In an interesting twist on the
AMD vs
NVIDIA saga, there is a very public discussion ongoing over at the
HEXUS.community forums between
AMD and
NVIDIA representatives.
Richard Huddy Worldwide Developer Relations Manager,
AMD's GPU Division, recently told
HEXUS it looks to him as if
NVIDIA is
"somewhat abandoning the gaming market" and that
"it appears NVIDIA is in a kind of sneering mode towards game players at the moment".
Richard Huddy was speaking to
HEXUS about the
NVIDIA GPU Technology Conference, which focused mainly on supercomputing and GPGPU computing for academic purposes, and the complete reversal from the previous
NVISION event, which was focused towards gamers.
It should be noted that the
NVISION event only started a year previously. Jen-Hsun Huang, the CEO and co-founder of
NVIDIA has reported that
it should return in 2010 in a recent interview.
However the comments by Richard Huddy did manage to provoke an interesting string of public responses between himself and Lars Weinand, Senior Technical Marketing Manager,
NVIDIA EMEA. We'll quote these verbatim so they are not taken out of context.
Hi,
it's an interresting opinion from Mr. Huddy but it's definately not true that NVIDIA is abandoning the gaming market. What Mr. Huddy describes is what is commonly known as "growth". We are on the route to GPU computing since the introduction of our CUDA architecture with GeForce 8000 series. Our leadership in GPU computing allows us to adress additional markets. GeForce 8800GTX was a very popular and successful gaming card and so are our current generation GPUs. Our next generation solution will follow in that tradion: for games with full DirectX 11, 3DVision and PhysX Support as well as GPU computing with support for OpenCL, Direct Compute, Cuda C, Cuda C++ and more. We also fully support all new technologies, like GPU support for Bullet Physics engine. Bullet is running on CUDA for over a year and is using many open source GPU algorithms from our CUDA and OpenCL SDKs.
Technologies like 3D Vision and PhysX are unique features and technologies made by gamers for gamers and we're not intending to change this. Our Devtech team is working closely with game develeopers all over the world, to ensure best support and compatibility of our GPUs for the latest games. If you're interrested to hear more on how NVIDIA works with game delvelopers, please feel free to watch the latest comments from Tony Tamasi on this topic.
blogs.nvidia.com/nTersect
There is no reason to belive NVIDIA would abandon gamers. People working at NVIDIA are gamers.
Source: Lars Weinand Snr Technical Marketing Manager, NVIDIA EMEAHi Lars,
Nice to hear something positive about DirectX 11 from NVIDIA for once!
Let me respond to those sections in turn.
(1) The positive mention of DX11 is a rarity in recent communications from NVIDIA - except perhaps in their messaging that 'DirectX 11 doesn't matter'. For example I don't remember Jensen or others mentioning tessellation (they biggest of the new hardware features) from the stage at GTC. In fact if reports are to be trusted only one game was shown on stage during the whole conference - hardly what I would call treating gaming as a priority!
(2) The tech of PhysX has still yet to gain any significant traction. I note from the most recent NPD sales figures that "Batman AA" figures at 96th place in the PC charts and yet that seems to be NVIDIA's ' showcase' for PhysX. I suspect gaming physics will be better adopted when as an industry we move away from the divisive proprietary standards that Lars advocates so heavily. [I note that you mentioned CUDA no fewer than five times - more than any other technology that you chose to mention!]
(3) There's every reason to believe that NVIDIA is moving its focus away from gaming. I'll list just a few:
- Not making it a priority at GTC is the obvious one.
- Arguing against the relevance of DX11 is another.
- Arguing, as NVIDIA did, that AMD working with Codemasters to add DX11 to DiRT2 is harming gamers is another.
- NVIDIA's behaviour in locking something as trivial as antialiasing to its own hardware (in Batman Arkham Asylum) shows that NVIDIA cares much more about money then gamers.
- AMD is already working with games developers on over 20 forthcoming games which feature DX11 tech. NVIDIA has been nowhere to be seen! And we're doing that while offering the world's best support for DirectX 9, 10 and 10.1 games too!
- NVIDIA is late to deliver DirectX 11 hardware to market.
If you don't agree with my fourth bullet point above then I'd guess you'd probably argue that AMD should lock DX11 functionality to its own hardware, yes? Something we haven't done!
