nVidia's cheating: Dumbing it down.

Surely you've been a Dad long enough to know that whenever you get asked a difficult to explain question, the answer is always 'Ask your Mom'?

 

Ah, now that's a more appropriate case for you to make in terms of possible confusion than some blanket statement about programmers asking for something that is beyond the specification. I can agree with you that there may have been some confusion in this case.

 

They can put all the fluff they want on their retail boxes. What's missing from the equation are benchmarks. Benchmarks do matter to differentiate products. And benchmarks are cheated on.

Kinda contradicts this:

And what about the people that never see a retail box, like the cases you mentioned yourself? Whether they are contempt with going exclusively 2D or not, sooner or later they'll notice they got a "Radeon" or "Geforce" or "Xabre" or whatever. Why do you think OEMs put MX420s into boxes instead of Xabre80s? Simple, "Geforce" gives Johns that warm and fuzzy feeling that it'll be fine, they want to read that word somewhere. Image. Brand awareness *shudders again*

Those trends are subject to market shifts in the high end, as evidenced by a lot of Radeon 9000 equipped low end machines popping up late last year. SiS/XGI will never make it into OEM boxes without a high end heavy hitter.

These are only my own humble observations, but I hope they sound reasonable.

 

Well, being able to try a product before buying it can certainly be a powerful factor affecting purchase decisions. Obviously if you can see a card running and are happy with the performance, you may be compelled to buy that one instead of a different one that has good reviews but that you can't try. If you ask a knowledgeable friend, chances are they either already own the card they recommend, or they own a card that's out of the naive user's budget. I wouldn't say your example, where you own a mainstream card but recommend a different one, is the most common scenario. And reviews of the Radeon 9000 were generally positive, so that would only have reinforced your brother's decision. Remember the 9000 still outperforms the 5200 in many games, and the minimal DX9 support of the 5200 shouldn't really be a purchase factor unless you're a graphics programmer.

Correct. But there are still a lot of people in the market for this class of product that WILL read reviews and get advice from friends, and they CAN be swayed to choose one manufacturer over another.

Huh? How does a DX8 card look more like a rip-off than a so-called DX9 card that is far too slow to run DX9 apps? At least with the ATI card, you have no illusions about what you are getting. The FX 5200 is much more likely to fall below your expectations.

Sure. But remember, your brother did still have to choose a graphics card, and his choice directly affected the choice of card for his friends and family. So even if your brother heard from a friend who talked to a friend who read in a magazine somewhere that the GeForce is a bad card because it cheats in benchmarks, then that one magazine's opinion has influenced the decisions of a whole pile of people who necessarily know anything about graphics cards.

Of course they do. But marketing and advertising do not necessarily equal trickery. Marketing is about convincing people that they should buy your product, and typically involves conveying the benefits of the product. Advertising is simply about conveying marketing messages to the widest possible audience.

I agree that the naming schemes from ATI and Nvidia have become very confusing. In your example, your determinations of which products are "worse" appear to be subjective. The 9000 has fewer texture units and vertex engines than the 8500, but they are more efficient. In some cases (specifically DX8 shader-heavy apps) it's faster, in some cases it's slower. The 9100 is identical to the 8500, so it can't be worse than either chip. The 9200 is a 9000 with AGP 8x, so it can't be worse than a 9000. The 9000 & 9200 also support Fullstream technology, but lack hardware TRUFORM support. Hopefully it's obvious why there is no simple way to name these products. In any case, given that all of them have very similar price, features and performance, I don't see how any one of these products could really be considered a rip-off relative to the others. On the other hand, a GeForce 4 MX that has less performance and than a GeForce 2 and less features than a GeForce 3, is another story...

What tricks are ATI getting away with? So far it's been identified they were doing something with the shaders in 3DMark, and they promptly removed that from their driver (resulting in a lower score). They also don't apply AF to all textures if it's selected in the control panel, but they give you a way to disable this optimization if you don't like it. As far as I know, that's it. Nvidia is still cheating in 3DMark03 with clip planes and shader replacements, still cheating in UT2003 with forced bilinear filtering, still cheating in Shadermark and CodeCreatures and lord knows where else. And the result is that they appear to outperform ATI in benchmarks, but further tests have shown that they are slower in most actual games. It's going to be up to reviewers and customers to decide if they get away with it or not.

