**thread name change* Nvidia and AMD moral and immoral business practices

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Janooo

Golden Member
Aug 22, 2005
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OQr3i.png



Try this link
I am not in the US. Maybe that's why my laptop is not on the list. :(
 

Scali

Banned
Dec 3, 2004
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All things considering, I would consider myself to be more impartial than before - I now to just vote with my wallet (price, performance, heat, power draw, and the things mentioned in this thread kind of lead me away from nVidia this last gen).

Same thing here... I just see it differently from you.
AMD has no physics, no Cuda, and very lousy OpenCL support: I went back from AMD to nVidia.
 

notty22

Diamond Member
Jan 1, 2010
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I agree, if your around long enough you will see or unfortunately experience many disappointments related to design or manufacturing.
I have a 2004 Sony Vaio laptop ,2000 dollars bricked with a ATI discrete gpu, The gpu died. Probably heat related.
A original owner of the Xbox 360, I believe I was one of the first 300 to sign up for Live, Red Ring of Death.
A special edition model of car. One of 400 made with a supposedly hand assembled engine. = Blown head gasket :(
Early adopter of DvD, 1998, Sony DvD player ,retail 500 dollars. 13 months dead.
 

Scali

Banned
Dec 3, 2004
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I agree, if your around long enough you will see or unfortunately experience many disappointments related to design or manufacturing.
I have a 2004 Sony Vaio laptop ,2000 dollars bricked with a ATI discrete gpu, The gpu died. Probably heat related.
A original owner of the Xbox 360, I believe I was one of the first 300 to sign up for Live, Red Ring of Death.
A special edition model of car. One of 400 made with a supposedly hand assembled engine. = Blown head gasket :(
Early adopter of DvD, 1998, Sony DvD player ,retail 500 dollars. 13 months dead.

Yea exactly.
I have lost two cards to bumpgate. Thing is, I have used both without a problem for about 2 years, before they died.
After about 2 years, you are more or less expecting such hardware to break down anyway. Wouldn't be the first time a videocard broke down on me. Wouldn't be the quickest either (that record is held by a Radeon 9600Pro, which crapped out after about 3 months).
In my case it meant that I had to upgrade a few months before I actually planned. I wanted ride out my 8800GTS320 until the Fermi release... although it was already a bit long in the tooth. It didn't make it that far, so I bought an HD5770 instead. In retrospect I shouldn't have had to wait for Fermi anyway, I'd probably still would have gotten a Radeon at that point... Either that, or waited for the GTX460, which I have now.
I'm not really bothered... the card had already served its purpose, and I was in 'bonus time'. I enjoyed the heck out of it while it lasted.
 

Seero

Golden Member
Nov 4, 2009
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Yea exactly.
I have lost two cards to bumpgate. Thing is, I have used both without a problem for about 2 years, before they died.
After about 2 years, you are more or less expecting such hardware to break down anyway. Wouldn't be the first time a videocard broke down on me. Wouldn't be the quickest either (that record is held by a Radeon 9600Pro, which crapped out after about 3 months).
In my case it meant that I had to upgrade a few months before I actually planned. I wanted ride out my 8800GTS320 until the Fermi release... although it was already a bit long in the tooth. It didn't make it that far, so I bought an HD5770 instead. In retrospect I shouldn't have had to wait for Fermi anyway, I'd probably still would have gotten a Radeon at that point... Either that, or waited for the GTX460, which I have now.
I'm not really bothered... the card had already served its purpose, and I was in 'bonus time'. I enjoyed the heck out of it while it lasted.
When i brought my laptop, I also also brought extended warranty and was hoping it will die right after the default warranty. The sales rep told me that I will get a new laptop even if the dvd rom breaks. I believed I was a smart buyer at the time until the extended warranty expires...

I have let it run for days, I have play games with it. I have even put in a database and a application server on it, but other than it runs slow, nothing else happened. I even ran off trying to overclock it, but other than artifacts, it doesn't die.

It has been 6 years now... stuck with a single core CPU, a 128mb video card and a wireless G...

If that sounds like a robust laptop, then check out the one my boss brought. He put it on the driveway, forgot and ran over it with a rav 4. The screen broke, but surprisingly, it still works with a external monitor. It is older than my laptop and is still running somewhere in the office. Everyone wants it to die, but it just doesn't. We put it under a table no airflow, and it still won't die...
 
