I am sure Dave B will disagree with me on this one...

[digitalwanderer]

And you apparently do not also know that nVidia publicly and formally cancelled nV30 production shortly after it attempted to start it

Quite understandable if he doesn't "know" that, I doubt anyone can keep up with everything you make up in your head ...

You really didn't know that Incurable, Walt is not making this shit up...it all really happened.

But you are right in one respect, I suppose--maybe they were just drooling morons who simply didn't know when their chains were being yanked? Is that how you'd prefer to see it?

I think it's the only way to take it. NVidia spanked most "technical" websites with its PR at this time, whether it was over NV30 or 3DMk03. There are plenty of editorials admitting as much.

Where are these editorials? I think I saw one at [H], but that's the only site I can recall that went public with it. (I mean one of the sites that helped nVidia pimp the nV30, I know a lot of other sites like here never bought into the bullshit)

 

[Jawed]

TechReport moaned about being mislead and decided to "stamp down" on PR claims and test stuff to destruction itself. I think TR's last straw was the ATI "trylinear fiasco".

Jawed

 

[digitalwanderer]

TechReport moaned about being mislead and decided to "stamp down" on PR claims and test stuff to destruction itself. I think TR's last straw was the ATI "trylinear fiasco".

Ah, thanks. I don't generally follow that site too close.

 

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

So, unless ATi enjoys shadow boxing and ghost chasing, I'd be surprised to see the company doing anything major which is based purely on rumor and wild speculation. I know I wouldn't worry about it if I was them.

As I said, I'm sure that ATI and Nvidia mostly know what their competitors are doing by now ie it's not "shadow boxing and ghost chasing" so they are not working on "rumour and speculation". Both companies will have friends in the OEMs, websites and magazines and all it takes is for someone to move from one company to the other, and information changes hands.

You'd have to be very foolish to not pay attention to what your competitors are doing, as Nvidia showed when they fell down with NV30. I'm not talking about "listening to rumours" but actually taking into account where your competitors actually are, what they are bringing out to compete, where they will takes sales and money away from you.

At this late stage, there's only a limited amount that either company can do to react, but in each case it will be a question of how much marketing, product-pricing, chip yield, etc they are willing to sacrifice to make a more attractive product. For instance, ATI could decide to make their top R520 product a full 32 pipes rather than stockpile them for the refresh next spring, or to sell their chips for less money. In truth, the winner for this round of upgrades has already been decided a year back as the main design decisions for next generation products were being finalised, but there are still choices to be made.

 

[incurable]

And you apparently do not also know that nVidia publicly and formally cancelled nV30 production shortly after it attempted to start it

Quite understandable if he doesn't "know" that, I doubt anyone can keep up with everything you make up in your head ...

You really didn't know that Incurable, Walt is not making this shit up...it all really happened.

Sure he is. NV30 was produced. NV30 shipped as the regular 5800 (the 400/400 MHz one w/o Dustbuster) for quite some time. NV30 even shipped as the dustbustered 5800 Ultra in limited numbers before its production run was ended.

And as for the publicity and formalness of the cancellation announcement, well, apparently it was neither public nor formal enough to make it into an official NVIDIA press release. Go figure. Maybe Jen-Hsen Huang faxed it to Walt.



PS and off topic: While writing this post I had déjà vu of some sorts, having dreamed writing the first paragraph above two nights ago. Spooky feeling. :? Though I'm quite happy to know it still works.

 

[dizietsma]

I picked up the 5800nu about a year after it was released. I think nvidia speeded up the nv35 to market so it quite quickly took over from nv30 rather than "cancelling" nv30 which is Walt's rather unsurprising spin on it.

Going from a 4400ti to the 5800 was not a disappointment but my 9800Pro was definitely better.

 

[ANova]

I remember the R300 and NV30 pre-/launch quite vividly. It was at this time that I realized just how influential and amazing nvidia's PR department was at what it did best. Do any of you guys (besides Walt) remember just how many months it took before people finally started admitting the NV30's problems? I certainly remember having conversations on other forums with people convinced that the NV30 was better then the R300. It was not until I hammered factual data into them for the 100th time that they started to realize the truth, and shortly afterward Valve outright claimed it's inferiority at Shader Days. Then all the sites magically changed their past conclusions in favor of the R300, Futuremark implemented their approved driver program, the NV30 was quietly pulled and replaced with the NV35, etc.

You could say it wasn't bad when compared to past video cards, but when compared to the R300 it was a joke, and a bad one at that. The fact that nvidia pushed it as the latest and greatest with bogus benchmark numbers and paid sites to claim it as the winner is what really made it go down in history.

 

[Smurfie]

Date: June 13 2005.

But what we have are people reminiscing on the past. That is the past! Leave it as it is. If what we want is ATI at the top, challenge ATI to do better than what they did in 2004. Talking about the R300 and NV30 isn't going to change that ATI is tripping a little today.

 

[Pete]

[H]'s "Doom 3 Preview Benchmarks," which [H] reported running on sealed boxes furnished by nVidia running only nVidia-furnished benchmarks

IIRC, the only thing really sealed about those boxes were the hard drives. Didn't either [H] or Anand have a problem with their test system, and they used their own parts with an nV HD? (Yes.)

not to mention the fact that the "Doom 3 Preview Benchmarks" setup by nVidia ran on [H] about a *year* or so before the game was released.

How was this different from the similarly early and closed HL2 benches?

Even Carmack recommended ATi over nV for Doom 3 early on, and ran an early build of it on R300 while stating that nVidia just had nothing comparable to test.

It would take a complete stooge not to preview their game at E3 on the fastest available hardware, and obviously a 9700P was much faster than a 4600 (which is the fastest card JC said iD had access to at the time). And, if you recall, Doom 3 was first publically previewed on a GF3 (in a Mac!) even earlier.

