More ATI Driver News from Derek Smart

[Sabastian]

It seems that Derek has just registered. I think I've just thought of a new revenue stream for B3D - I'm sure people will pay to see OpenGL guy vs Derek!

[sarcasm]Great!![/sarcasm] Hrm I am not sure that will be a lucrative situation. He may charge us for every posts?

 

[Joe DeFuria]

Assuming that is actually Derek, I really HOPE that there would actually be a constructive "conversation" between the two.

Why do I get the feeling that won't happen...assuming that it is even "suggested" that Derek is not 100% absolutely correct in his accusations, and we all don't bow down to his l33t coding skillz...

 

[Sabastian]

Assuming that is actually Derek, I really HOPE that there would actually be a constructive "conversation" between the two.

Why do I get the feeling that won't happen...assuming that it is even "suggested" that Derek is not 100% absolutely correct in his accusations, and we all don't bow down to his l33t coding skillz...

Also his abrasive manners will not be something that I am looking forward to reading.

 

[Derek Smart [3000AD]]

I'm hoping one of our many valued ATI driver devs here can contradict his assertions about the drivers for 9000 and 9700.

1. Multi-texturing is broken in the current drivers (he gives screenshots as an example of a quad-textured scene where only the first texture is visible)--actually, I'm perfectly willing to accept that this might be his mistake.

2. No w-buffer support, and none is ever likely to be added

3. Z-buffer resolution capped at 24 bits.

The combination of 2 and 3 is most distressing, since it seems there will be no solution for games (like flight sims) that might rely on high-precision Z-buffers.

I would appreciate it if, in the future when quoting my posts, that you (a) post it in its entirety (b) point to where I posted. You know, Netiquette and all

Anyway, I'm not in the mood to get into a pissing match with anyone - especially ladies who have little or no experience with 3D hardware nor software development - most especially DX.

That said, I have a lot of experience in dealing with driver dev teams from every major manufacturer in the game business. I deal with them from time to time, but with ATI, I deal with them, quite literally on a weekly basis. I don't treat one in one way and another in another way.

I also want to assert (as I did here in the past) that the ATI engineers are at the top of their class - if only ATI would get their driver dev team to clean up their act, nVidia would have a lot to worry about.

The 9000/9700 cards were not ready for prime time by any stretch of the imagination. Sure, the board maybe, but not the drivers. To me, the release of this board was a pre-emptive strike against nVidia (who've had their own share of collosal fuckups in the past) in a time when ATI needed it most. In the end, the consumers are suffering the effects of this, while every speed git on planet Earth, is running around singing the praises of the cards speed, while completely ignoring the fact that these drivers, well, suck.

I'm not going to type up everything I already typed up elsewhere, I will come back later and post it all verbatim, in order to give the full picture of my thoughts and comments.

And this, being my first post here (I am only here because some trolling fool posted nonsense on another board and referenced this thread), will probably be my last because I can already foretell the direction that this is going in.

So, I will address your three points.

1. MT is broken. Plain and simple. Here is an excerpt of email sent to me by ATI dev support when they reproduced what I had sent them.

Derek, we have reproduced the multitexture problem and will get a fix out asap.

2. W buffer has been removed. Here is an excerpt of the email sent to me by ATI dev support when I discovered artifacts in my game and realized that it was falling back to Z buffer.

Derek,

The 9700 hardware doesn't support w-buffer. We do not plan to implement software support as this will de-stabilize the driver and we will take a significant performance hit. Can you use 24-bit Zbuffer to to get the precision/range required? Can you provide more details on your requirements for this to help us investigate a solution for you?

I would like to set up a conference call with one of our engineers to help with this issue.

3. No 32 bit Z buffer. You'd think that with this card's architecture and the removal of W buffer support, that they'd do it. Again, excerpt from another email.

Sorry but 32-bit Z buffer is not supported on the 9700.

For 7500 & 8500 W buffer range has no real cap as far as I know. When you use integer W buffer format, the scale and bias is used to bring W range derived from projection matrix to acceptable HW range.

As for the rest of the posts...

I see some sensible and knowledgeable people making some good comments about the effects of them removing W buffer from the card and their lack of 32 Bit z buffer support.

Yes, the GF4 and all previous nVidia cards, support W buffer and still do. I have no reason to believe that the upcoming NV30 will remove it.