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psoomah

Senior member
May 13, 2010
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When i brought my laptop, I also also brought extended warranty and was hoping it will die right after the default warranty. The sales rep told me that I will get a new laptop even if the dvd rom breaks. I believed I was a smart buyer at the time until the extended warranty expires...

I have let it run for days, I have play games with it. I have even put in a database and a application server on it, but other than it runs slow, nothing else happened. I even ran off trying to overclock it, but other than artifacts, it doesn't die.

It has been 6 years now...

It's mainly the thermal expansion/contraction from turning the computer on and off that took out the bumpgate chips.
 

golem

Senior member
Oct 6, 2000
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I should have phrased it slightly differently.


Its not that I am more annoyed because I own AMD hardware, its just that I am more aware of their poor practices. The way they acted with regards to PhysX & artificially limiting it in peoples systems is out of line imo. I don't need to reiterate all the things that nVidia has done in the last two years - these reasons are one of the primary reasons why I choose to go with AMD this time.

ATI gets a pass for not putting out good OpenGL, Linux, OpenCL drivers for thier OWN customers. But Nvidia gets dinged because they won't support Physx if ATI is the primary graphics cards?

You know it cost money to test and support physx right? It's expected that they would do this in a single or dual Nvidia card system, but what if in an ATI/Nvidia system ATI drivers somehow stop physx from working or work wrong? So Nvidia has to spend resources to figure this out too?

Why would you ding Nvidia for not supporting mixed ATI/Nvidia customer (esp since the Nvidia card is the cheaper one) while giving ATI a pass for NOT putting any effort into physics?

So for Nvidia to have "good" business practices they not only have to provide support to everyone who has an nvidia card even if the fault is caused by their competitor.

ATI has "good" business practices by not providing the feature at all.
 

Scali

Banned
Dec 3, 2004
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When i brought my laptop, I also also brought extended warranty and was hoping it will die right after the default warranty. The sales rep told me that I will get a new laptop even if the dvd rom breaks. I believed I was a smart buyer at the time until the extended warranty expires...

I have let it run for days, I have play games with it. I have even put in a database and a application server on it, but other than it runs slow, nothing else happened. I even ran off trying to overclock it, but other than artifacts, it doesn't die.

It has been 6 years now... stuck with a single core CPU, a 128mb video card and a wireless G...

If that sounds like a robust laptop, then check out the one my boss brought. He put it on the driveway, forgot and ran over it with a rav 4. The screen broke, but surprisingly, it still works with a external monitor. It is older than my laptop and is still running somewhere in the office. Everyone wants it to die, but it just doesn't. We put it under a table no airflow, and it still won't die...

What is your point though?
I'm not saying all hardware HAS to die.
Heck, I still have an 8-year old Celeron-based laptop that is still good-as-new (and completely useless since XP SP3, making it WAY too slow).
I even have a Commodore C64 that still works perfectly, which would be about 25 years old now.
I just know from experience that hardware is some of the most flaky and unreliable stuff out there. Some stuff may last for years... other stuff just craps out after a few months. I learnt the hard way not to rely on hardware. It's nice when it works, but don't take it for granted. And that has nothing to do with brand, type, price range or anything. It's mostly just dumb luck.

In fact, have you ever heard about NASA's policy for the chips in the Space Shuttle and such? Since we don't know a whole lot about the reliability and degradation of silicon, especially under extreme circumstances such as space flight, NASA sticks to what they know.
To this day, they still power most of their onboard computers with late 70s/early 80s chips, such as the original Intel 8088/8086 processors. The reason is simple: they KNOW these chips work. They could replace everything with super-duper Core i7s or Atoms or whatever, but nobody knows how these newer production methods will hold under extreme conditions.
Some chips just have a tendency to die... others seem to live forever.
 

Rezident

Senior member
Nov 30, 2009
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Great thread btw...

Nvidia's well-documented dodgy practices (that are so dodgy and so well documented that they have now spawned a thread on MORALITY in a hardware forum!) - are they good or are they bad? I think the answer is obvious and everyone knows it if they're honest. Tripe about how companies can make money anyway they want just doesn't wash in this day and age, if you keep that old mindset you WILL go out of business eventually, we have evolved.

For example, NV locking physX out of a system with an ATI card is SO petty, Nvidia seems like a spoilt child throwing its rattle out of the pram, Nvidia really needs to grow up. It would be like Valve banning any games by Bioware or Blizzard or Bethesda or any other developer from being sold on Steam (except Valve would never do that because Valve is not like Nvidia). Valve cares about PC Gaming and itself (hint hint NV, it is possible to do both).

