Rick Bergman of ATI Interview

[Geo]

http://www.trustedreviews.com/article.aspx?page=6115&head=73

Props to my homeys at EB for the tip.

Bergman is big cheese of the PC business (i.e. everything but Consumer).

I was discouraged by the answer re cooler noise, which was a typical two-ply defense: "Is not, and isn't our fault anyway!" Can't get that one fixed while you're still on that river in Egypt.

This was interesting:

RB: I can understand what you are saying but I think we will see a fast consumer uptake of Vista. We are currently testing a lot of our DX9 development cards on Vista and we’ve found it to be pretty good. In fact, our developers use it as their base OS now. DB: Vista’s demands for graphics performance also have a knock on for us. To get the full effect of the operating system many people will need to upgrade. It can be frustrating for the people out there but we have to be ready around then to make sure we have a lot of appealing cards available. We actually have our third release drivers available for Vista builds already and we are working really hard with Microsoft on this. Microsoft officially states it is pro ATI for Vista because our drivers are more stable and the development is further ahead.

 

[Tim Murray]

Re: the quote about Vista.

Wonder if that's why Crossfire driver support still sucks. Profiles in the DLL? Not even an undocumented way to add new ones? Come on.

 

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

I think he's being optimistic with regards to the quick uptake of Vista. People are not going to jump to Vista as quickly as he thinks. Look at how long it took people to go to XP and get drivers for all their equipment. A lot of people stayed at Win95/Me and skipped 2000 and NT altogether, and only went to XP after a couple of years.

I think there will be several issues, but foremost will be Vista having a high hardware requirement adding an initial high cost, drivers not appearing for legacy hardware, and people just not trusting a new MS OS until it's had some service packs and been tested in the field by others.

While so many people are still pleased with their XP installs, they won't feel a need to upgrade at high cost on day of release.

 

[Geo]

I keep saying that gaming performance could be an early important uptake factor for Vista. Enthusiasts will move if they get faster fps out of their current stuff on current games. And they'll mostly be at 2gb and sm3 cards anyway. And they are a vocal lot, with a goodly amount of second degree influence.

But in the end what really will drive uptake, far and away, is new pc/laptop sales. But still, something like above could be a nice little cherry on that cake --for MS anyway; prolly neutral for the IHVs.

 

[Sunrise]

I think he's being optimistic with regards to the quick uptake of Vista. People are not going to jump to Vista as quickly as he thinks. Look at how long it took people to go to XP and get drivers for all their equipment. A lot of people stayed at Win95/Me and skipped 2000 and NT altogether, and only went to XP after a couple of years.

I can share your impressions regarding Vista (it´s not just the new GUI, but also the OS itself that is power and ram hungry). Vista is the only OS i can think of in years, that really "changes" the requirements for a broad range of installed PCs.

I went from Win95 to Win98 at the first day of release and Win98 really was fast and stable. After that I skipped NT/2000 entirely, simply because there weren´t enough benefits, being more or less "just a gamer" back then. What really was surprising however, is that I went to XP right at the time when it was introduced (with the same basic setup, that is a P3-650, 768MB RAM and a Geforce 1 DDR until today). What i got was even more stability, good compatibility and performance about on par with Win98. A very solid user experience without any need to upgrade.

Vista compares very well to a Ferrari, it certainly will be very fast and good looking, but it also seems to be heavily dependend on "how much you feed it" to really get any satisfaction out of it.

 

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

I keep saying that gaming performance could be an early important uptake factor for Vista. Enthusiasts will move if they get faster fps out of their current stuff on current games. And they'll mostly be at 2gb and sm3 cards anyway. And they are a vocal lot, with a goodly amount of second degree influence.

But in the end what really will drive uptake, far and away, is new pc/laptop sales. But still, something like above could be a nice little cherry on that cake --for MS anyway; prolly neutral for the IHVs.

Gamers being tech savvy may not want the hassle of Vista for a while. TPM, games incompatability, heavy DRM on one side with many copy protection schemes not working correctly, etc.

As a heavy gamer and tech enthusiast myself, I'll be counselling those whom I deal my second degree influence to "wait and see". I don't want the non-gamer, non-techie, or non-bleeding edge hardware owners to be having problems with these new issues - or be calling on me to fix them.

I'm sure most developers and publishers will not be willing to narrow their markets down to just Vista. Sure, MS has paid for a Halo 2 exclusive to help their Vista sales, but most people will just live without Halo2, and most publishers won't focus on it for a while.