I am not in the mood to give anyone programming lessons on the merits and benefits of using a W buffer. Go buy a good 3D book or search the net. My BC series of games, so far, have the largest game world in the history of the gaming industry. A single space area alone, which measures something like 2,121,306 km in 3 dimensions, can contain a scene with the following models.

station         // very large @ approx 12424.27M (H) x 27882.35M (W) x 27880.98M (L) 
carrier ship    // large @ approx 486 (H) x 975 (W) x 2268 (L)
person  // small @ 1.75m (H) x 0.64m (W) x 0.43m (L)

In this scene, you can have the ship, station and person (a space marine as seen in these BCG shots I released yesterday) in the same frame and proximity. Take a wild guess what happens in this instance.

In fact, the my rendering engine has technology I call space partitioning which does just that: partitions the W/Z buffer in order to reduce the effects of low precision/range.

So yes, the lack of a W buffer will produce a bunch of artifacts on these boards. But hey, in a world where gamers are used to seeing artifacts such as clipping, tearing, shearing, pixelation etc, I guess this is OK, right?

Maybe. But my point is WHY remove W buffer in the interest of speed? I don't get it. I mean, if the game doesn't use it, then the card won't have a problem with speed, would it? This should be a developer's decision and NOT a driver developer's decision. The W buffer worked just fine in the previous 7xxx and 8xxx cards and the 8xxx cards were fast enough for ALL games on the planet.

As for the the MT that 3DMark uses. Well, herein lies the problem. ALL benchmarking programs are for just that benchmarking. Get it? Let me repeat that for the comprehension impaired BENCHMARKING. As such, these problems are NOT likely to uncover problems in drivers which affect games.

If this was the case, where was 3DMark when I first reported that ATI had broken table fog? They didn't fix it until it became a problem in GTA3.

Where was 3DMark when they broke the specular lighting?

Where was 3DMark when they broke the text buffering by switching from one buffer (W) to the next (Z) when rendering text?

Where was 3DMark when it was discovered (by me) that the 7xxx/8xxx/9xxx cards had a problem with textures on same co-ords - for which I had to come up with a myriad of ZBIAS calls in various parts of my code, all doing #ifdef checks for ATI boards?

And, oh, did I mention that they also broke hardware TnL in 9xxx cards? No? Well, they did.

Where was 3DMark when, well, they broke MT?

Here's a good one for you? Are the developers of 3DMark aware that in one of the driver sets, the driver returns incorrect values? Here is one such function I had to workaround to get around one particularly nasty problem in ATI drivers. I have nine other similar bits of code in my rendering pipeline.

void GfxD3D::MultiplyMWM(const bcMatrix &mat)
{
	mwmStack[curMWMStack] *= mat;
//	pd3dDevice->MultiplyTransform(D3DTS_VIEW, (D3DMATRIX *)mat.m);

// It seems that the Radeon driver has a bug in Direct3D8::TransformMultiply() and
// Direct3D8::GetTransform().
//
// The latter returns an INVALID_ARGUMENT. I suspect TransformMultiply() uses GetTransform()
// internally in the Radeon Driver.
//
// The GfxD3D::MultiplyMWM() function is changed since TransformMultiply() fails. SetTransform()
// is used instead with the current transform on the top of the gfx transform stack which does
//  the same thing.
//
   pd3dDevice->SetTransform(D3DTS_WORLD, (D3DMATRIX *)mwmStack[curMWMStack].m);
}

So, PLEASE don't go comparing what 3DMark is doing, to what games are doing. m'kay? In fact, even 3DMark has been known to bring entire OSes down, to the extent of taking out entire registries. Yes, I have had that first hand experience myself.

So, any of you want to start a pissing content about the merits of my claims, here's a bucket. Piss in it. I stand by ALL my statements as they were originally written. I don't have time for this fanboi nonsense, because when the shit hits the fan and my fans come screaming, I'm the one they come screaming to. Not some faceless fanboi parked at a website singing the virtues of one card over another with NO regard for how games, outside of limited space fp shooters and rts games, are affected.

Oh yeah, for those of you who don't know, all the Quake engines use OGL and even ATI would be hard pressed to fuck up their drivers to a major extent for such a rock solid kernel.

