GraphixViolence said:
How is someone who doesn't know anything about graphics cards supposed to know if something looks "okay"? Either you have $x in your pocket to spend on an upgrade and you go to the store to see what that gets you, or you've done some research by asking friends, reading magazines, and surfing the net to determine what card is the best deal for your needs.
Well, let's take my twin brother as an example. He's not into graphics programming, but he does study computer science. When I had bought my Radeon 9000 I was a bit dissapointed. A month later a lot better deals were available, but my brother bought exactly the same card, even against my advice and after reading a few reviews. The only reason he chose that card was because it was better than his TNT 2 and he had seen on my computer what it was capable of. In other words, he thought it looked "okay" and didn't want to take the risk. So he spend more money than for the better alternatives. Guess what, he doesn't care and hasn't regretted it for a second. It runs the things he wants to do fine and as expected. I'm very positive a lot of people who are not interested in maximum performance think the same way.
In the former case, you'll go to the store and see a FX 5200 and a Radeon 9200 at about the same price, and it'll probably be a toss up which one you buy. Performance-wise, the two products are pretty close, both have fairly mature and solid drivers, and since you have no idea what "DirectX" means, you'll either be happy with both cards or unhappy with both cards. In the end it'll probably come down to price and what the guy in the store recommends... how each product makes games look will never even be a factor.
So for this price class, which is the biggest, it's pointless trying to convince anyone that one or the other manufacturer is worse. And for someone who does know that a DirectX 9 card is highly recommended for future games, ATI looks like a rip-off! So it's all very subjective.
In the latter case, you're going to want someone to tell you which card is better and why. If a reviewer says DX9 is important, you'll believe him. If a reviewer says he can see one card has superior AA quality, you'll believe him. In other words, the reviewer determines what is important. Once again, whether or not a given product makes games look "okay" to you is never an issue... you just need someone "in the know" to tell you that you're getting the best product, so you feel all warm and fuzzy and happy. That is why issues that only a "geek" could appreciate end up being important to everyone.
Well, many people ask my brother what graphics card to buy. And my brother has also assembled a lot of flawlessly working systems for friends and family. They don't care whether he puts an Nvidia or ATI card in it, or why they pay 50 € more than what they can get in a supermarket. They ask for quality and they get it. And I'm sure they feel warm and fuzzy inside about the graphics card because their upgrade demands are never about the graphics card.
There is no trickery involved here. Both companies are giving people what they want. Everyone is looking for good value, and they know that more memory at a lower price means you're getting more of something for less, so they're happy to buy it. I have no doubts that if both companies had the means to educate more people about how things like AA and DX9 are more important than memory, they would gladly do so. But until that can happen, when people naively ask for boards with more memory, ATI & Nvidia would be stupid not to deliver it.
Now matter how much you want it, you
can't educate everyone about graphics theory and the chip and card manufaturers. They won't listen. As long as the stuff works and stays competitive, advertisement and marketing strategy have a huge influence on sales for this category.
Just an example: a Radeon 9200 is worse than an 9100, which is worse than an 9000, which is worse than an 8500 (there are exceptions of course). These cards are nowadays in the same price category but nearly everyone will buy the 9200 because the number is higher. So, for this example, ATI is again a complete rip-off. Don't get me wrong, I don't mean to bash ATI here. I just want to show that ATI isn't holy either. And Nvidia did an equally dirty trick with Geforce 4 MX vs. GF3 and GF2.
No trickery involved you say? Nobody asked for newer product lines that cost the same but perform worse, but they sell like candy and I don't hear too many people complaining...
If it didn't gain them anything I don't think they would be doing it over and over again. Currently a lot of reviews are just focussing Nvidia's tricks once they went one step too far to make their FX products look better than they are. Meanwhile ATI is getting away with every trick of their own.
If the FX products were significally better than the Radeon 9700 range, nobody would be bitching about the trilinear approximations. They would even question why ATI isn't using it to increase performance...
On the other hand, what if one company told you their product had 256MB of memory, even though it only had 128MB? Wouldn't you be pissed off if you found out? How about if you bought the product because you heard it got the highest benchmark scores, and then found out it was cheating on the tests? Or how about if you bought the product because you heard it supported DX9, then found out that it was too slow to run DX9 games and had to default back to DX8? Even if you didn't really know much about how benchmarks worked or what DX9 meant, wouldn't you still be ticked off to find these things out? Regardless of how much we know, we never enjoy feeling like a sucker.
What makes you so sure you have 256 MB when it's mentioned on the box? Unless you are the memory manufacturer or the driver developer you have no sure way of knowing what you have. Ok, ok I won't doubt it much, but you can get screwed in many ways. And as long as you don't own all those cards yourself there is no sure way of knowing what benchmarks are fully correct. And not everybody is willing to read the details of a hundred reviews just to find out who is using the right testing methods. Lately I've been seeing a lot of review conclusions about ATI being the best buy, but when I look at the detailed graphs I sometimes see Nvidia scoring a lot better at higher anti-aliasing. If that's what I'm looking after, the review's conclusion wasn't very helpful. Also, personally I don't care if ATI scores 300 FPS and Nvidia 'only' 200 FPS at low resolutions or without anti-aliasing.
It's all about expectations. I've seen a lot of people whine about 5 FPS, for Nvidia as well as ATI cards.
Wrong... see above. If someone reads a review that says "don't buy this card because it cheats... buy this other card instead", people will listen, because they assume the reviewer knows what he's talking about. And if they find out AFTER they bought the card that it doesn't actually deliver what it was supposed to, you're not going to be happy, even if it seems to be working fine in your system. You won't be happy because now you know you could have bought a better card, and were suckered into buying an inferior product. That feeling sucks.
Unfortunately reviewers make mistakes too. A lot. Some of them even claim Nvidia is not doing trilinear filtering at all. But these people don't understand what trilinear filtering is and can't tell the difference between an approximation and bilinear. Or the 24-bit FP vs. 32-bit FP ATI gets away with. I know it's not a DirectX 9 specification but what if programmers ask for it? And what they don't talk about is the banding on some of ATI's mipmap transitions and worse anisotropic filtering for diagonal directions. And what they mostly show is a floor with a texture that is not running diagonally. And a static image can have a slightly different mipmap bias so the image looks sharper and the mipmap transitions further. Not to mention you need a well calibrated monitor gamma to see things correctly...
Again, I'm not saying Nvidia is perfect either. Not at all. My next card may very well be an ATI card again because they currently offer better mid-range cards for low prices.
These so-called "pointless" discussions are the only way that products improve over time. If the only app you ever run on your PC is Internet Explorer, then as far as you're concerned, every new graphics card released in the past 3-4 years is pointless. Fortunately, there are enough people who care about these things to keep driving technology forward.
Yes it's quite pointless. Technology will drive itself. After Intel's defeat by AMD for the 1 GHz race, it's failure with the 1133 MHz chip and the dissapointing Wilamette, it regained the crown again. But it's pointless to talk about AMD's glory nowadays. Things are a bit different on the graphics card market but you could very well forget all about Nvidia's cheating in a year
if their next generation of cards is succesful. All I want to say is, don't shut your eyes for Nvidia because they had one dissapointing product range.
Ok, I'll repeat it once more to avoid misunderstandings: I don't favor Nvidia (nor ATI). I might have defended it a little in this post, but my main point is that they still produce excellent products especially for the low-end market so trying to convince average people of their 'evilness' can make you look like you're sponsored by ATI.
But after all, time will tell...
So, it's not surprsing that you can't perceive things which are so obvious to the "geeks" you are conversing with. Until you become a geek I perceive you will not be able to perceive many things...