You can't be sure. That's why you trust friends and reviewers to tell you if you're being lied to. There may be no tangible performance difference between a 256MB and 128MB card, but if a company tried to pass off one as the other, you'd certainly have grounds for a lawsuit.

I'm not disagreeing with any of that. But if all of your favorite reviewers start saying that something was wrong with Nvidia's benchmarks, there's a good chance you're going to believe them. The geeks like us might analyze their methods, but most other people will just trust them.

Of course reviewers make mistakes, that's how Nvidia was allowed to get away with all of their cheats in the first place! No one discovered them until after they reviewed the original product. The ATI limitations you mention have all been known for some time and discussed at length. ATI doesn't "get away with" 24-bit FP because this is what is stated in the DX9 spec. The angle-dependence of AF has been around since the 8500 and was significantly improved in the R3xx series. The mipmap/LOD bias and gamma issues apply to tests on any card. The difference with Nvidia's cheats are that they affect only common benchmark applications, and in many cases they reduce quality below the level of earlier generations of products, and they can't be disabled!

I don't think anyone is proposing that no one should consider purchasing any future Nvidia product because of the problems with their current line-up. But if no one bothered discussing or complaining about their problems, what motivation would they have to correct them as soon as possible? Do you think it was coincidence that Intel really cranked up the speed of their product releases after they started facing serious pressure from AMD and their customers?

My point is that none of Nvidia's products, even their low-end products, are actually as good as people were originally led to believe. You don't have to be sponsored by ATI to feel that way. If you're a sports writer and a Yankees fan who thinks the Mets are evil, does that imply that you are being sponsored by the Yankees?

 

I think what he was trying to say that it "looks like" a rip-off regardless of the merits of the two cards.

I would like to "market" and "advertise" a bridge in Brooklyn...

So, when ATI does it, it's just "confusing"?

Why does Nvidia merit a "lord knows what else"? ATI brought us 'Quack', they only filter one texture, they cheated in 3dMark03, and "lord knows what else". The point is that both of these are businesses that will do whatever is necessary to get the upper hand (hopefully) within the bounds of the law (then again the CEO of the Sacred Most Holy Church of ATI is currently being investigated for what seems like obvious insider trading - but I guess that's not "cheating" in your book).

You, and others on this forum remind me of people who are rabid fans of a team, as if their personal self-esteem and self-worth is tied to how well their team does. Sure, it's fun to root for a team, and argue the relative merits of two competing teams, but after you've shouted yourself hoarse, and downed more than your fair share of beers, you go home and get back to your life. But then again for some of us that's all there is?

Bottom Line: Don't be naive about corporations. Their goal is to make money, tons of it, not to be morally superior.

See above.

 

Which is exactly why we should watch what they're doing and try to ensure unacceptable behaviour isn't rewarded.

Entropy

PS. Being the co-founder of a small corporation, let me just add that you can actually have as a businessmodel to supply something that is useful at a cost that is mutually beneficial. Not all corporations turn into the communist charicature of private business.

 

Well, why not? They've been seen to be doing a hell of a lot more so far (70+ detections in Antidetect), and its fairly evident that its been happening for quite some time (the 3DMark increases when 9700 was announced is a classic example). And, hey, ATI only implemented the filtering after NVIDIA were dolling out 5800's with non-Trilear filtering enabled. As for 3DMark03, at least they managed to "cheat" without reducing any IQ and then subsequently owned up to it and removed them - much more than NVIDIA have done so far. So far we've seen NVIDIA spoon feed press on their new "optimisation guidelines" only to completely flout them when it suites them to do so.

And you remind me of the embittered supporter who's team is loosing and is forced to dish out these worthless platitudes. Otherwise, if they want to waste their time discussing in this fashion on forums, what care is it of yours?

 

Above3d:

You claim to have "snipped ATI propaganda" when all you really did was eliminate part of the post that proved Nick wrong!

Considering a 9100 is the SAME as an 8500, this statement is already absurd without delving deeper..... nice of you to label the facts as "ATI propaganda". We know which team you root for

 

Why diss XGI before they launch their first product?
You may be in for a surprise next month

Really?

http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/video/display/20030804021242.html