In light of all the negativity about the whole AMD vs. NVidia and TWIMTBP "lockouts" and such, I wanted to throw a little personal experience commentary in on the subject. Please note, this is not even remotely intended to be any sort of flame fest regarding either camp, nor is it an attempt at fanboy trolling. I really, truly have an interesting facet of the situation to share.
#1 - I am an AMD/ATI user, proudly running an AMD CPU (940BE) on an AMD/ATI Chipset (790GX) motherboard with an ATI GPU (4890). With that out of the way...
I know we're all tired of hearing about either group's marketing department throwing their developer relations dollars around to provide "user experiences" (eg: feature "lock outs") to specific titles. But there may actually be more to it than actually appears.
Particularly in the real of anti-aliasing, I recently had the opportunity to beta test an upcoming title which will remain unnamed due to various legalities. In any even, the latest round of testing that was done had introduced some rather severe issues in terms of stability with my particular system, to the point where the title was essentially unplayable. After consulting with the developers and community, ATI users had been directed to turn off anti-aliasing options in the title completely. This in particular had seemed to solve my issues, as I was now able to actually test the title for a length of time far exceeding the "few minutes at best" I was seeing earlier. After consulting further with the community, it appears that NVidia users were not affected, and the developers for the title did indeed state that there appeared to be some sort of bug in the anti-aliasing features exposed by the current ATI drivers (most were reporting using 9.12), or possibly in the developer's implementation of AA.
As far as I am aware, this particular title is not on the TWIMTBP program, at least not publicly as of yet. My point here is that there may actually be more of a need for these sort of relations programs behind the scenes than just feature "lock-outs" and whatnot. Again, as discussed in previous threads, it is one thing for vendors to go knocking on developers' doors providing them with an incentive to implement vendor-specific features. The onus should be on the developer to request assistance from a willing vendor if specific features are needed.
Of course, the bewildering part of all of it still lies in using what should be vendor agnostic APIs (DirectX for example) and developing for the lowest common denominator, which isn't done. But again, this isn't done in some cases for good reason - sometimes you want to use a feature that is newer than the API provides to provide that little sparkle that makes your title that much more appealing.
I guess what I am trying to say here folks is that there are differences even in what appears to be a common functionality between both camps. So before we go jumping to conclusions, we really need to see what exactly is at play here. The realm is just too gray to say anything definitively otherwise.
#1 - I am an AMD/ATI user, proudly running an AMD CPU (940BE) on an AMD/ATI Chipset (790GX) motherboard with an ATI GPU (4890). With that out of the way...
I know we're all tired of hearing about either group's marketing department throwing their developer relations dollars around to provide "user experiences" (eg: feature "lock outs") to specific titles. But there may actually be more to it than actually appears.
Particularly in the real of anti-aliasing, I recently had the opportunity to beta test an upcoming title which will remain unnamed due to various legalities. In any even, the latest round of testing that was done had introduced some rather severe issues in terms of stability with my particular system, to the point where the title was essentially unplayable. After consulting with the developers and community, ATI users had been directed to turn off anti-aliasing options in the title completely. This in particular had seemed to solve my issues, as I was now able to actually test the title for a length of time far exceeding the "few minutes at best" I was seeing earlier. After consulting further with the community, it appears that NVidia users were not affected, and the developers for the title did indeed state that there appeared to be some sort of bug in the anti-aliasing features exposed by the current ATI drivers (most were reporting using 9.12), or possibly in the developer's implementation of AA.
As far as I am aware, this particular title is not on the TWIMTBP program, at least not publicly as of yet. My point here is that there may actually be more of a need for these sort of relations programs behind the scenes than just feature "lock-outs" and whatnot. Again, as discussed in previous threads, it is one thing for vendors to go knocking on developers' doors providing them with an incentive to implement vendor-specific features. The onus should be on the developer to request assistance from a willing vendor if specific features are needed.
Of course, the bewildering part of all of it still lies in using what should be vendor agnostic APIs (DirectX for example) and developing for the lowest common denominator, which isn't done. But again, this isn't done in some cases for good reason - sometimes you want to use a feature that is newer than the API provides to provide that little sparkle that makes your title that much more appealing.
I guess what I am trying to say here folks is that there are differences even in what appears to be a common functionality between both camps. So before we go jumping to conclusions, we really need to see what exactly is at play here. The realm is just too gray to say anything definitively otherwise.
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