Ian McNaughton goes out against The Way it's Meant to be Played

[SE-Lain]

But the thing is & the points which you all seem to over look & not for reasons of comprehension is that the so called Nvidia specific implementation does work on ATI cards but has been deliberately disabled.

The Nvidia specific implementation is guaranteed to work on Nvidia hardware - that's why it's enabled in the game. The fact that it works on ATI hardware is more than likely a convenient bonus, one that could break at any moment with a catalyst driver update.

If ATI can guarantee that the solution remains functional in future drivers, I'm sure the devs will have more confidence in enabling it on ATI hardware.

 

[Calabi]

Finally, a comment from the developers that shows how fair this entire situation has been all along. Nvidia helped the devs create an anti-aliasing solution because there had been no AA solution for Unreal Engine 3. Albeit, they used an Nvidia specific implementation, but that isn't surprising seeing as Nvidia offered to help them with it. Also, an Nvidia specific solution would have been advantageous to the devs because it would have been quicker to implement with Nvidia's superior knowledge of their own hardware.

So, The devs created a vendor specific AA solution with Nvidia's help, perhaps because it isn't possible via D3D due to the way UE3's rendering engine works. They decided not to implement a solution for ATI because that may have also required an ATI specific implementation - and without ATI's assistance, it would have taken too long or been too difficult.

Only now have ATI decided to approach the devs to help them implement an AA solution for their own cards. Is this another sign of their developer relations incompetence?

I'd like to know more about this Nvidia specific AA which appears to circumvent DirectX and yet still appear to work with Ati.

Your right the Developers are incompentent, for being able to develop an entire game on their own and for some reason not being able to implement AA which has been around for ages, and already been used in engines which use the Unreal engine for a long time.

If it was the case, that they had to be helped to implement AA then every developer would scream out for help, and you would have the card manufacturers rushing about trying to help everyone implement whatever new feature there might be.

 

[Final8y]

The Nvidia specific implementation is guaranteed to work on Nvidia hardware - that's why it's enabled in the game. The fact that it works on ATI hardware is more than likely a convenient bonus, one that could break at any moment with a catalyst driver update.

If ATI can guarantee that the solution remains functional in future drivers, I'm sure the devs will have more confidence in enabling it on ATI hardware.

There is no such things as guaranteed to work on everything on the PC because of its open platform nature & the only time features or SW is stopped from working is if it is known not to work.

Many games when installing on vista64 pop up a warning that it has only been tested on windows 32bit & never does it deliberately stop you installing unless it is known not to work which i have yet to come across besides 16bit installers.

So the guaranteed excuse does not cut it.

 

[Greebo]

The Nvidia specific implementation is guaranteed to work on Nvidia hardware - that's why it's enabled in the game. The fact that it works on ATI hardware is more than likely a convenient bonus, one that could break at any moment with a catalyst driver update.

If ATI can guarantee that the solution remains functional in future drivers, I'm sure the devs will have more confidence in enabling it on ATI hardware.

Problem is that both Nvidia and ATI regularly break things like aa with every driver update so there is no guarantee, not even from Nvidia.

 

[Rapido!]

Hmm, why is it Nvidia's fault that AMD has shown such a gormless lack of awareness that it didn't bother to ensure that their users would have an AA option? There's no suggestion that AMD made any effort in this instance, at all.

Their response to this has been an ill-judged play-the-victim ploy predicated on them not having gained an ancillary benefit from Nvidia's investment, which is frankly ridiculous. It's that whole "realistic expectations" thing again; the engine doesn't support AA natively, it takes time and money to make it happen. Nvidia invested both, AMD invested nothing when they could have done so, and are calling sabotage as cover.

Please. Time to get your own house in order and deliver for your users on these things, for once.

 

[Orangey]

There sure are a lot of green sleeper agents popping up all over to damage-control this fiasco.

 

[Bergkamp]

Hmm, why is it Nvidia's fault that AMD has shown such a gormless lack of awareness that it didn't bother to ensure that their users would have an AA option? There's no suggestion that AMD made any effort in this instance, at all.

Their response to this has been an ill-judged play-the-victim ploy predicated on them not having gained an ancillary benefit from Nvidia's investment, which is frankly ridiculous. It's that whole "realistic expectations" thing again; the engine doesn't support AA natively, it takes time and money to make it happen. Nvidia invested both, AMD invested nothing when they could have done so, and are calling sabotage as cover.

Please. Time to get your own house in order and deliver for your users on these things, for once.

Is your post ironic humour or do you actually believe that?