 

[Derek Smart [3000AD]]

As promised, here are my posts from another board, from which the originator of this thread, grabbed my posts.

==========

Oh, and Derek, seriously, has anyone mentioned lockups in BK that you're aware of? Let me know if they do. I'm going to test a copy of The Thing later today and see if I can't get the bitch to freeze on me.

Nope. Nothing so far.

I got the 9700 Pro (retail candidate) Rev A13 board from ATI quite some time ago and it came with a CDROM containing these drivers

These drivers are what Carmack was running Doom3 on at E3 and what shipped to retail. Also, Carmack was running an earlier dev board and not the Rev A13.

win9x : 07/25/2002, 4.13.01.9056
win2k : 07/25/2002, 5.13.01.6143
winxp : 07/25/2002, 6.13.10.6143

The fast track ATI dev site, has these devloper-only drivers.

win9x:08/15/2002, 4.13.01.9062
win2k:08/15/2002, 5.13.01.6166
winxp:08/15/2002, 5.13.01.6166

So far, I haven't observed any problems with BCM or BCG and especially not with TnL

These are the latest 8500 drivers. Compare to the 9700

win9x: 07/04/2002, 4.13.01.9050
win2k:07/04/2002, 5.13.01.6118
winxp:07/04/2002, 5.13.01.6118

This brings me to another thing: benchmarking programs. All they are good for is just that, benchmarking and aren't bloody likely to unveil
driver artifacts or problems which occur in games due to developers exposing flaws in drivers (like I do on a fairly regular basis with ATI boards, as you all know).

So, when I see arguments like ....oh, the card performed find on 3DMark 2001 SE, I go WOT?!?! and move on with my thoughts and with the opinion that such notions are stupid, irrelevant and born of ignorance and fanboi nonsense.

Funny thing is, we have this same discussion going on right now on my bulletin board. I have taken ATI to task over their shoddy driver development over the years. In fact, when they read that piece, the dev relations lead and I got into a dialog in order to identify how best to approach such naggling issues.

In fact, I'm surprised that I'm still on the dev team quite frankly. I cut them no slack whatsoever. Fact is, just around the time of the 8500, the disdain for ATI's driver development, reached and all time high and they knew that in order to propell those cards into the mainstream (and take on nVidia in the process), they had to gain gamer loyalty and appease us devs.

I have to say that while I still think that every one of the incompetent driver devs should be fired and that dept re-structured and actually staffed with devs who are gamers, they have come a long way from where they were. HOWEVER, things like fog table, lighting tris which are *clearly* not to be spec lit, *llegally* switching driver states in some DX ops etc are the kind of mistakes you will only see inexperienced developers make. And the ATI driver devs do this over and over and over and over. I mean, how the fuck do you break fog without noticing it??!!??? The most basic and prevalent DX feature used by DX titles. I've seen people get fired for less. But yet, with seemingly each driver release, the ATI driver devs manage to flat out break even the basic functionality of their driver set.

Sure, nVidia has buggy drivers too, but I have yet to see such blatant mistakes being made. If anything, most of nVidia's driver issues stem from compatibility issues more than anything else.

IMHO, ATI has the worst driver dev team in the history of hardware manufacturers. And Matrox have the best driver dev teams, bar none. I am on the dev team for all major hardware manufacturers and I deal with them on a fairly regular basis.

Sure, they [ATI] don't jump up and get right on something I report with the same enthusiasm as they would if Carmack called. And the reason for this is clear: my games are not mainstream enough to warrant it. Nevermind the fact that EACH and EVERY bug I've reported has been VALIDATED and CONFIRMED, then later fixed.

Example #1: When I reported a problem to them, they NEVER fixed it. But as soon as the same problem popped up on GTA3, this is the result. I reported that problem exactly 26 days (yes, I keep very accurate email logs) before I heard back from the head of ATI dev relations on 06/20/02. I downloaded that patch, peeked at it and discovered that it only replaces a DLL. They could've fixed this back when I reported it. They didn't. I then poked at the driver under a debugger and of coure discovered that exactly what I told them the problem was and how to fix it, is exactly what they did.

