More ATI Driver News from Derek Smart

[Randell]

phew its bad enough with some of the ATI/3dfx/nVidia fanboy arguments but DS does have his own following (pro & anti him, lots of single posters here today) which appear to have landed.

Still makes interesting reading (some of it).

 

[Derek Smart [3000AD]]

No graphical glitches related to multitexturing...which is what the thread was kind of about at one time.
Since it was ported over for X-box I would assume it would not run as smooth

Thats irrelevant I think, because the XBox implemenation of the DX8 api is not that different from the PC pipeline. Its just different hardware.

At any rate, until ATI tell me how MT got broken, we can only speculate why it works on one game and not the other. OpenGL_Guy is looking into it; because I really would like to know. All I know is that its broken in my game. For the same reason some things are broken in one game and not in the other.

 

[ben6]

Believe it or not I loved Battlecruiser 2000AD and 3000AD . I have very few if any problems with my 9700 (well there is one issue in Quake3 running WinME but it's not in gameplay or playing demos, only when I try to disable sound it's not presnet in XP) and the 9700 "fix" yesterday fixed my issue with Mafia

 

[Bigus Dickus]

Quick question: how many existing games use (or require for proper rendering) W-buffer support?


After that post of Derek's at the top of this page (which almost sounded, well... civilized) I can't help but wonder if he just now took some medication.

 

[Doomtrooper]

Yes Opengl_guy should have a standard form for requests :

1)Overclocking Tab
2)Fix Z-bias
3)Overclocking Tab
4)Force Refresh in Winxp
5)Overclocking Tab
6)W-buffer

etc....

Oh and a overclocking tab

 

[ben6]

1)Overclocking Tab
2)Fix Z-bias
3)Overclocking Tab
4)Force Refresh in Winxp
5)Overclocking Tab
6)W-buffer

etc....

Oh and a overclocking tab

Hrm are you trying to say something about overclocking Doom?

 

[Doomtrooper]

No why you ask ??

 

[walkndude]

Go back to work Derek.

Dont you know what happens when you argue with an idiot(s) ?

 

[Derek Smart [3000AD]]

Go back to work Derek.

Dont you know what happens when you argue with an idiot(s) ?

Work?!! Who? Me? LOL!!! hehe, I took the day off mate (in memory of the 911 victims). Right now, am about to go play BF1942 on my rig which is running a GF4 Ti4600

 

[mwgamer]

This is actually good information for an end user like myself.

When I see Devs of games going off about a video card it makes me wonder.

Not everyone wants to spend the cash on the new and best hoping it works and having to do the driver dance to get it to work.

I dont know if this Derrick guy is right or wrong but its information for me to take into account if Im going to purchase a product or not.

 

[KimB]

]REGARDLESS OF D3D DRIVER IMPLEMENTATION, I NEVER, EVER, EVER, EVER HAD TO MAKE ANY ZBIAS CHANGES IN MY CODE FOR ANY BOARD TO GET IT TO WORK. FOR THE ATI BOARDS, I HAD TO

So that includes nVidia, Matrox, 3dfx, S3, SiS, and Trident? Just trying to clarify...

Anyway, if you're going to be such an ass, you might as well be just a little bit more specific.

Some specific examples of driver problems (or lack thereof) from other vendors would be nice, since you've only been talking about ATI's.

 

[Brellek]

Hello,

First of all I am not a developer/programmer/etc other than a game player/customer. Hell I own a Heating and A/C contracting company, not really glamorous credentials for posting in this forum.

However I really feel alot of you are missing the point somewhat, and I'll concede that maybe Mr. Smart is inviting some confrontation with his grammarical tone. But really so what?

When do you/we draw the line? For god sakes are we going to go back the the days of 3dfx and dowloading a new dll to paste to our game folder once a week? Maybe we should all go back to using note pad to edit a file line by line so our damn game thats susposed to be supported out of the box will work. Or heck I actually really liked all that great artifacting S3 used to give us so why am I complaining?