It's a real shame that it's not ironic humour... Don't think I'm picking on you though, 'cos I could have quoted plenty of others flailing around, desperately trying to find a defense for nVidia's shenanigans.

 

[Shocky-FM]

Firstly, there are several console games that have come out on the PC with DX10 added

Yep, there have been a few but there the exception and DX10 adds very little in most of those titles as DX10 is merely an add-on, these are not really DX10 titles. Most ports have no DX10 support and most on the way are won't either.

I got as far as nvidia having DX10 neutered and Assassins Creed, that’s fanboy talk, I'm not interested that crap.

 

[kylew]

Yep, there have been a few but there the exception and DX10 adds very little in most of those titles as DX10 is merely an add-on, these are not really DX10 titles. Most ports have no DX10 support and most on the way are won't either.

I got as far as nvidia having DX10 neutered and Assassins Creed, that’s fanboy talk, I'm not interested that crap.

Why is it fanboy talk? There was no reason to get 10.1 removed. NV didn't have 10.1, so it wouldn't have effected their performance other than making ATi cards faster in it.

 

[Final8y]

Hmm, why is it Nvidia's fault that AMD has shown such a gormless lack of awareness that it didn't bother to ensure that their users would have an AA option? There's no suggestion that AMD made any effort in this instance, at all.

Their response to this has been an ill-judged play-the-victim ploy predicated on them not having gained an ancillary benefit from Nvidia's investment, which is frankly ridiculous. It's that whole "realistic expectations" thing again; the engine doesn't support AA natively, it takes time and money to make it happen. Nvidia invested both, AMD invested nothing when they could have done so, and are calling sabotage as cover.

Please. Time to get your own house in order and deliver for your users on these things, for once.

The answers to your points have already been made many times in this thread already.

 

[Calabi]

He's playing the old troll game.

 

[Andric]

There sure are a lot of green sleeper agents popping up all over to damage-control this fiasco.

yup - pretty bloody obvious about it as well

 

[BubbySoup]

The Unreal Engine 3 doesn't support FSAA, the bottom line is NVidia worked with them to add "vendor-specific AA implementation" and AMD didn't, yes you can trick ATI cards into using this NVidia implementation but it wasn't intended for ATI cards.

If NVidia had been as lazy as AMD then NEITHER vendor would have got AA implementation, AMD wouldn't have even been able to use their "device trick" and benefit from NVidia's work in adding it because it simply wouldn't exist.

That's poor. You make it sound like the developers said, "Hey guys, the engine we're using doesn't support FSAA, come work out your AA specific implementations with us..." and nVidia turned up whilst AMD didn't bother.

It's more a case that AMD would have had the door closed in their face had they shown up at all.

It's all about the $$$ baby.

 

[londonbairn]

I think you will find that NV are in bed with Microsoft

"NVIDIA today announced work with Microsoft to promote NVIDIA Tesla graphics processing units (GPUs) for high performance parallel
computing using the Windows HPC Server 2008 operating system."

I bet you're jealous, you'd rather be in bed with them wouldn't you

 

[AMG]

LOL!!!!

yeah anyone that says that is hiding something

 

[Hairybudda]

I would really like to know specifically which extensions the developers used to implement their FSAA algorithm that didn't have an analogue in an ATi card that could be exposed by DX? I've never really written much in D3D, is it like OpenGL where you can use an extension before the ARB let it into the spec officially?

 

[Amnesia]

ive always favoured nvidia cards in the past.

nvidia 2 gts
nvidia 4400 ti
nvidia 6800 gt
ati 9800 pro
nvidia 7800 gt
nvidia 8800 gts
ati 4850

but this what nvidia has done absolutely stinks.....if ati were to respond in the same way (as others have pointed out) then its us the gamers that get screwed over.

after seeing a demo of batman with physx i was considering buying a nvidia card as i have a 8800 sat doing nothing which i could use for the physx....but im having serious second thoughts now.

 

[Calabi]

I would really like to know specifically which extensions the developers used to implement their FSAA algorithm that didn't have an analogue in an ATi card that could be exposed by DX? I've never really written much in D3D, is it like OpenGL where you can use an extension before the ARB let it into the spec officially?

Thats what I thought they must be using one hell of a hack or finicky round about way of doing it if the way it works for Nvidia doesnt work the same as for Ati. Thats what DirectX is all about an open universal standard by which any card can be made to function as long as it is made to that DirectX standard.

 

[craig3000]

I won't support them atm end of

 

[nib95]

Ok, so basically, if Nvidia help with some tech that can benefit ATI too, they won't share it? But if it's Vice versa, ATI will? Pretty much shows you the ethical/moral value of each company.