Example #2: Due to the massive sizes in my games, the Z buffer is not large enough to store it. I use a W buffer predominantly. Even that doesn't have the ranges I need, so I have my own unique technology which handles Z/W buffer partitioning on-the-fly. On one fine morning, they flat out broke it. I reported it to them. They said they'd look into it. They never fixed it until the same problem cropped up in Morrowind as seen here.

As to what I mentioned above about not giving some games fix priority, here is an excerpt from one of the dev relations guys. Its no secret and doesn't contain anything confidential. Draw your own conclusions and you'll see why I'm pissed about their driver development.

Derek,

I've been going through various angles trying to get people working on the bugs. The big holdup is that other critical showstoppers keep popping up and the promised assignments of the bugs gets pushed back further and further. It's hard for the driver team to justify assigning someone to a problem for a single game when getting a driver certified or fixing an OEMs bug is on the list as well. That's the straight up goods for you as requested. If you have an OEM testing your game and finding this bug then there's a better chance it will get fixed quicker, that's just a generalization and not specific to your game to be certain.

At other times (and if right now as I type this), I've had to go through hoops to put in workarounds in my rendering pipeline for blatant ATI bugs. I do this by having to query the board and writing code that does an op differently on ATI drivers in order to workaround bugs. One such example is with the ground plane. The ATI drivers have a problem with (layman speak coming up, since I don't want to confuse you non-dev folks with tech speak) mapping a texture to the same co-ord. This is required for detail texturing. Standing on the ground in BCM (ground zero) where your POV is close to the ground (standing, you are 6' tall, crouched you are about 5' tall), the ground plane would flicker on/off. Step into a vehicle or fly off in a craft (which increases your elevation) and the problem goes away.

Did they fix it? Nope. I had to workaround it. And in the end, the conclusion was that the drivers just cannot be fixed!!!!
I swear, I have a mass of special code with spurious dabs of ZBIAS exclusions. Here is what I got from them in the end

Hi Derek,

I just finished corresponding with the driver team on the ground flickering issue and it comes down to a z-buffer precision limitation. The workaround the suggested is essentially what you've already done, to find ZBIAS values that work for you. I know it's not an optimal solution but in order to find a specific workaround for your game in the driver will cause problems in other applications most likely. The driver team now considers this a closed issue so I'm pushing onwards to the specular and w-buffer bugs.

The problem here is NOT (as I've said before) with the dev relations folks (who sent the above), who are the buffer between us and the driver dev team. Its the driver dev team and the lead in that dept who gets to decide what gets fixed, when and when a driver fix is released to us devs and then the public. If Carmack picked up the phone and told them to fix a specific problem he was having, I can almost 100% guarantee you that ALL work in the dev dept will come to a screeching halt until its fixed. What happens in this process? Us lower dev folks and naturally the gamers, end up waiting in line - and seemingly for weeks and sometimes months on end.

Does this change my opinion that the next-gen ATI boards (8500, 9700 ...) are not lackluster as some would like to think? Not by a long shot!! But until they get better at driver development, frequency of driver fixes/releases and actually paying attention to the problems of ALL game devs, they are never going to shake this bad rep they have. Ever.

Right now, I have 4 of 8 dev machines here in my office, running an ATI board. My primary machine is hosting a 9700 PRO. And thats not because if there's a bug in the card I want to be the first to know about it. Its because I really, truly like these boards. Prior to this board, my primary machine had an 8500. I have a bunch of nVidia and Matrox boards around here as well, with my primary gaming rig currently hosting a Ti4600.

I don't care if ATI takes the #1 spot. I don't care if nVidia loses their spot like 3Dfx. Frankly, I don't give a shit if they all go out of business (good and talented people can always find work in this industry). All I care about is that whoever is developing mainstream video boards puts out products that work and that they put more emphasis and money on driver development than they do on marketing.

==========
It's my understanding that the 9700 drivers are an entirely different code base than previous ATI drivers. Does this accord with your experience?[/quote]

Thats pure and utter rubbish. Where'd you hear this particular piece of misleading marketing goobledegook?

And I have no problems proving it. Quite easily actually; and thats only because, good, bad or egotistical, I consider myself to be a higher level developer than most. One of the best there is, in fact. Too bad I'm stuck in a niche and on the outside of the farce because I'm outspoken, don't take crap from anyone and are voted ...most likely to piss everyone off at the drop of a hat.