And you apparently do not also know that nVidia publicly and formally cancelled nV30 production shortly after it attempted to start it, and that even nVidia's CEO JHH is on record saying "nV30 was a failure."

Yes, well, are there other ways to cancel production? Will ATi secretly cancel production of a card and hope no one notices? JHH did the only thing he could do, admit NV30 was a failure from an end-user and critical standpoint. I don't think ondaedg was implying that NV30 was a great card with his quip.

 

[Geo]

Date: June 13 2005.

But what we have are people reminiscing on the past. That is the past! Leave it as it is. If what we want is ATI at the top, challenge ATI to do better than what they did in 2004. Talking about the R300 and NV30 isn't going to change that ATI is tripping a little today.

Certainly 2002/3 was an important inflection point (probably one of the top three or so) in the industry and should be integrated into our worldview of the possible. Where I get uncomfortable is how many people seem stuck there, as the only relevant benchmark for their thinking, like no years before or since mean anything. . .

 

[JoshMST]

I think people just like to claim, "Hey, I wasn't fooled by all this!" The truth of the matter is that most of us took for granted that NVIDIA hardware has always been faster than ATI hardware until that point. Rage 128, 128 Pro, Radeon, and Radeon 8500 were all "similar" to NVIDIA products in terms of features, but NVIDIA was always faster. So, many of us press folks didn't look into NVIDIA's claims closer because we had never had a reason to doubt them. We all knew that PR was PR, but we had never really been led astray by NVIDIA all that much before hand.

I was guilty of taking their claims too seriously without getting true empirical data about the claims, but that was mainly because I didn't have access to NV30 hardware until much later. Since then we have all learned better. We really don't see the same blinders on writers as we did before. So, we all learned a lesson ,and most of us admit that. So, instead of rehashing all the garbage from 3 years ago, lets talk about the topic onhand!

 

[digitalwanderer]

Who's "we", I wasn't fooled by all that.

 

[ninelven]

erased

 

[trinibwoy]

Well, you can only be fooled by an entity you believe in...

Nvidia doesn't really exist?!

 

[Jawed]

 

[ondaedg]

Quite understandable if he doesn't "know" that, I doubt anyone can keep up with everything you make up in your head ...

OK, excuse me for lying when the truth is that nV never officially cancelled nV30 production and JHH never declared nV30 a failure in a public statement. Thanks for enlightening the world that I made it all up...

Uh, do you have any more fiction spinning around in your head?....Unbelievable.

If you ask me, you are the one with fiction spinning around in your head. Better yet, you take it a step further. You take what you want to believe, twist some words, and the next thing you have is a statement declaring web sites and IHVs as being payed off criminals, none of which has ever been proven. Then you go on to chastise me for not remembering what you are making up in your head!

And then you go on to pat yourself on the back over how good of a memory you have that you can actually remember the events that occurred in YOUR head!

If you really want to impress me, why don't you use that amazing memory and remember what I was thinking in 2002.

 

[ERK]

I've been reading this forum for about four years, and I can assure you that Walt is not making this stuff up. While his exact wording may be slightly exaggerated to make his point, in essence what he wrote is what happened.

IMO, Walt and Digi and Josh are more in line with history than are incurable and onda.

That's from my own memory, of course.

 

[IgnorancePersonified]

Really I wish I could power on every morning like a solid state system but having residual memory and applying that in context is not necesarliy a bad thing.

One thing nv30/nvPR really showed me was that a lot of tech websites are run by geeks with no journalist training or the so-called ethics that go with that. Some very basic 101 rules were and still are left by the wayside in order to be '1st to print' and get the hits. Sounds good in the short term for the bottem line but reputations are long term.

Oh wait ... there's an alternate history being postulated in this very thread.

 

[ondaedg]

so what you're saying is that Josh's theory which is that Nvidia's PR dept led web sites to believe that the nv30 was going to be a speed demon and that Walt's theory which is that Nvidia payed off web sites to write favorable articles are one in the same or similar?

Josh's theory and Walt's theory are nothing alike. Dig and Walt have some strange obsession with Nvidia. I just have fun pointing out their issues, at their expense of course.

 

[IgnorancePersonified]

nah I'm talking about tech sites being run by inexperienced gullible nerds or at the other extreme people: who are in it for a quick buck and are also inexperienced nerds who are also gullible.... Obviously this doesn't cover all sites otherwise I truly would be a jaded alcoholic and not the binge drinking cynic I currently am.

Falls in to line or contains elements of both other 'theories" if you have to put it that way. I wonder why - an element of truth to both know doubt?
I actually enjoyed the editorials(post nv30). The issue hasn't gone away - there has been numerous threads on this and other sites about the same topic. One of the worst offences is only listening to one snout - in the case josh is talking about, nvPr. Bit hard in that case as you are relying on the only people that have the info. Still a pinch of salt in those cases never goes astray. Seen it way to many times on tech sites for me to consider them in any way reliable or taking there job seriously. And I guess that's the problem. Hobby sites grow up and feel the pain of growth well before the experience has settled in. I think Anandtech would make a great study case.

So I would agree with both Josh and Walt in part. What you don't? Expand on that one please.

Actually I categorised your recent posts as "anti-fanboi-fanboi" drivel. anti-fanboi-fanboi's feel the need to recount each and every post made by anyone they deem to be on the "other side" or to refute their chosen <insert_maker_of_glitsy_merchandise> perception in the market whilst still claiming impartiality because they have recently purchased <insert_competitor_of_maker_of_glitsy_merchandise> product.



I guess it's that time of the year again.