This is why the R300 won't do well!

Which is more a result of the current marketplace conditions than anything else.

Each company did what it could do in its own case. Only nVidia had the clout (or thought it did...) to attempt to force the use of its own extensions. The rest *had* to go open.

Blaming nVidia is silly, because any other company would have done the same in their place.

 

Crusher

my oringal point was in response to your quote:

Now that we have shown you that many times developer send time and money to optimize their game for one brand of card over another maybe you want to rethink some of this. Another example is the GF3 enhacned version of Giants. Techinally anything that was done there should run just fine on a 8500 but does not, again thanks to the developers.

Kind of shows you that developers are lazy to go back and change their code doesnt it?

If they made these ext open and standard then fine, but the since they are proprietry and nVidia tried to charge for them. Big difference here. Did we all happen to forget why its called OpenGL instead of just GL?

Once they make the specific, then yea its there fault, be it ATI, 3DFX, nVidia, ect....

 

Oh dear god. You just finaly gave up on defending nvidia as if it was not using a proprietary extension and now that you find it is true you change your argument to rationalise their actions for making the extension proprietary. What kind of blinkered approach is that ? Oh yeah nvidia can do know wrong, how silly of me to forget.

Sabastian

 

I just have to say: So what? My argument still stands, and ATI still did release their own OpenGL extensions.

 

Chalnoth,

So you are saying that Matrox has their own API , ATI has their own API and Nvidia has their own API, and PowerVR has their own API..


Ummm

 

You dont have an argument. It went from declaring NVIDIA would never do such a thing to a reversal of "Well, anyone would have done the same thing in their place"- when every single 3d graphics chip maker HAS been in their place for the past 8+ years and never did any such thing. So therefore that claim is totally invalid.

You are still grasping at non-existent straws. Of course ATI added their own OpenGL extensions.. as did 3dfx, SGI, Matrox, S3 and everyone else. That is the whole point of the ARB is to review and extend the API and this becomes a necessity as new hardware and unsupported features arrive in this hardware.

The part you trying to avoid is that these new OpenGL extensions become part of the API- not property solely owned by the company that has desired to add them. This goes against the entire basis of OpenGL and NVIDIA is the first company to pull this kind of nonsense.

If NVIDIA wanted to, they could freely implement, include and support all ATI, 3dfx and SGI extensions that have been added to the API in past years. This isn't the reverse case with the new shader extensions NVIDIA has hijacked the API against and it took ATI/Matrox (3rd time saying this now) to put non-proprietary, usable extensions into the API.

If you are still unclear to the difference, please ask. I'm sure more people will be more than happy to explain this in more depth if needed.

Cheers,
-Shark

 

Omg a post that I and Shark agree with

 

Yes... ATI has done their own OpenGL extensions (many of them in coordination with other video card companies mind you).

But the point that I don't understand how you can possibly be missing is that anyone can use the ATI OpenGL extensions. Any company, if their hardware supported it or they built hardware to support it, could use the ATI extensions in their drivers. Nvidia tried to charge companies to be able to use and support their OpenGL extensions.

Do you still not understand the massive difference between those two positions?!?

Edit: Oh, and Sharkfood... I believe at least originally S3 was licensing their S3TC extension in OpenGL. That was why the Rage128 series and other contemporary cards at the time often only had s3tc support in DX (because they could since S3 licenced it to Microsoft). I assume somewhere along the line that changed though, but I don't know the history on it.

And to add to what sharkfood said further, it wasn't until the rest of the ARB took a liking to the approach that ATI/Matrox was going with their shader extensions that Nvidia swallowed their pride and made their shader extensions open... however that was FAR to late for it to actually matter, because ATI/Matrox (and i think 3dlabs was interested in their approach as well IIRC) were already going a different direction... Those divergant approaches to the shader exensions apparantly aren't easy to reconcile with the approach Nvidia took to their shader extensions.

 

Why must this board be so anti-Nvidia? I mean you would think Nvidia has killed your children!

I like Nvidia like I liked 3DFX in their heyday, but that doesn't mean I am going to take a crap on ATI.

Some of you have to learn some RESPECT and it really wouldn't hurt if you were to be a little humble either.

Sheesh, its the same people with the same tired arguments and dislike for Nvidia that makes this forum really crappy. I didn't say a$$ kissing, I said being humble and a little open minded.

 

Actually, my understand of the S3TC extension was the extension was fully open, but the underlying technology would need license if you wished to use S3's propriety format.

MesaGL and WickedGL both implemented the extension without license and simply used their own form of pack/unpack codewithout tromping on the IP from S3.

Docwiz-

It has nothing to do with being pro-This or pro-That, it has to do with being pro-factual information and pro-honest depiction.

Any discussion of events worthy of criticisim should be openly discussed, and occurs here with all vendors- be they NVIDIA, ATI, 3dfx, NEC/PVR, Matrox, Bit Boys (if you want to call them a "vendor" heh), and 3DLabs. All have their skeletons and all have interesting histories and angles to discuss and evaluate.