THESE 9700 drivers I'm looking at are based on the first generation of the introduced Catalyst driver subset. Which, themselves are from the previous drivers subset but just given a fancy name and consolidated across the OS. Frankly, the whole Catalyst thing, IMO, is just a marketing sham and probably something cooked up by ATI marketing in order to

(a) show some sort of consolidation of drivers

(b) some ridiculous notion of new fancy name = new better drivers

(c) an attempt to take on and mimic nVidia's Detonator series.

In fact, nVidia did the same thing. Go off on a different driver code path, slap the Detonator monicker on it, and called it a day. We've all lapped it up since, and without complaining. Why? Well because the drivers just bloody work. More than can be said for the Catalyst drivers.

Case in point : Wasn't it in the first Catalyst driver release that they released a fix for the fog problem in GTA3? Well, guess what, the only reason that bug and others was in there to begin with, is because the Catalyst subset were based on (as I pointed out above) on existing driver set. So, even in that first Catalyst release, the fog was broken (as I had reported weeks earlier).

While I was typing this, I took a break to do a compare on a random DLL driver between the 6118 win2k driver for the 8500 and the 6116 win3k driver for the 9700. Lets put this way, I'm not fucking amused that the would try to pass of the 9700 drivers as coming from an entirely new code base. Besides, I have yet to see this claim in print. Does anyone have a link to a site with these claims? If it exists, I'll bet that it came from marketing and not driver dev or dev relations. Then again, stranger things have happened.

Sure it is possible to start from scratch, but to me, starting from scratch and from a different code base means just that : starting from scratch and from a different code base. Starting from scratch and from a different code base doesn't mean that you use, e.g. the same code and DLL from control panel or you execute the same branch of code to an op check (e.g. ZBIAS) in the same module at the same location....and from a module of the same name as the previous subset (i.e. the 8500).

Do the many driver bugs you identified above apply also the the 9700 or 9000 Pro, or are they confined to the 8500 or earlier generations of ATI cards?

It depends. The problems fixed in the 8500, appear fixed in the 9700. The problems still pending on the 8500 are still pending on the 9700. Draw your own conclusions.

Example. I went in and disabled the ZBIAS checks (mentioned in my previous post above) I made for ATI boards (which I didn't have to do for Matrox, nVidia or ANY other board btw) and the problem - again - showed up on the 9700 Pro. You'd think that this is on thing that they'd actually fix in a new revision board. They didn't. So, because the boards primary architecture is true (in some respects) to the 8500, the driver channel remains the same. i.e. they can't fix it. Meanwhile, nVidia, Matrox and every other video board manufacturer in the world, don't have this problem. Is it board architecture or driver problem? Its a driver problem.

I have experience in designing PCBs back from my old days. As such, I know enough to know that this particular ZBIAS problem is at a driver level. That bit they said about not fixing it since it would break another game is true. Why? well because, quite frankly, they botched that particular aspect to begin with and most games have worked around it. To fix it, would probably mean breaking those games. Who cares about Derek Smart's games? Thank God that I was smart enough to find a workaround.

==========
/me peeks from under covers

OK, this horse ain't dead yet, so....

FYI

1. They broke multi-texturing in ALL the current 9000/9700 drivers. The version on the CD and the version on the Beta site. I reported it last week. Just got confirmation five minutes ago. And I am assured that they will get a fix out asap
   
   For you developers, let me repeat that and see if it has any impact yet. They broke multi-texturing.
   
   Go back to what I said before How do you break table fog? Such a simple and critical driver component?. Same applies to MT.
   
   These are shots from the upcoming Battlecruiser Generations.
   
   Compare these two identical scenes taken from within my terrain editor
   
   MT normal on 8500
   MT broken on 9700 Pro
   
   There are about four MT layers in that scene. The normal terrain + the detail terrain + the site texture all mapped to the same co-ord. As you can see from the broken one, the models are resting on the land (as normal) but because the MT is broken, the site texture (up which the models rest) and the two texture layers upon which the site texture rest, are not mapped. As a result, you can see right through to the water table (since this site in particular is ASL).
   
