K.I.L.E.R. said:
BRiT said:
The best way for Nvidia to regain my trust is for them to produce hardware and software drivers that is on par or superior to that of their competitors at the same price bracket. ie: DX9 support, single-slot card, better looking AA, faster and better looking AF, no image quality artifacts.
Unfortunately, I don't expect Nvidia to approach this until the Fall/Winter season.
I'll 2nd that.
BRiT and K.I.L.E.R.-
No offense, but IMO opinions like yours are exactly the reason Nvidia cheats. The "winner take all" attitude held by so many people who follow 3d hardware distorts the industry. I mean, look at what you said: the only thing that will make you regain your trust in Nvidia's honesty is when they get back the technology lead? Huh??
This makes no sense whatsoever, but AFAICT the vast majority of forum posters (not necessarily the B3D forums, but in general) agree to conflate their views of a company's honesty and integrity with its engineering prowess and market success. All this does is make it impossible (as a business matter) for Nvidia to do anything but lead a quixotic campaign of disinformation to try to actively dispute the fact that their high-end cards have fallen behind ATI's in the last product cycle.
By claiming specs and features for their hardware that don't actually exist (not to mention claiming to have launched hardware which doesn't exist), demonizing 3dMark, cheating profligately, and ridiculously accusing FM of rigging the test against them, Nvidia has obviously lost the support of their more informed former-fanboys. But if they had done the ethical thing and told the truth about their specs and launch delays, had continued to support 3dMark even when by its measure that they lost to ATI on both absolute and price/performance bases, then they would have seen
all their fanboys abandon them just as viciously. At least this way, they still keep the dumb and gullible. (And hey, the money of the dumb and gullible is worth just as much as the money of us smarties.)
That's the problem: 3d is always seen about who's #1
right now, even though it's surely has the fastest product generation turnover of any sector of the electronics hardware industry. Nvidia still has awesome engineers and scientists, and clearly holds the potential to regain the performance crown with NV40 and keep it for who knows how long. They just had a spate of bad luck, where several tough decisions ended up having gone the wrong way and proceeded to bite them in the ass.
[Namely:
1) devoting too much focus and R&D to XBox/nForce
2) choosing to design CineFX (particularly NV30-34's version) around the idea of having three data types in the fragment shader pipeline and offering a trade-off of performance for precision--which was not necessarily a bad idea in itself, but turned out disasterously when DX9 and ARB_fragment_program instead went with ATI's all-FP24 model
3) designing NV30 for low-k .13u before TSMC screwed the transition up royally]
But as they work through the down-period caused inevitably by the fallout from all that bad luck (plus ATI executing brilliantly on R300), Nvidia clearly sees their best strategy being to pretend none of this ever happened. Because otherwise they have no talking points to sell their fanboys on. When it was ATI who couldn't keep up at the high end, they could at least point to legitimate advantages which made their cards worthwhile for some: lower prices, better 2d image quality, or the option of AIW. As Nvidia's reputation has always been about performance, they have nothing else to stand on. The only talking points Nvidia can hand out now are "they're wrong"; "it's not true"; "they're out to get us"; "they did the same thing--hey, everybody does it!" (Not to mention "hey, remember when their drivers used to be buggy? Yeah...me too. I'm just sayin', ya' know...'hey remember'. Yeah.")
Unfortunately, this drivel works to string enough people along that they still managed to sell totally outclassed GF4 products for ages at high margins. Of course they lose more and more people all the time, but with an, um,
interesting story to tell at the mainstream with the 5200, a decent upper-midrange product coming online in the 5600, and some benchmark victories from the vaporware 5900, they're already in an infinitely better position than they were a few months back.
Their lying and disinformation has meant that they've lost a lot fewer fans over the months of having a black hole at the top of their product lineup than if they'd come clean at every opportunity. Does this mean it's paid off for them? Not yet. After all, if the opinion-makers in the community (that's us in the forum, of course, but much more so the webmasters) refuse to forgive Nvidia for the shit they've pulled then it can end up hurting them much more in the long run.
But if the reaction instead is that once Nvidia gets another stellar product out there, and maybe improves the sample positions for their AA modes, all is forgiven, that will prove lying and cheating was the smart thing to do along.