I'm sure several of you are going to blame those issues on developers of the games not necessarily the hardware and in some cases maybe thats true. But how can you blame a guy for wanting something as difficult as game production to be made just a little easier rather that harder by one of the dominant manufacturers of the hardware we're running in our machines? He's drawing the line where he feels it ought to be drawn and more power to him. Hopefully ATI's skin is as thick as you're expecting his to be and they can shrug off the comments tone and see what he's really trying to say/ask for. Which in my perception is to just stop making his damn job harder, my god I often wish for the same thing from my suppliers/vendors in my trade.

As to where I got my info on per game patches, several websites are now posting fixes/workarounds for the 9700's problems in current games.

I'd also like to give my take on the John Carmack factor. Mr. Carmack back in the day gave oodles of praise to the glorious 3dfx, and at the same time shunned nvidia. In fact I really can't remember exact quotes or anything but I remeber one which basically said below 60 fps is unplayable therefore 3dfx's washed out brown textures will always be more desireable to a gamer than the riva 128 which just cant compete with the voodoo2.

Well guess what, Mr Carmack certainly didn't predict the future, or secure the long term dominance of 3dfx. Guess who deceided which was really better? I did and thousands of other guys and gals like me that buy the hardware and games you all develop.

Strangely it sounds to me like Mr Smart has a pretty decent grip on that concept. And maybe you're right the technofiles are finding the drivers to be satisfactory/decent, but I promise the average gamer doesn't want to implement those workarounds, we want games to work. And the very same Mr. Joe Average can't phone up to scream at an ATI but we can find those numbers in the back of our game manuals that make fellows like Mr. Smart the middle man or scape goat.

I guess what I'm saying is he really has to be our voice and kudos to him for having enough brass to do it...

Hey ATI how about helping my man here make better games??

 

[KimB]

I'd also like to give my take on the John Carmack factor. Mr. Carmack back in the day gave oodles of praise to the glorious 3dfx, and at the same time shunned nvidia. In fact I really can't remember exact quotes or anything but I remeber one which basically said below 60 fps is unplayable therefore 3dfx's washed out brown textures will always be more desireable to a gamer than the riva 128 which just cant compete with the voodoo2.

I'd just like to say that from what I've read, the #1 drawback of the Riva 128 was its image quality. The speed was there, the image quality wasn't. In particular, I don't believe it supported any MIP mapping, or most blending modes.

At the time, I don't doubt for a moment that the RIVA 128 was inferior in pretty much every way to the Voodoo and Voodoo2.

 

[Kassandra]

Doomtrooper:

I was simply trying to sum up what Derek Smart was saying, which is not necessarily my own opinion. Being able to read is a clear advantage here.

Btw, whatever and whoever you believe I work and work for: You can bet you're wrong. I am not involved with any graphics hard- or software company. I simply resent the way the things Derek Smart is saying are twisted and distorted to make some futile point against him without getting onto what he is really trying to say - no matter how rude he says it. Personally, I find the people much worse who use finely crafted phrases to stab you in the back with a smile - simply for the sake of provoking.

I can at least understand him very well: ATI hits him right where it hurts, and that's his purse. Having to work around their bugs and not getting the support he'd like to have (and prolly should, provided the ATI drivers are as bogus as he says they are) costs his time, his money and probably some customers. Btw, no matter how unorthodox his approach to multi-texturing is: If it's a valid approach, and if ATI admits that it's a driver bug, imho he can rightfully demand them to fix it. He has purchased a license to use the driver, and has a right to get a working product. Period.

So you better stuff your unspoken suppositions.

Kassandra

No but I have a good idea what you do for a living and who for ...

ATI driver quality is notoriously bad, and below the standards of other reputable graphics cards manufacturers

ATI driver quality decreases even from that level

Serious claims for a newbie...want to give some examples to back that up ??

 

[Dave Baumann]

As to where I got my info on per game patches, several websites are now posting fixes/workarounds for the 9700's problems in current games.

I've seen one - from ATI themselves, which was actually just a DLL from a later release of drivers. What others have there been?

 

[Kassandra]

I'd just like to say that from what I've read, the #1 drawback of the Riva 128 was its image quality. The speed was there, the image quality wasn't. In particular, I don't believe it supported any MIP mapping, or most blending modes.

At the time, I don't doubt for a moment that the RIVA 128 was inferior in pretty much every way to the Voodoo and Voodoo2.

