it. That was where you erred. But that's valuable experience you can carry forward into the future. nV3x was a "failure" really since nV30, and that was apparent to a lot of people, including me. The nV30 cancellation, the nV35/8 yield/fab problems, and the benchmark cheats and driver "optimizations" and the rest of it last year were all a matter of public record at the time and not ever merely "rumors." You were persuaded by poor info that such facts as were in evidence weren't actually true, but as I say now you know better, right?
What on earth might've led you to believe that the feature sets for "DX9" or "OpenGL2.0" would *not* have become important? You certainly didn't get that from reading informed opinion on B3d...
(nVnews, maybe?) After DX7 and then DX8 and then DX8.1 were first introduced, they certainly became useful, right? I mean, the intention for new API versions is that they become useful, right? There was never any reason to think any new API version wouldn't actually represent the "future" of 3d games--despite anything nVidia said to the contrary, right? This was underscored dozens if not hundreds of times in the B3d forums last year.
The 9700P shipped initially in 8/'02--I bought mine 9/''02--which makes it about 2 years old presently--not four. "Haste makes waste" is a valuable sentiment for anything, including graphics card purchases. Who says the 9700P is "obsolete," btw...? My 9800P is running D3 very well presently. It runs everything else I've got extremely well, too. When I buy my x800PE later this year it will be because I want to, not because I have to...
So, between r3x0 and R4x0 you've got about two years, roughly, which strikes me as about right.
It is pretty obvious if you understand the relationship between pixels per clock and clock speed and shaders, etc. These are things you'll appreciate as time moves on and you gain experience. Granted, though, that nVidia PR didn't make it easy for you by truthfully reporting nV30/5/8 specs as they certainly should have done. But the info that the nV30/5/8 gpus had 4 pixel pipes instead of the claimed 8 was all over the place for most of last year.
The problem again is one of experience--the more of it you have, the better you can sift the good info from the bad. Relax, because we've all been where you're sitting. Oh, the stories I could tell about how many times in the past I've been mislead by misleading PR--but the result is today that I am rarely mislead by anything...
Eventually, you'll get there, too, have no doubt!- Status