The appalling irony is that this selfish behaviour does not help Nvidia in the long run, it actually hurts NV. Look how much Valve has grown by embracing other developers (competitors! *shock horror*), how much could NV benefit from AMD's considerable prowess, if it was mutually beneficial? Both have had their ups and downs and have survived - so far - but one really bad down in this game and you're dead. With no respawn. One could help the other when it's going through a bad patch, and they would both prosper long-term. Like a magic spell or a power boost or Price throwing you that pistol or Alyx showing up to save your @$$.

And who would benefit most from this symbiotic relationship? We would.

If Nvidia would collaborate with ATI - or even just stop open hostilities, for starters - it would be SO MUCH better for PC gaming as a whole and ultimately for Nvidia too, in the long-term. Fact.
 

Scali

Banned
Dec 3, 2004
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If Nvidia would collaborate with ATI - or even just stop open hostilities, for starters - it would be SO MUCH better for PC gaming as a whole and ultimately for Nvidia too, in the long-term. Fact.

I hate to destroy your dreams, after you typing this long post and everything... but technically nVidia was the one willing to collaborate on PhysX with ATi, and ATi refused. As was already mentioned earlier in the thread.
So you're now blaming nVidia for the fact that ATi denied nVidia's offer to help implement PhysX on their hardware?
AMD is the one not collaborating. Not with PhysX, not with Bullet (look at Erwin's bug report on the rendering problems with point sprites for example), not with OpenCL...

Please, stop this pro-AMD/ATi madness. It's gone WAY too far.
 

Kenmitch

Diamond Member
Oct 10, 1999
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Me along with alot of other I'm sure would like to see nvidia's offer of physX. With the terms and conditions as presented to ATI at the time.
 

golem

Senior member
Oct 6, 2000
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Great thread btw...

For example, NV locking physX out of a system with an ATI card is SO petty, Nvidia seems like a spoilt child throwing its rattle out of the pram, Nvidia really needs to grow up. It would be like Valve banning any games by Bioware or Blizzard or Bethesda or any other developer from being sold on Steam (except Valve would never do that because Valve is not like Nvidia). Valve cares about PC Gaming and itself (hint hint NV, it is possible to do both).

A really bad example, Valve gets a percentage of every Bioware, Blizzard, or whoever game they sell. If ATI were willing to give a percentage of every sale they made to Nvidia, I'm sure Nvidia would love to enable physx on ATI/Nvidia systems.


Valve makes a game like every 2 or 3 years, and it's easy to have more than one game on your computer. So really how much competition is there between Valve and say Bioware or Blizzard? They don't even make the same type of games. And again, Valve makes money off every game they sell on Steam, whether they published it or not.
 
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AnandThenMan

Diamond Member
Nov 11, 2004
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AMD have Charlie - he quite clearly shows massive bias against nvidia, well bias isn't strong enough, he shows hate, and is quite clearly paid by AMD via adverts on his site. If AMD were above board they wouldn't sponsor Charlie.
Get your facts straight. AMD does NOT sponsor Charlie. Period. If you knew anything about pay per click and pay per view banners, it would be obvious to you. Charlie runs ads he wants to run, and no surprise he runs AMD centric banners. But AMD does not pay Charlie anything.

His hate for Nvidia is well know (and way over the top, it ruins any attempt at objectivity IMO) but he is not an AMD sponsored puppet.
Charlie is known to be on many forums, always uses another alias and mostly doesn't reveal who he really is, he is almost certainly present here.
Beyond3D and a few others, Charlie does reveal who he is. And if he doesn't reveal who he really is in some cases, how do you know it is him? And what member here is actually Charlie in disguise? What is their user name?
However to even use Charlie in any nvidia vs ati thread is viral marketing by AMD in action and working.
Stop making BS up, cripes.
I think you have to be pretty warped in the head if you think that nVidia deliberately caused bumpgate.
I think nVidia handled the situation quite well, they put money aside to compensate their customers.
The way bumpgate has been handled is atrocious. Even if you get your laptop repaired, you get the same defective GPU/motherboard all over again. It's going to fail down the road because the actual issue was not fixed. A faster spinning fan only delays the inevitable. This is why class action lawsuits happen. I have seen quite a number of people extremely turned off to Nvidia products because their laptop died (and died again) and there is no proper fix, except to replace the entire unit.
Fast-forward to AMD's Barcelona architecture. Whoops, again a bug related to memory addressing... this time the TLB was broken. Did AMD recall the CPUs? Nope.
AMD dropped the ball for sure, and it cost them dearly, in reputation and sales. But I believe you are incorrect that AMD never offered a replacement. Pretty sure if you experienced the bug and did not want to only do a bios patch, AMD would replace the processor free of charge (this was mainly to corporate customers, end users rarely if ever saw the actual problem happen). That does not absolve AMD from any responsibility, they should have never released a bugged product like that in the first place.