Chalnoth:

You must have never owned a Riva 128 card. I still have one. It's dead slow. It can by no way compete with even with a Voodoo 1 (I had 3 in the course of time). The graphics chips architecture was ... well, a nice try and an interesting concept, but not executed so that it really would perform. It was the Riva TNT which marked the turn of the tide for NVIDIA and 3dfx, and it was the Riva TNT2 which was finally capable of breaking the dominance of the Voodoo graphics card line - a TNT2 Ultra would beat any Voodoo 3xxx fair and square (I owned both cards, as well as a dual 12 MB Voodoo2 set). When NVIDIA introduced the GForce GPU, it was finally game over for 3dfx (because now it was them who choose the wrong path for their silicon implementation).

A word on another thing: Your nitpicking about which graphics cards other than ATI's Derek Smart had no problems with gives me the dire impression of you trying to make a point of nothing to hide the fact that you have nothing really to say to counter him.

 

[KimB]

No, I don't own one. I was speaking relative to what I've read. Here's an example:

http://www.tomshardware.com/graphic/98q1/980121/3dbench-28.html

NVidia's RIVA 128 is not famous for highest image quality and I am sure that you can see the reason why. The waterfall is not filtered as fine as in the reference picture below and the sky and clouds don't look as good as on the Voodoo either. However, the RIVA doesn't seem to lack of any particular feature when running Turok, it just doesn't look quite as good as it could. At least you get a fair trade off here, since the RIVA may not be the most beautiful, but the fastest at Direct3D.

This was before the release of the Voodoo2, btw.

 

[Kassandra]

Dave -

please read my statement over. The abuse imo consists of the fact that quite a few people here concentrate on some questionable statement of Derek, gladly using it to put him down and blatantly ignoring all the other things he said. Btw, even if he used an uncommon way to implement MT, it looks like it was a valid one, as he says that ATI has admitted that the bug was rooted in their driver.

If 'customers' do not agree with Derek Smart about the state of the ATI drivers, does that mean Derek is wrong? I don't think so. Just because I don't notice something's broken because I never use it a way that would reveal it, doesn't mean that someone who does use it that way has no right to complain about it and demand it to be fixed - which afaik is exactly what Derek is doing.

So?

First of all, I'd like to hint everybody to the fact that Derek Smart's main claim is that

• ATI driver quality is notoriously bad, and below the standards of other reputable graphics cards manufacturers
• ATI driver quality decreases even from that level

I think we understand that, and part of the issue remains that not everybody agrees with him, certainly not all the consumers.

He quotes a few problems with ATI drivers that have arisen during his development work to prove that point - not just the MT issue, which imo is abused a bit here to draw attention from what Derek really tries to say by pointing to some statement of his that seems questionable and thus suitable to shed a bad light on all of what he is saying about ATI drivers.

I’m not sure it has been abused, Derek’s stance is that it broken – most other people stance is “Is it really broken globally or just not working in your game?†There is no evidence to show that this is broken globally since it has not been visually noted in any application that uses multi-texturing as yet. Further to that, ifrom reading Derek’s subsequent posts he still hasn’t actually answered the question instead arguing that Bencharmarks will not show the issue(?) and he’s using DX not OpenGL (despite DirectX games not showing any issue).

 

[KimB]

A word on another thing: Your nitpicking about which graphics cards other than ATI's Derek Smart had no problems with gives me the dire impression of you trying to make a point of nothing to hide the fact that you have nothing really to say to counter him.

No, actually I completely believe and agree with him.

I just would like to see his comments put into perspective. It's kind of pointless to talk about problems without comparing those problems with those seen elsewhere.

It's like giving ATI a "bugmark" score of 23, but not giving comparison scores from other companies.

 

[Kassandra]

Imo a message board like this one is for those looking for a discussion, not for an opportunity to insult or flame people

This is exactly the problem with Derek showing up here. Any valid point he might make is completely overshadowed by his acting like an arrogant and pompous twleve year old in need of heavy doses of Prozac.

Admitted. Does that mean he is wrong? I'd say no, and imo his point is relevant enough not to be put down for his tone (which, btw, is a result of his statements being misused) - still wrong, but understandable. To be honest, I do not like his tone to much either, and he would've certainly reaped more sympathy if he'd stayed calm, but still he has a valid point.