 

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

Vista compares very well to a Ferrari, it certainly will be very fast and good looking, but it also seems to be heavily dependend on "how much you feed it" to really get any satisfaction out of it.

You ever been in a Ferrari? Loud, noisy, uncomfortable, expensive, without the mod-cons you get on a car the fraction of the price, impractical for every day use, fuel guzzling, and limited to a couple of thousand miles a year on your insurance. They are however significantly faster than you'll ever be able to drive this side of a disused airfield.

Hmm, might be a good analogy after all.

 

[booomups]

and regarding skipping nt/2000, microsoft fed the normal user still windows 98 and and windows me before xp came out, also the consumer pcs you could buy back then came preoloaded with windows me.

so... if every new pc sold will be shipped with vista and vistas copy protection gets, or better said stays cracked, vista will certainly soon be accepted widely.

 

[Geo]

Gamers being tech savvy may not want the hassle of Vista for a while. TPM, games incompatability, heavy DRM on one side with many copy protection schemes not working correctly, etc.

They may dual-boot, but if they can get another 5fps on the same title with the same hardware, watch 'em scurry! That's my prediction anyway. Of course MS and the IHVs have to deliver that extra 5 FPS first. That was part of what held back XP adoption in my book. . .XP gaming performance sucked eggs for a good year. . .

 

[Sunrise]

You ever been in a Ferrari? Loud, noisy, uncomfortable, expensive, without the mod-cons you get on a car the fraction of the price, impractical for every day use, fuel guzzling, and limited to a couple of thousand miles a year on your insurance.

Yeah, more than once, actually. Some of them were modded to be (more or less) "just a race car" and i was driving them on the Hockenheimring motor racing circuit situated here in good ol' germany, which you probably know from formula 1 car racing.

Aside from the unbelievable speed, i can´t really say that this impressed me much, because while you had unbelievable speed, those cars weren´t very practical for everyday use, which is exactly why i took that analogy, because i think it fits pretty well.

Obviously, moving forward in time, this is going to change, but i wouldn´t expect to be impressed by Vista with pre-SM 3.0 hardware, having less than 128MB graphics memory and less than 1GB of main memory. Just thinking of all the bugs MS introduced in their last OSes and some additonal ones with their service packs makes me stay away from it at first, so Vista will have a hard time to be "ready" for my needs.

But then, let´s just wait and see.

 

[Sobek]

As a heavy gamer and tech enthusiast myself, I'll be counselling those whom I deal my second degree influence to "wait and see". I don't want the non-gamer, non-techie, or non-bleeding edge hardware owners to be having problems with these new issues - or be calling on me to fix them

Quoted for Great Justice. (QfGJ?)

I'm in the same situation, with people inquiring all the time about Vista and wether they should upgrade to it when it comes out. I find myself telling them to give it a few months and just see what kind of issues the OS faces shortly after launch. With the problems they manage to discover on XP alone, I highly doubt they'd enjoy, or better yet, perceive and benefits in using Vista.

Waiting game this time...

 

[micron]

Quoted for Great Justice.

Sorry....

 

[chavvdarrr]

They may dual-boot, but if they can get another 5fps on the same title with the same hardware, watch 'em scurry! That's my prediction anyway. Of course MS and the IHVs have to deliver that extra 5 FPS first. That was part of what held back XP adoption in my book. . .XP gaming performance sucked eggs for a good year. . .

you believe in these 5 fps ?!
Ask yourself - what the average PC bought today has ?
Putting aside enthusiasts, who anyway will change the hardware till Vista comes out, the average PC has 512-1024MB RAM, no more, and video card in the range of i915/i945 to 6600GT/X800/X1600
5 fps more are possible ... but not on such hardware IMHO

 

[Geo]

I can't put aside enthusiasts as that's who I was pointing at in starting this lobe of the conversation. I've got 2gb, an X1800xlaiw, and an X2 4200@4600 clocks. By the time Vista ships this gear will be my wife's machine and I'll be another notch up.

Just for an example; there are plenty who can put my setup to shame.

 

[chavvdarrr]

do you define gamer == enthusiast ?
this is not true IMHO
There are many "gamers" who simply are not able to upgrade every 6 months.
Those who can do that AND are gamers are <1% of pc users
I won't call that "fast jump to Vista"