We allow cussing in P&N and OT, not in the tech forums.

Moderator Idontcare
 
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T2k

Golden Member
Feb 24, 2004
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Ask the guys over at NGOHQ.

Here is a very good place to start your quest.

http://news.softpedia.com/news/Nvidia-Helps-Porting-PhysX-on-Radeon-89601.shtml

Yeah, that's the type of bullcrap that was debunked already -the part were some guys from the corner was requesting access to low-level architectural secrets was an absurd joke.
It was a pretty lame PR hoax by NV, nothing else - if you need any proof then consider this: why NV rejected ATI when THEY said they will do it?

It was pure BS, typical NV style PR stunt that didn't even work (sans people with little or no technical understanding.)
 

Keysplayr

Elite Member
Jan 16, 2003
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Yeah, that's the type of bullcrap that was debunked already -the part were some guys from the corner was requesting access to low-level architectural secrets was an absurd joke.
It was a pretty lame PR hoax by NV, nothing else - if you need any proof then consider this: why NV rejected ATI when THEY said they will do it?

It was pure BS, typical NV style PR stunt that didn't even work (sans people with little or no technical understanding.)

@ Kenmitch. Just read it for yourself.
 
Apr 20, 2008
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Yea well, nVidia didn't do that on purpose.
It's not like nVidia's chips are the only reason laptops would ever break down.
I have plenty of broken unfixable hardware that doesn't have an nVidia chip on it.
These things just happen. That's not the point. The point is how you deal with it when it does.
And thats the point. nVidia wasnt replacing anything or taking blame until a lawsuit was won against them. Thats not taking care of your customer. Plain and simple.
 

railven

Diamond Member
Mar 25, 2010
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Yeah, that's the type of bullcrap that was debunked already -the part were some guys from the corner was requesting access to low-level architectural secrets was an absurd joke.
It was a pretty lame PR hoax by NV, nothing else - if you need any proof then consider this: why NV rejected ATI when THEY said they will do it?

It was pure BS, typical NV style PR stunt that didn't even work (sans people with little or no technical understanding.)

Reading both articles and knowing a little about NGOHQ the first part of your posts seems like it.

They like to script their own code (ie the source of the hacked PhysX drivers to allow ATI+NVIDIA systems before the beta drivers had it.)

Seems like they were trying to make their own library and required important info from ATI. Interesting, I wonder if they would have got it working - through a hack or two even?
 

blastingcap

Diamond Member
Sep 16, 2010
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I may be wrong, but I didn't see anything that confirmed that Nv started it, but if you have something I would like to see it as I may be wrong like I said.

Anyway, judging by SirPauly's Xbit link, it looks like ATI probably was guilty here as well.....

Ah I read the link, and I agree with you that it doesn't look good for either company. Per the judge's leak though, it appears that NV offered and AMD accepted or at least didn't outright reject price-fixing, hence its agreeing to pay up as well. There has been nothing leaked to show that AMD instigated the price-fixing.

I have to say that this thread did open my eyes up to AMD vs NV in terms of corporate evilness, so to speak. (Corporations cannot have morality really; so I am using the term colloquially as applied to companies.) I thought NV would win the evilness race in a landslide, but it's a closer call than that (though I would still say NV wins the race and that it's not a tie). Thanks to those of you who kept it civil and weren't rude.
 

