Sadly, he's absolutely right about it.

So, what you say is that this excuses blocking AA on Batman for ATi owners?

Come'on, propietary standarts hurts devs and consumers. If they are so worring why there's no OpenCL port of PhysX? Or any announcement to port PhysX to DX11?

AMD/ATI need to pour some cash as well and stop being such tight asses.

80% lack of developer support from AMD and 20% software abuse from Nvidia.

Sure, i'm agree with that. Al least some things are changing. AMD brings DX10.1, support and their brand to various games (Clear Sky, H.A.W.X., Stormrise, BattleForge). Today AMD/ATi distributes their HD5800 series to a wide variety of devs (for what i heard, over 10.000 VGAs). And they're bringing support to future games like AVP and DiRT2, Tripple A games.

So? Dividing the PC gaming community with proprietary standards is another way to kill the industry too!
Hypocrites.

I personally heard from several game developers that AMD is giving them shitty treatment (support, hardware, personal attention). It is hard to stick to the latest technology and sometimes they need a hand with it. And guess what! Game developers aren’t the only ones to receive such a great treatment from AMD. Software developers even receive even worse treatment.

I remember that a bunch of people have donated money and bought an HD 4800 card for ATI Tray Tools developer (Ray Adams). I emailed AMD about it and asked them to support Ray Adams – they refused. One time I even asked AMD myself for some help with one of my projects and you already know what their reply was.

You remember my PhysX on Radeon project? Guess who fucked.

There are so many TWIMTBP titles simply because Nvidia is providing better treatment to developers. They reply to emails, they answer questions, they provide documents, and they even provide samples. Now you wonder why Batman doesn’t support AA on Radeons? I’ll tell you why... the developer probably received shitty treatment from AMD as well.

Unsurprisingly AMD is even worse with PR. They have a lot of PRs, but only one of them actually does have PR skills (Chris Hook). Except of Chris, everyone else is a lazy bum. In the HD 5800 launch, I emailed their EMEA PRs and asked for photos for the press release article – they failed to provide it. Hell, these lazy bums don’t even bother to reply their emails.

Look, someone needs to pay to those developers to make better PC games. If some game will run 5% better on some card or the other, who cares?

Regeneration: I think AMD didn't get you support on the PhysX issue because of possible legal troubles with NV.

mkey: One thing thing is 5% faster or slower, other to block filters.

What I do with my software is none of their business. AMD is a public company and they are required to provide basic developer support no matter what.

This has nothing to do with Nvidia not wanting ATI to use AA, This has everything to do with ATI not working with the developers to ensure that a UT3+AA patch was checked in and certified to work with the Batman implementation of AA.

As i said elsewhere

The Devs used Vendor IDs and most likely a min Driver string in a Device List within one of the compiled files to ensure that the AA setting only gets shown on cards who have been verified to have Working AA on the game.

ATI DID NOT work with the Developers to ensure that a DFR+AA work around was inplace, so the Developers never enabled AA to work on ATI cards.

IF ATI gots its game on and came to the table and works with developers, rather then chucking a **** and accusing nvidia of "sabotage" Then one would find that the AA option would be available within the first updates.

ATI KNOWS full well that the UT3 engine does not support AA without driver level work arounds, and is deflecting their Complacency and laziness off on Nvidia as underhanded market tactics.

Now, If anyone does not believe me, they can verify it with the developers of Batman:AA themselves.

This is not the first time, that ATI has dropped the ball when it comes to Developer relations and its not something that happens rarely either.

This is very much why ATI comes to the table late when it comes to support of new titles within their drivers.

For once I have to agree. Nvidia does a lot with developers to get decent games for PC. AMD needs to do the same or stop bitching.

I do have one question that I hope someone can answer very authentically:

First, though, this: I have not liked the marriage of AMD with ATI from the start. I didn't like the sound of it when it was announced and my opinion has not changed over the past 2 years since it took place.

Now, the question: Which entity is actually holding up the cooperation with gaming developers? ATI? or AMD?

IIRC, when ATI was a sole entity, they did work closely with developers. Maybe I'm mistaken, though.

ATI is a subsidiary of AMD.

you can call it what you like, but AMD = ATI and v-v...

Yes, you are correct re: the present status of AMD/ATI. I don't argue with that at all.

But, wasn't ATI active with game developers prior to being bought out by AMD? IF so, then, in my estimation, it's AMD calling the shots and preventing the ATI team from doing what they were doing prior to the merger.

I always felt that the merger would diminish ATI and I believe that's come about.

Let's not make a conspiracy out of this, they are just being goddamn lazy and complacent. They obviously sell enough cards and they just don't give a shit about that one extra effort.

The last dates i can find regarding an ATI program is 2005.

The first hints of a merger came out in summer of 2006. I think it was Forbes that made it known and then only as speculation.

I did find this article dated in June, 2006 on Ars...

http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news...06/amd-ati.ars

I guess what I'm trying to determine is whether or not the ATI team was actually actively working with developers prior to this time. If they were, then it's AMD's influence that has diminished them. But, as a long-time user of ATI cards, it seems to me that ATI was doing so and was quite active in this.

From my own perspective, I'd rather them be working with developers and not spend so much time on drivers every month or at least strike a happy medium somewhere.