   And on the GF4 Ti4600
   
   MT on station (ignore that SF marine poser. He's just showing off his new duds
   MT on damaged station
   MT on destroyed station being rebuilt
   
2. They removed W buffer support from the 9000/9007!! And they don't ever plan on supporting it because, according to them this will de-stabilize the driver and the card would take a significant performance hit
   
   I didn't even know this until I saw tearing artifacts in my game recently, then peeked at the driver CAPS return values and it was telling me to, well, fuck off, I don't support W buffer So I asked ATI and they confirmed it.
   
   So, any game (such as mine) that requires W buffer support, is, well, fucked on the 9000/9700. In the case of my games, there will be some tearing and other artifacts due to the limited resolution/range of their Z Buffer (see next issue). The good thing is that I had the hindsight (in a previous patch update), to fallback to Z buffer if the driver didn't support W buffer (which all next gen cards support btw).
   
   Let me explain the impact of removing W buffer support from a card. They literally put the card (in this aspect) back in the realm of legacy 16 Bit cards, some of which, in fact, did support a W buffer. I guess they think that all games of the future are limited to FPS, RTS and the like - you know, games that don't need such ranges. Expect to see some problems on sims, especially flight sims with large ranges (depending on how the developers handle their buffers).
   
3. The Z Buffer resolution/range is locked at 24 bit. No 32 Bit support. End of story. No discussion.

There you have it.
==========

 

[Derek Smart [3000AD]]

Derek,

because he does have some experince and knownledge with the r9700 hardware since he works on the drivers for it

Don't get me wrong, I am NOT claiming otherwise. Frankly I have no clue as to his skills set. And, quite frankly, I don't care. In much the same way he has no clue and doesn't care about mine.

The point I was making above is to cut off that poster at the pass and stop him from thinking that because ATI folks post here, that I would refrain from voicing my opinions. Obviously the poster probably doesn't know who I am.

I am a developer and we, as developers, have bugs to fix. The point I am making and which I have always made is that the ATI DRIVER DEV TEAM are the #1 reason that ATI has such a bad rep even though the cards are some of THE BEST on the planet.

It wouldn't be so bad if unimportant things were broken. But when you find legacy support and obvious issues (They broke fog fer crissakes) lingering in ALL their drivers, I get pissed because it makes MORE work for me, I have to kill myself over special ATI exclusion code, workarounds etc etc

THATS what I'm pissed about.

THAT and the fact that with ALL this noise about speed, people don't seem to get this simple fact

THESE CARDS WERE NOT READY FOR PRIMETIME BECAUSE THE DRIVERS SUCK!!!!

There, maybe its all clear now.

 

[Doomtrooper]

Derek its you lucky day, Yes in fact there is a couple Dev relations folks here on this forum along with three to four ATI 9700 card engineers..I'm sure they will be happy to answer you questions...


I would also take this opportunity to point out how much of a hyprocrite you appear to be... I refer to your own forums:

quote:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Originally posted by Cmdr_ Laracuente:
The Radeon 8500 doesn't compare to the geforce TI 4600 or even the 4200
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Nonsense. On many levels. Sure, the 8500 128MB may not be as fast as the Ti4600, but it certainly is no slouch. You get what you pay for.


quote:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Originally posted by Grayfox:
now thats a shame... what about the little people that cant afford their $400 flagship but own an older model??? are they to just suck it up??? yet another reason to NOT like ATI.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Don't listen to him. He's just talking rubbish.

Even to this day, ATI still releases drivers for their older line. I see no reason why they'd stop releasing drivers for the 8500 just because they released the 9xxx cards. Thats just ludicrous poppycock and misinformation.

Rule of thumb: IF YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT, DON'T POST!!


quote:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Originally posted by rtoolooze:
Sorry S.C., I know your cruising around on an ATI ship, but I won't come aboard.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Better put that crack pipe down, because you're clearly smoking some heavy sh*t to come up with such nonsense. What? I should keep slamming ATI just because it suits the agenda of a few clueless retards? ATI have come a long way, since the last time I slammed them. You don't like their cards, don't f*cking buy them. Yes, it is that simple.

At some point or another, I have EVERY graphics card EVER made. I judge them based on merit. Nothing more. Nothing less. All card/sound manufacturers send developers hardware so that they can ensure compatibility. I am on every single dev program you can think of (including several MS products) and I judge all of them based on merit.

