ATI continues to surprise - AMD teams up with Blizzard

[RussianSensation]

"In a rather unexpected announcement today, AMD has teamed up with Blizzard Entertainment in a sponsorship deal for BlizzCon 2008 as the graphics card provider for the event which will be held in Anaheim this year from October 10th to the 11th.

However, what is even more exciting is the fact that AMD struck a deal which allows it to bundle all of the best games from Blizzard with its ATI graphics cards, so maybe we can look forward to a Star Craft or even Diablo 3 bundle in the future.

Another upside to this deal is that Blizzards games should be tuned work perfect on AMD hardware as Blizzard will get early access to new hardware from AMD.

This is all great news for AMD which hasn't been very strong when it comes to support from game developers, as unlike Nvidia's TWIMTBP program, AMD's equivalent, The Ultimate Visual Experience, hasn't exactly taken off in the same way. In all honesty, we can't think of any games that display the AMD logo when you start them, but then again, the TWIMTBP logo is just frustrating when you start a game, so let's hope AMD doesn't decide to ask for something similar from Blizzard."

Source

Official Press Release

With

4850 ~ $150 > 9800 GTX
4870 = GTX 260 ~ $250
4850 X2 (somewhat of a surprise offering)
and 4870 X2 completely dominating GTX 280 in most of the latest popular games out, AMD is really on the comeback.

Let's hope their processors experience a similar turnaround, soon.

 

[Genx87]

Is is good to see competition in the graphics dept again. Unfortunately reading about the i7. It appears AMD is in for more ramrodding on the CPU front from Intel for quite some time

 

[Operandi]

Just marketing really... but it dose show that there some good competition in the market, which is defiantly a good thing.

 

[Aberforth]

Blizzard might have DX 10.1 support in upcoming games like D3, SC2.

 

[RussianSensation]

Originally posted by: Operandi
Just marketing really... but it dose show that there some good competition in the market, which is defiantly a good thing.

I think it's a little more than that. Blizzard games are very popular. Some people play WOW every day. When that game came some years ago, tons and tons of people on this forum inquired which card to buy to improve their performance in WOW.

With Diablo 3 and Starcraft II there will be a wave of new buyers looking to upgrade potentially. So not only will ATI be able to bundle those games, collaboration with Blizzard can mean that their cards might be superior to NV in such titles (of course not all TWIMTBP NV titles are faster on NV cards so there are no guarantees).

Any tangible competitive advantage such as product bundling to create a more favourable product offering relative to a competitor and/or a performance-oriented focus to the customer is not "just marketing". It only requires a look in the not-to-distant past to ATI's HL2 bundling with 9600Pro/9700 series to realize just how powerful a great gaming bundle can be.

 

[Piuc2020]

While a partnership with such a big developer is great, Blizzard only ever releases maybe one game a year AT most (including expansion) and they are always pretty computer-friendly, I don't see this as having much benefit for ATI, sure it'll be big in 2009 when Starcraft 2 is released and then on 2011 when Diablo 3 but that's nothing compared to the hundreds of NVIDIA logos we have to see in every other game. In terms of performance, Blizzard games always max out on mid-range hardware, I'm sure Starcraft 2 will max out on today's current hardware even though it's possibly one or two years away still.

 

[Leon]

AMD continues to bleed red ink - 1.18 billion in this quarter alone

Fixed

 

[toslat]

Originally posted by: Leon
AMD continues to bleed red ink - 1.18 billion in this quarter alone

Fixed

stale news, and what does it have to with the topic?

 

[Foxery]

Originally posted by: Operandi
Just marketing really...

This is the only guy so far to get the point. Blizzard's games are HUGE, and full of uninformed and gullible people. If the login screen for WoW had an ATI logo on it, it would leave an impression on millions of potential customers. Targetted advertising at its best.

As far as DX10.1 features go, Blizzard prefers to remain vendor-neutral. They'll only do this if nVidia puts 10.1-capable products on the roadmap. AMD can't afford to bribe them enough to write a unique codepath...

 

[wwswimming]

Originally posted by: toslat

Originally posted by: Leon
AMD continues to bleed red ink - 1.18 billion in this quarter alone

Fixed

stale news, and what does it have to with the topic?

http://quote.yahoo.com/q?s=amd

that made me wonder - about their stock. current
market valuation - $3 billion.

i checked AMD when the markets opened after 9-11.
it had a market valuation of about $2 billion.

http://quote.yahoo.com/q/is?s=AMD

so the big loss was quarter ended Dec. 31, 2007.

I'LL BUY SOME AMD STOCK & USE THE PROFITS TO BUY A

nevermind.

and they paid $6 billion for ATI ?

forget all that stuff, i'll settle for a 4850 with a decent heatsink &
stable drivers.

 

[SlowSpyder]

Originally posted by: Leon
AMD continues to bleed red ink - 1.18 billion in this quarter alone

Fixed

I'm no finance expert, but from what I understand over $800million of that number is actually just a write down on the value of ATI. They actually 'only' lost ~$200million. The majority of that $1.18billion was just AMD lowering the value of ATI, or more or less saying they paid too much money. So in a sense it's still lost money as they over paid, but it's not actual lost money from that quarter, just that they claimed it then or whatever. Losing $200+ million isn't good, but at least they're a lot closer to being profitable then if they had lost an actual $1.18billion.

 

[Bateluer]

Wasn't Nvidia's TWIMTBP a joke anyway? Nearly every game carries that logo, and none of them are optimized for Nvidia hardware. Heck, in some cases, they ran better under ATI's cards. The logo seems to be merely a rubber stamp stating that the publisher paid Nvidia money.

 

[thilanliyan]

Originally posted by: Bateluer
Wasn't Nvidia's TWIMTBP a joke anyway? Nearly every game carries that logo, and none of them are optimized for Nvidia hardware. Heck, in some cases, they ran better under ATI's cards. The logo seems to be merely a rubber stamp stating that the publisher paid Nvidia money.

I'm sure it's optimized sometimes, but yeah it doesn't always work.