I think Dave was responding there to how impressively one-sided your arguments are (a la NV makes your games better, AMD just engages in marketing).
Well, that's what it looks like to me most of the time.
HAWX anyone? Not a major release, but certainly a game that showed very substantial AA performance gains from its 10.1 support. AMD was making that game better, NV was just marketing against 10.1 support. Oh my.
Oh sure they've got performance increase in HAWX. Were they faster than NVIDIA? Nope. So what they've done has nothing to do with improving gaming graphics. They've just used their fraction of API to improve their performance but were still slower than NV thus bringing no possibility for improving graphic quality.
So both graphics firms just pull their targetted feature sets for each generation out of thin air then? And what's the point of having a commonly supported API used as a technology inflection point for PC hardware if devs are promoted to fragment their support between competing IHVs? Does PC gaming in general benefit from that?
That's the question you need to ask AMD because it was their decision to effectively ruin common DX10 API in favor of their DX10.1 update.
Like someone wrote upstream, we really should be condemning anything that fragments or damages the PC as an open gaming platform (and, yes, I realize that the wintel platform isn't truly open but since the vast majority of PC game devs use it there's no point in havering over semantics).
Condemn DX10.1 then. Condemn proprietary 6x0/7x0 tesselator (ended up being not used at all?).
What we're discussing here is NVs provided MSAA support in BAA. What's that has to do with APIs and PC platform fragmentation? NV can use whatever it creates for profit. NV has no reason to support anyone but itself. And AMD has exactly the same goals and rights. Or should we comdemn them for porting Havok to their hardware and not optimising it for NV GPUs? (Where is that OpenCL Havok port, btw? Ended up being AMD's marketing speeches again while PhysX got it's second AAA title released?)
I wasn't responding to a "win" for AMD, but simply listing a game that gave a "noticeable implementation" from its 10.1 support.
"Noticable implementation" means quality improvements or at least visible performance advantage. HAWX has neither.
Yup Assassins Creed was definitely not a AAA title. Oh wait, it was big enough that Nvidia had to have UBIsoft remove DX10.1 in a patch because it made Nvidia cards look bad... Ooopsie.
Ubisoft removed 10.1 support from AC because it was buggy. And from what i've heard it's inclusion in AC v1.0 was a mistake.
But even if it's true -- where was AMD when that happened? Doing marketing speeches again instead of pushing Ubisoft for proper 10.1 support in AC? See now what i'm talking about?
Mirror's Edge is a UE3 title that uses exclusively DX9 and has AA support.
Mirror's Edge uses it's own renderer with it's own MSAA support implementation.