I'd also disagree with your assessment of the forums here. I can already point out several dozen threads (a couple on the main page right now) that go on for 4 or 5 pages of discussions condeming non-NVIDIA hardware, and a single post pointing out a contrary issue concerning NVIDIA either results in 'well, let's just end the discussion now' or "Thread Closed"

 

No, you'd actually think that nvidia made some proprietary OpenGl extensions.
this board is far from anti-nVidia. Why is it that unless you bow down and NEVER disagree with nVidias actions that you "think nVidia killed your children"? Get real...
And why should we be humble? about what?

Exactly what has happened here that we should be humble about? Please make some sense, cause i dont get it....

Chalnoth, i think you should read back over your posts and notice hgow your "argument" has changed.
I dont see how (except by intentionaly ignoring) you are missing what several people are telling you....

 

No, I'm pretty sure that's not true. I do know that it is entirely possible to use S3TC textures in Direct3D without a liscense, as Microsoft liscensed the tech from S3 for that purpose (I have a feeling MS wouldn't allow it in D3D otherwise...), but in OpenGL, other companies needed a liscense (this may have since changed...). I do know that nVidia now supports S3TC in OpenGL due to a cross-liscensing agreement with S3.

 

I think you're seeing only what you want to see from what I've said. Regardless, it doesn't matter to me. All of the programmability is going to go open-source with OpenGL 2.0 (and perhaps sooner...).

Oh, and don't forget that ATI may have not wanted to support nVidia's extensions in the first place...such would force programmers to use ATI's extensions for decent compatibility.

 

I have been here for two years and I just have not posted.
I have seen a lot more anti-nvidia stuff here and it comes from people that are the leaders of either the website or this board.

Its kind of like the Anti-Nvidia club, which takes an office right next to the anti-Microsoft club.

There is way more bashing against Nvidia by both Daves, Reverend, Joe, etc.... They seem to think they know a lot, but I see them being wrong quite a bit.

This board used to be pro 3DFX and anti nvidia and then when 3DFX got bought out by Nvidia, they stayed anti Nvidia and became pro ATI.

Of course I want competition, but ATI is doing well and so is Nvidia and this talking smack around here is alarming.

I come here for information and enlightenment, but all I see is a flamewar all the time on who came out with toasted bread first and how fast its toasted. I don't care, just give me the goods.

 

or as shark said, we're pro facts and reason. Chalnoth simply abandoned both in his arguements in this thread.

 

Or maybe, just maybe, we're against nV's and MS's certain reprehensible actions. I'm not sure why a company deserves respect or humility on our parts if the people running it display neither.

Anyway, I'm not sure why you and Chalnoth can't seem to grasp our problem with proprietary extensions. Maybe if you were made to pay a licensing fee for every .gif you've ever used?

 

I find this board fairly balanced personally. At this site you can find fairly objective and knowledgeable opinions and facts. Hey if you want pro nvidia garble you can go to nvnews.net same goes for ATi at Rage3d. For the most part the net is packed full of people who are biased one way or another to a degree. But I disagree with your declaration that this site is entirerly anti-nvidia. There are quite a number of posters here that are pro nvidia but there also seems to be a nice mix really. There is even some who are pro bit boys..... Kyroll, ATi, Matrox. My point here is I find that the knowledge base here is very rich.

Posts like yours only stifle intellectual debate for fear of appearing bias one way or another. Personally I am bias against nvidia because of the 500$ video card in my machine that I bought a couple of years ago that had extreme driver issues for nearly a year. (Annihilator Geforce Pro) At any rate I think possibly you post would be more relivent if it were posted at say nvnews.net or Anandtech.com to name a couple only the reverse message should be used. Nvidia is not the second comming and if they are a good company they will stand to the critical views. IMHO I personally think that you have it all backwards and that people have been fooled into thinking nvidia is a flawless company. Nvidia is over rated IMHO and I post my opinion regardless of the forum. Thankfully I can do that but it stands in the face of what you say in your post. All your argument does is bolster my argument that there are way to many pro-nvidia fan boys out there who will say or do anything it seems to sway others or at least stifle others into to saying nothing critical about nvidia which is the real problem IMHO.

sabastian

 

I agree with pretty much all the arguments made against the way Nvidia tried to license their OGL extensions to others, they got what they deserved and many other vendors are now going another way - they might even end up having to support the ATI/Matrox extensions in the future, who knows? I do think though that if ATi or another company would have been in NVidia's place (come to market first with an important so far in OGL unexposed feature), they would have probably done the same thing - namely trying to come up with a proprietary OGL extensiosn first, instead of going open source right away - in this business companies have pretty much always tried to gain profit from innovations they brought to the market, everybody is usually very protective of their IP and often tries to establish *his* way of doing things as standard as long as it can be afforded or thought possible (be it by licensing *their* tech to MS' next DX, introducing OGL extensions, having their own API or something else). In this case Nvidia probably overestimated their influence. IMHO the ATi/Matrox co-operation and making their extensions an open standard is a direct result of the current market situation, in which Matrox and ATi have both lost major ground to Nvidia in the past, its more of a strategic co-operation to take market leverage away from Nvidia, than creating extensions in "the spirit of open source".

This is supposed to be a 3D technology board though last i checked, so I think the ethics, marketing of products and company politics shouldn't really be that much of an issue - the technology should speak for itself, not clouded by some company politics, it should be about better looking and faster graphics than bitching about which company's PR department, lawyers or driver team sucks more...