When ATI released the 8500 and with crappy drivers, you saw my take on it. EVERY dev, media etc slammed them for the same thing. They've been cleaning up their act, to the extent that I have two 8500 machines here in my office and Peter, Andrei and Darrin, all have 8500 boards (as well as others I send out to them) simply because they are good cards and with stable drivers. I never thought that ATI could quite possibly top the 8500 any time soon. They proved every one wrong.

JC has always been neutral and outspoken in his views of cards and drivers. There is a good reason that the 9700 board was running DOOM3 at E3, when it could very well have been running on a Matrox Pahrelia (what a f*cking waste of time that was) or GF Ti4600. So, does that mean JC (and everyone else for that matter) are cruising around on the ATI ship?

What nonsense

The 9700 (I have the 9700 Pro) is a damn good card. In fact, currently the best there is and with drivers that I have so far found no problems with.



--------------------
President, 3000AD Inc.
Designer/Lead Developer
The Battlecruiser Series

"The man who follows the crowd will usually get no further
than the crowd. The man who walks alone is likely to find
himself in places no one has ever been."

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Make up your mind please...thx.

 

[Derek Smart [3000AD]]

An I don't really care for behaviour like that on my board - no matter who you are. I'm just pointing something out.

Fine. Goodbye then. Cry baby

ps: I have removed the otherwise offensive rhetoric for the benefit of others. There, happy now?

 

[Sabastian]

]

So, I DON'T give a flying FUCK who he is

Can I say that I saw this comming? Yuk, you are not going to get any frends using this tone, as is right now I think your a jerk.

 

[SirXcalibur]

Ah don't worry about it Dave. Soon enough he will get mad enough and not bother coming back anyway. Just like he did at the Rage3D forums a while back

edit: Man, I didn't even get a chance to finish posting before he had stormed off. The words "prima donna" come to mind for some reason.

 

[Galilee]

I can imagine that someone saying what he says will get a hard time at rage3d, and here too in some extent

 

[Sabastian]

]

An I don't really care for behaviour like that on my board - no matter who you are. I'm just pointing something out.

Fine. Goodbye then. Cry baby

ps: I have removed the otherwise offensive rhetoric for the benefit of others. There, happy now?

Thanks for that. Try to remain civil, although it doesn't seem to be a part your temperment.

 

[Doomtrooper]

Credability goes a long way...no matter who you are

 

[Derek Smart [3000AD]]

Derek its you lucky day, Yes in fact there is a couple Dev relations folks here on this forum along with three to four ATI 9700 card engineers..I'm sure they will be happy to answer you questions...

Yeah, and? I already have an open line to the important people I need to be in touch with at ATI. I see no need to do it on a public board - where, I might add, the engineers and reps are STRICTLY PROHIBITED from posting on behalf of ATI. They'd better look at their employment contract carefully.

I would also take this opportunity to point out how much of a hyprocrite you appear to be... I refer to your own forums:

Wasted opportunity. You should post the date/time stamp of the post. And then have the dev folks check the date/time stamps of my reports to them. In fact, WHY didn't you just link to the thread?!?! Instead doing a bad cut/paste job which doesn't have the date/time stamp.

Look, I have an email folder with ATI going back to 06/11/1999, do you want me to post it? No, I didn't think so. All I'm posting from them (above) are factual info and nothing that is partial or damaging in any way, or I wouldn't post it.

And by the same token, here is an advisory I put up, that same week. Go to the last post.

That said. My claims remain the same. GREAT card. TERRIBLE drivers.

 

[antlers]

I would appreciate it if, in the future when quoting my posts, that you (a) post it in its entirety (b) point to where I posted. You know, Netiquette and all icon_wink.gif

I did reference a link to the same thread in a previous post on the same topic. Probably should have repeated it here.

 

[Derek Smart [3000AD]]

I can imagine that someone saying what he says will get a hard time at rage3d, and here too in some extent

Why, you think I'm scared of whining fanbois? You're kidding me, right?

I only leave when (a) trolls start posting nonsensical rubbish which NO basis in reality and/or facts (b) people start making personal attacks.

So, if trolls can post all the crap they want, why can't I leave when I want?

So far, I don't see ANYONE countering ANYTHING I've written. Instead, you folks are spending your time dissecting ME and not the posts or the implications therein. Bad form, that.