I have 2 games i think that have the ATI Programs logo... im pretty sure one of them is Black and white 2.

so..

bottom line..

is ati gonna go into their pockets and start supporting game developers and improve games on the radeons???

I don't think so. Well, maybe if they want to take advantage of this primer dx11 support, but who is going to develop dx11 games?

But..
if ati doesn't do that..
they will lose the game developers support in making good games for radeons...

that wont be good for ati..
and nvidia will win this battle if ati does not invest and work with game developers...

strange thing....

AMD.

Thank you! That is exactly what I thought.

This sounds like a guilt trip to justify underhanded business practices.

To Nvidia: The Way It's Meant to Be Played is to Fully Utilize the Capabilities of End User Hardware without Discrimination.

TWIMTBP = FUTCOEUHWD

Anything else and you are striking a blow to PC gaming yourselves.

And for the record, Without The Way It's Meant to Be Played Nvidia would be dead. In your market, you support the developers who create the products that drive interest in your own products. Without PC game developers you'd have been dead before PC gaming truly started to decline.

Ah... no.

Nvidia hardware is used to make movies ffs, LOTR effects were done on Quadro FX chips.

Their interest in other markets does not provide enough profitability to sustain the company without massive restructuring.

TWIMTBP is an "exclusive" program... Period!

TWIMTBP I gues they don't like directX 10.1 support with 50+ freeloaders on team. How will they do DirectX 11?

Wow 50 people who they can use to help out nvidia cards to 10.1 or 11. Why so little games support the latest tech if there are 50 engineers?

To answer the question:
Hopefully this will prove useful in making this determination:
from here: History of ATI (page 5) from Firing Squad
This really implies that ATI, the powerhouse of Graphics chips makers (one of the very first serious contenders for beating out folks like Matrox and Hercules graphics manufacturers) didn't really make themselves as agile or responsive to the market as it began to shift. IN other words, they failed to capitalize on their position in the same way as the Hercules and Matrox companies that fell before them for the very same reason: Inertia.

That was written in 2001. I haven't seen much change from ATI since then, even up to the point of being announced in 2006 that AMD was going to purchase them.

Now I happen to have been an Intel and AMD employee and I currently have a wife who works at AMD in Quality Reliability (which is a fancy term for Product Development Failure Analysis, plus, it's shorter.) AMD is having trouble in many areas and one of them is the integration of ATIs group with AMD. The biggest problem is that ATI doesn't communicate well even with their boss.

Now communication in AMD is generally piss poor -- at least from my personal experience of 10 years employment and another 9 years as the husband of an employee -- and you add that to the "closed shop" mentality that ATI brings with them and you can see that there's gonna be trouble "right here in River City."

ATI, since the Rage 3d II has had trouble responding to the market with proper driver support, so that should tell you that working with Developers has been a long established non-tradition, so don't blame the bottleneck on AMD, it sits squarely in ATIs lap. That said, AMD didn't buy ATI to improve ATI, it was an acquisition to lead AMD into producing MoBo graphics integrated chipsets and chipset solutions for graphics cards, not producing higher end more competitive graphics cards to compete with NVIDIA. So, the graphics cards production is still more of a mystery to AMD and ATI still doesn't like to talk shop with developers and the marriage of the two companies doesn't really do anything to address that, so that's on both AMD and ATI.

Both AMD and ATI also suffer from being contenders and not defenders. In a marketplace economy that has people pissing all over themselves in fear of losing their jobs, it's no wonder they aren't talking in the first place, but that only compounds the issues of their poor communication skills in the first place.

What both companies really require is a good reaming out of Upper Level Management dead wood and an infusion of more creative and imaginative thinkers and decision makers who can leverage the power and potential of this pair. And I don't mean some not clean behind the ears college grad types who don't know what Business Ethics means, but someone with some experience in the video graphics market who has the skills and savvy to do the job, combined with being something of a pariah of prediction about where the market needs to go. In other words, a very smart contrarian who can work wonders by doing things a bit differently than what the pundits all say is "normal."

NVIDIA needs to reach out more to developers as well. The best thing they can do to seal the fate of companies like ATI is make their standards more open and available so that anyone can develop using either card. You do that and still outperform and partner with game developers and then ATIs death is all ATIs fault.

There was a time when ATI compatibility was considered the mark to reach. Now, it appears the crown has gone to NVIDIA.

The death of computer gaming is much misunderstood. It's not NVIDIAs team of 50 engineers 'working damn hard' that is preventing the demise of PC gaming. It is the resiliance and knowledge of PC gamers continuing to buy PC games to run on a more powerful and flexible platform than any console ever can be that prevents the death of PC gaming.

ATI, NVIDIA and any other PC OEM should show us the respect and love we deserve and work more cooperatively to make standards and work to those standards for the benefit of all; not spend their precious time throwing rocks at each others' glass houses.

What do I know, I've only been gaming on a computer since 1987? I've only had to hear the "death of computer gaming" 7 or 8 times now since then.

I also have only been console gaming since 1977, so what do I know?

I know a lot, firsthand and through research. Maybe I should take over ATIs management? Nah, not worth the trouble.

best regards,
dunniteowl