The Political Factor
What does politics have to do with video cards? A lot actually. You can thank Nvidia for that.
Nvidia has this “terrific” program called “The Way Its Meant To Be Played” or TWIMTBP for short. They have a dedicated lab in Russia where testers tweak drivers and at times influence game developers to get the maximum performance out of their video cards. Is this fair? Depends if you are a fan boy or have a more neutral view.
If a company has enough money and resources to flout around does it have the right to do this? I would say Yes and No.
If all Nvidia was doing was to tweak their drivers then there is nothing wrong with that. But they started influencing game developers to alter their code, take out elements that favor their competition; that is unfair.
I’ll give you a couple of very recent and old examples where games are manipulated to an extent that either the game had poor performance on any card but their own or had features that were deliberately altered so that they are available only on their cards.
Tomb Raider –Angel of Darkness
The game was released eons ago. Thankfully the game was not very good and thus it escaped the chagrin developers might have faced. This was a “TWIMTBP” game but it ran badly on Nvidia’s hardware. Looks bad doesn’t it? The game had a built in benchmark utility which clearly showed how “bad” was bad. The developers (the now defunct Core design) released a patch that quietly took out the benchmark feature. Had the game been actually any good, Nvidia might have lost a lot more than a few frames per second!
Splinter Cell –Chaos Theory
Another TWIMTBP game. This one was released at the time Shader Model (SM) 3.0 was the talk to town. Nvidia was there first with its Geforce “6” series. Nothing wrong so far… The problem was that if the game’s engine did not detect a SM 3.0 compliant card, it would fall back to SM 1.1 renderer. Those who had the “pleasure” of playing this game in its original form on ATi’s (now AMD, but I’ll call them ATi) hardware will remember the banding on the walls. I was also one of those lucky ones.
The game did eventually get a SM 2.0 rendering pathway via a patch, which came out months later. By that time Nvidia had gained all it wanted to.
Assassin’s Creed
No point mentioning TWIMTBP. This was one of the few games that actually took advantage of DirectX (DX) 10.1’s extra features (over DirectX 10). This made the game run faster on ATi’s hardware, which were DX 10.1 compliant. The developers released a patch which took this pathway out saying it was not rendering the scene correctly. Several techzines did a scene by scene comparison and figured nothing was wrong with the DX 10.1 rendering technique. Except for the fact it made Nvidia look bad.
Batman Arkham Asylum
The only way to get Anti-aliasing to run on this game “officially” is if you have a Nvidia card. Nvidia said it actually spent time making sure the game supported this feature on its card and that ATi should have spent some resources as well. How quickly they forget that this game as a nice “TWIMTBP” logo on it. Yes it is possible to activate phys-x effects on ATi cards. But to do that you'll have to fiddle with the system. And they will not be accelerated. (Most do not need acceleration any ways though)
The “Politics” simply do not end here. Nvidia has two more “aces” up its sleeve.
Graphics Processing Unit Physics (GPU-Physics, Phys-X)
Once there was this company called Ageia. It came up with a dedicated Phys-X card. It was supposed to do wondrous things for gaming physics. That company was acquired by Nvidia, which converted the physics middle-ware called “phys-X” so that it would run off its line of graphics cards. Thus the moniker GPU Physics.
Now in game physics middle-ware is nothing new. Havok is fairly well known and is probably the most commonly used engine out there. Havok runs off the Central Processing Unit (little wonder the company was acquired by Intel). It is platform independent. Performance depends on the power of the CPU. Havok-Fx was an extension that allowed accelerated physics. However since Intel's acquring of Havok, this project is pretty much up in the air. ATi at times has demonstrated Havok GPU accelaration. As ATi is now promoting an open physics engine, this (Havok GPU acceleration by ATi) is going to be limited to tech demos of the past.
In game physics is a moot point. John Carmack, the brains behind Doom, Quake and recently rage is not a fan of dedicated physics. There are other developers (and publishers) who, if “coaxed” enough would gladly sing praises for Phys-X.
Take Batman Arkham Asylum as an example. It has some lovely phys-X accelerated effects. However if you read around, you’ll get to know that most of these effects could have been done using a general purpose physics engine. Reason? TWIMTBP!
Phys-X has not caught on, but if Nvidia keeps up these tactics, it just might be the next “big” thing.
OTOH, ATi is not sitting idle either, it has its own idea about an open physics engine. As ATi and Nvidia are the only major players (YET) in discrete GPU, it depends on who can convince more developers. ATi’s “Get in The Game” (GiTG) program is fairly weak (how many games can you name with this logo?). Nvidia’s isn’t. Enough said?
Worse yet, with the latest Nvidia drivers, it (Nvidia) has disabled Phys-X if any ATi card is present in the system. Before this it was possible to do Phys-X by pairing a Nvidia card for Physics and ATi card for graphics rendering. Nvidia is locking onto as much as it can.
Scalable Link Interface (SLI)
For those who use two (or more) discrete graphics card together should already be aware of SLI and Cross fire (X-Fire). These two technologies enable Nvidia and ATi respectively to link up two (or more) discrete GPUs in order to improve gaming performance.
For this you’ll need a motherboard with two physical PCI-e x16 slots. X-Fire is an open standard. Any motherboard manufacturer can openly use this technology.
SLI on other hand is proprietary. Only recently with the advent of the Core series of processor has it become “widely” available. Before this you needed to have a Nvidia chipset based board (less than an ideal solution). Now Nvidia licenses this technology for US$ 30,000 per manufacturer.
Is Nvidia playing dirty? Broadly speaking yes it is. Will it continue to do so? You betcha! Unless ATi can improve its own program OR Nvidia closes its things are not going to change much.
ATi is not in a very good financial position thanks to the white elephant that acquired it (AMD). Had ATi been going alone, it would have been a much healthier company and probably in a better position to counter Nvidia. But as things stand, I do not, at least in the short term see the status quo changing.
After learning all of this, is there any point in getting an ATi solution. Of course! Especially with the latest ATi series.
Yes there are problems, which do not have to do much with ATi. Yes when games come out ATi usually needs to tweak its drivers to get things working as they should (Need for Speed Shift, Red Faction Guerilla, Resident Evil 5 DX10 Pathway). But they can not be beat for price performance. Their latest 5 series are cards amazing. More on this in the next section.
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