And no, I'm not here to make friends. I have a enough of those and its hard to keep track of them. I'm here to defend my posts because some ignorant person decided to start spouting nonsense off at the mouth.

 

[Derek Smart [3000AD]]

I would appreciate it if, in the future when quoting my posts, that you (a) post it in its entirety (b) point to where I posted. You know, Netiquette and all icon_wink.gif

I did reference a link to the same thread in a previous post on the same topic. Probably should have repeated it here.

Not a problem. No harm no foul. Hence the winkie in my post

 

[Dave Baumann]

In the end, the consumers are suffering the effects of this, while every speed git on planet Earth, is running around singing the praises of the cards speed, while completely ignoring the fact that these drivers, well, suck.

The needs of the consumer and the needs of the developer present themselves in different ways. Most people who buy hardware don’t really care about the state of the drivers just so long as they can play their games – the fact is that from the consumers point of view Radeon 9700 PRO is actually doing reasonably well on the driver front (well, better than 8500 anyway), and where issues have occurred they have rightly jumped up and down over them (just look at Rage3D).

1. MT is broken. Plain and simple. Here is an excerpt of email sent to me by ATI dev support when they reproduced what I had sent them.

IS MT really ‘broken’ or just broken in the way you are coding for it? Why hasn’t anyone noticed it? Why have I ran Serious Sam through the various levels of multitexturing options it has and got performance improvements?

http://www.beyond3d.com/reviews/ati/radeon9700pro/index.php?page=page17.inc#multipass

Maybe. But my point is WHY remove W buffer in the interest of speed? I don't get it.

Why are you assuming they removed it in the interests of speed? Your mail says its not supported in hardware (giving no reasons why its not supported) and they don’t want to software emulate it because of speed.

As for the the MT that 3DMark uses. Well, herein lies the problem. ALL benchmarking programs are for just that benchmarking. Get it? Let me repeat that for the comprehension impaired BENCHMARKING. As such, these problems are NOT likely to uncover problems in drivers which affect games.

People playing games and taking screenshots will uncover these problems, as yet we’ve not seen any with MT.

 

[Doomtrooper]

I see no need to do it on a public board - where, I might add, the engineers and reps are STRICTLY PROHIBITED from posting on behalf of ATI. They'd better look at their employment contract carefully.

Obviously not as there is many here as with Rage3D...

 

[Joe DeFuria]

In the end, the consumers are suffering the effects of this, while every speed git on planet Earth, is running around singing the praises of the cards speed, while completely ignoring the fact that these drivers, well, suck.

Quite frankly, consumers are not suffering the effects of the release state of the drivers. The 9700 drivers from a consumer perspective are damn good, especially considering the version 1 nature on a brand new architecture.

And quite frankly, that's what counts.

Multitexture is "broken" in your experience? I haven't seen or heard of it being "broken" in any other title. This is NOT to say that it isn't in fact "broken." This is to say that CONSUMERS aren't suffering from it. You are.

ATI has said they are fixing it for you. What do you want? And don't give us any garbage about "how can they break it?" You're a coder. You should know better than anyone how things can break when they are used in novel, unexpected, or perhaps even "inappropriate" ways.

Now, you may certainly be having some developer issues. I can appreciate that. I can also appreciate ATI giving their stance on your issues, and can apprciate that ATI has their own reasons for doing things like not supporting a 32 bit z or W buffer.

Is anyone else complaining? I haven't heard of it. Is it because no one else has the "guts" like "you" do to stand up to the big bad video card companies? Or is it because it doesn't matter that much to everyone else.

If it's the latter, then don't you think that ATI has the right to not fully support you, if by doing so means creating more instability, or higher cost, for everyone else?

Yes, sometimes life is a b*tch, especially if you're doing self-procalimed great and novel approaches to graphics for a game that isn't a "popular" title.

Like it or not (apparently, you do not), this is indeed a popularity contest. Just don't try and say that the consumers are suffering. the consumers are only suffering to the point that the conusmers playing your game might have some issues on Radeon 9700 hardware. As far as I can see it, ATI is delivering exactly what the consumers want. Incresaed performance, increased imagae quality, and good drivers from a consumer perspective.

(Why do I get the feeling that a lecture on "consumer quality is derived directly from developer quality" coming?)