You talk about your purported "leadership in GPU computing" but today that's simply an empty claim.
Ask yourself these questions:
1. Whose is the world's fastest available gaming GPU?
2. Which is the first and only company selling DirectX 11 GPUs?
3. Which company sells the GPU with the highest compute power?
I think if you look at the facts you'll have to concede that GPU leadership is presently AMD's - because the answer to every one of these questions is simply "AMD".
Source: Richard Huddy Worldwide Developer Relations Manager, AMD's GPU DivisionAs some of you may be aware, there have been issues reported from various sites involved in benchmarking new hardware, of the amount of trouble enabling Multisampling Anti-Aliasing in the
Eidos title,
Batman: Arkham Asylum, a game sponsored by
NVIDIA under the
TWIMTBP program.
NVIDIA was reported to have locked in-game enabling of Anti-Aliasing to
NVIDIA hardware, leaving
ATI users to use the brute force option of using Catalyst to enable Anti-Aliasing. While Anti-Aliasing still works, it involves a lot of extra work for
ATI hardware, skewing benchmark results in favour of
NVIDIA hardware.
Lars Weinand and Richard Huddy went on to have a very public discussion on this very subject.
[...]Batman AA is not our property. It is owned by Eidos. It is up to Eidos to decide the fate of a feature that AMD refused to contribute too and QA for their customers, not NVIDIA.
If it is relatively trivial, Mr. Huddy should have done it himself. The Unreal engine does not support in game AA, so we added it and QAed it for our customers. As Eidos confirmed (Not allowed to post links here, but check PCper for Eidos' statement) AMD refused the same opportunity to support gamers with AA on AMD GPUs. I'm sure Mr. Huddy knows how important QA is for game developers. I recommend AMD starts working with developers to make their HW work in a proper way. That's not our job. We added functionality for NVIDIA GPUs into the game. We did not lock anything out. AMD just did not do their work. This happened with previous UE3 engine titles before, where ATI owners had to rename the executable to make AA work on that title (Bioshock in example). It’s not NVIDIA to blame here.[...]
Source: Lars Weinand Snr Technical Marketing Manager, NVIDIA EMEALars,
Many of the points you've come back with have been well dealt with by other people here, but there is one snippet that deserves a swift response from me.
[...]
I’m surprised and pleased by authorised NVIDIA spokesperson Lars Weinand’s clarification that “Batman AA is not our property. It is owned by Eidos. It is up to Eidos to decide the fate of a feature that AMD refused to contribute too and QA for their customers, not NVIDIA.”
AMD received an email dated Sept 29th at 5:22pm from Mr. Lee Singleton General Manager at Eidos Game Studios who stated that Eidos’ legal department is preventing Eidos from allowing ATI cards to run in-game antialiasing in Batman Arkham Asylum due to NVIDIA IP ownership issues over the antialiasing code, and that they are not permitted to remove the vendor ID filter.
NVIDIA has done the right thing in bowing to public pressure to renounce anti-competitive sponsorship practices and given Eidos a clear mandate to remove the vendor ID detect code that is unfairly preventing many of Eidos’ customers from using in-game AA, as per Mr. Weinand’s comments. I would encourage Mr. Singleton at Eidos to move quickly and decisively to remove NVIDIA’s vendor ID detection.
It’s also worth noting here that AMD have made efforts both pre-release and post-release to allow Eidos to enable the in-game antialiasing code - there was no refusal on AMD’s part to enable in game AA IP in a timely manner.
I trust that you will also confirm that no similar activity will take place on any other games?
Richard Huddy, Worldwide Developer Relations Manager, AMD's GPU Division
Source: Richard Huddy Worldwide Developer Relations Manager, AMD's GPU Division took the chance to confirm what was being claimed by Richard Huddy was in fact accurate, and kindly posted an
exchange of emails between AMD and Eidos over the issue of being locked out of in game Anti-aliasing.
While it is nothing new to see
AMD and
NVIDIA go head to head in public, it currently seems like
NVIDIA has walked away from this round with a bloody nose. We would like to hear your views on the
NVIDIA practice of locking a
DirectX API feature to it's own hardware.
For more information and to read the full content of discussions;
Keep yourself updated on the latest Hardware and Technology news here at;
Gamereplays.org.