SolMiester

Diamond Member
Dec 19, 2004
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I think its quite funny how so many people are getting riled up over the most evil company for their questionable antic, when really, neither is a patch on the US govt and what it gets up to in the name of the American people.
AFAIC, either company can do as it likes with its intellectual property. Hundreds of software house make unilateral decisions and changes to their software with upgrades as even as the consumer buys it, the software house still own the product. On this note, I have no problem with PhyX and the previous hardware card (Agrea?) and stopping the product from working should ATi be the primary card. Neither with Batman AA as they did the code. ATi\AMD needs to start doing software stuff itself like its great eye-infinity product.
Anyway just IMHO....
 

taserbro

Senior member
Jun 3, 2010
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Yeah, that's the type of bullcrap that was debunked already -the part were some guys from the corner was requesting access to low-level architectural secrets was an absurd joke.
It was a pretty lame PR hoax by NV, nothing else - if you need any proof then consider this: why NV rejected ATI when THEY said they will do it?

It was pure BS, typical NV style PR stunt that didn't even work (sans people with little or no technical understanding.)

I never heard of anything like that before so I went to dig into it a little.
This is what I understand from what I read today so feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

First off, the whole thing being a pr stunt from nvidia doesn't really add up. The first news of this hack mentioned that the 3850 was getting better performance than its nvidia counterpart of the day while running physx. I agree that at that point in time, it sounded more like a scam than anything serious because there wasn't anything except an easily spoofed screenshot available, however if it were nvidia trying to promote themselves, then I don't know how to explain that they would go through that much risks and trouble to do damage to themselves. Ironically, it would have made more sense if it were amd's doing.

Secondly, despite those somewhat embarrassing turns of events, the first time nvidia was made aware of this theater, they seemed to actually be interested to help (which, according to toms, was independently corroborated), and while they hardly asked amd for company secrets, the latter apparently denied the official support required and engineering samples of the hd4800s so the project could really not survive the next product cycle. In addition, the guy publicly admits that the project was turning out to be much harder than he thought, if possible at all without amd's help and that he probably bit off more than he could chew. At this point, it sounded a lot more reasonable a story considering the enormity of the scope of such a project and knowing amd's dev support as well as what eventually happened to ati's stance on fos drivers.

Lastly, according to the admin of the source site (which started to be more credible to me since I found out that he had provided many unofficial patches and modified drivers for both nvidia and ati up to windows vista), the whole thing sunk due to nvidia eventually changing its policy about physx and introducing the driver vendor lock in addition to amd's unchanging stance of apathy about the whole hardware physics deal. So I guess there is room to blame nvidia at the very end here but it's not really like there was any guaranty he could have pulled the thing off anyway.
If anything he might just be a lone dev who got a healthy dose of publicity by finding out just how hard it was to port physx to ati hardware the hard way and then milked some traffic off of the noise his initial enthusiasm made by posting updates while knowing that it was really a dead end (note that I don't have proof of that; it's just my speculation).

The only thing I never saw mentioned anywhere in this case was your claim that "NV rejected ATI when THEY said they will do it" and even if it were true, how that prove that nvidia were behind it.
 

Keysplayr

Elite Member
Jan 16, 2003
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@ taserbro, very astute observations on that whole situation, and well said.
I too would like to see any sources stating that "NV rejected ATI when they said THEY would do it. By THEY, I assume T2k meant AMD. In fact, I would very much like to see any public documents stating that NV rejected ATI at all, prior to the actual, eventually imposed PhysX block.
 

Idontcare

Elite Member
Oct 10, 1999
21,110
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I think its quite funny how so many people are getting riled up over the most evil company for their questionable antic, when really, neither is a patch on the US govt and what it gets up to in the name of the American people.
AFAIC, either company can do as it likes with its intellectual property. Hundreds of software house make unilateral decisions and changes to their software with upgrades as even as the consumer buys it, the software house still own the product. On this note, I have no problem with PhyX and the previous hardware card (Agrea?) and stopping the product from working should ATi be the primary card. Neither with Batman AA as they did the code. ATi\AMD needs to start doing software stuff itself like its great eye-infinity product.
Anyway just IMHO....

Please no politics here, this thread is flammable enough just handling the topic alone. Thanks.

Moderator Idontcare
 

Scali

Banned
Dec 3, 2004
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And thats the point. nVidia wasnt replacing anything or taking blame until a lawsuit was won against them. Thats not taking care of your customer. Plain and simple.

Firstly, I don't agree on the lawsuit thing.
Secondly, people sue quicker than any company can even respond.
Unless that company is AMD. Apparently their customers like them so much, that they never sued over the Athlon or Barcelona bugs. Even though AMD took no action at all.
In other words: nVidia still handled the situation better than AMD did.