Nvidia's Chronology of Mistakes

[SPAM]

I am trying to figure out how Nvidia can make not one but a series of bad decisions.You have different departments in the company and they all messed up.
-Hardware development guessed wrong on the market needs and Dx9 hardware requirements.
-You had sales and marketing saying that 3dMark was trying to make their product look bad.
-You had driver development sign back on to the 3dmark beta testing after they said that benchmark utilities were not representative of game performance.
-You have the confession from Nvidia that an over eager engineer in driver development "optimized" the code a little over aggressively on UT2 benchmark.
-Then the promise that Nvidia would not optimize drivers to sacrifice quality for speed.

Now you have Gabe N. saying that Nvidia is optimizing Det. 50"s to sacrifice quality for the sake of speed!

If my review of recent history is roughly accurate what is going on?

 

[Cassius105]

yeh its weird

if they have indeed sacrificed IQ again they have made a big mistake

though in the short term they will lose sales in the long term there reputation will be far less damaged by the bad DX9 performance of the NV3x than it will be by over aggressive driver optimizations

 

[Ganache]

I feel ashamed of owning a NVidia product

 

[SPAM]

Some of the brightest and the best minds work at Nvidia how could they get it so wrong? Wrong on the hardware wrong on the drivers but perhaps most importantly wrong on how they have repsonded to their mistakes. I hope some one over in Nvidia land is brave enough to buck the current trend to blame others and start figuring out how to turn the ship around.

 

[sargeduck]

Hopefully, but I think they're all trying to save face, and incorporate more cheats into their drivers. They took a beating with 3D Mark 2003, got scratched with UT2k3, got punched in the face with Tomb Raider and Halo, and now with Half-Life 2.....It just ain't pretty. They will now focus all their efforts into making themselves look as good as possible in the coming days, but I'm afraid there going to get kicked hard in the sack with steel toed boots.



And to think that all they had to do was say they were sorry back at the 3dmark controversy....

As each day goes by, I hug my 9600Pro just a little tighter.

 

[rain_king_uk]

I think they were just totally wrong-footed by the quality of the new Radeons - they were expecting to be able to continue to take things easy and ramp things up slowly. After all, totally burying your last product line isn't good for business - it would be like Intel suddenly releasing a P4-5000. Bottom line, they didn't think they were going to be faced with such stiff opposition.

 

[SPAM]

And another thing...

John Carmack of Doom 3 says that Nvidia requires lots of propriatory code in Opengl Ati does not. Gabe N. of Half life 2 says that Nvidia needs lots of propiatory code to work decently in DX9 and Ati does not! Why do that?

 

[rain_king_uk]

I guess nVidia were hoping to lock developers into optimizing for their product and neglect other architectures - unfortunately for them ATi cards run standard DX9 code like the wind.

 

[Cassius105]

well like 3dfx they are attempting to get developers to take on there code path over the default to give them an edge on the competition

its backfiring badly by looks of it

just like it did for 3dfx

 

[ufo_warviper]

Nvidia's chronology of mistakes actually starts with the <b><font color=red>GeForce 4 MX</font color=red></b> series of chips. It just gets worse and worse from then on out.

My OS features preemptive multitasking, a fully interactive command line, & support for 640K of RAM!

 

[rain_king_uk]

If you're talking about GLide, then that was actually pretty decent, since the DirectX API was like a dog's dinner back then

<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by RAIN_KING_UK on 09/11/03 10:27 PM.</EM></FONT></P>

 

[Cassius105]

yeh it was decent

but even so going down the restricted API route was still a bad idea

 

[eden]

Man GLide rocked. All games on it were SMOOTH AS HECK.

And awesome looking too! That was for once a real API that provided serious performance with excellent graphics.

--
<A HREF="http://www.lochel.com/THGC/album.html" target="_new"><font color=blue><b>Are you ugly and looking into showing your mug? Then the THGC Album is the right place for you!</b></font color=blue></A>

 

[Ganache]

you know what glide was ?

GLIDE... GL-IDE, it was just an interface to run OpenGl on 3DFx cards using custom optimized code.

 

[SPAM]

So, (this is my imagination running wild)

Some guy in a suit in a Nvidia board room says

"We can leverage our sixty percent market share by maximizing the influence of our hardware design through unique code requirements and shift the whole graphics industry to our own software/hardware paradigm."

What about the game developers? How will they react?

"If they want to sell their games they are going to have to design them on our cards in order to make them playable on our cards. This will make it even more difficult for the competition because the game companies are going to design for us first. When you have sixty percent of the market you can control the direction the market takes.

What about Microsoft how are you going to get them to write DX code for our card?

"Market realities will influence Microsoft, if most people are playing on our hardware then they will have to design for compatibility with our standards."

What about the consumers?

"IF the game designers are on side, if Microsoft is on side then the gamers will follow. We will deliver the goods, we can trade on our previous reputation and reliability to make a compelling case for them to continue brand loyalty."

What about our graphic card competitors?

"Oh them, they are the least of our worries, sure they may cry foul when code is optimized for our hardware but then is that any different from previous years? It's not as if they can design hardware to challenge our market dominance!

All those in favor of the Proposal say Aye!

 

[eden]

Um, wasn't 3dFX's API called Glide?!

Anyways, I wrote it on purpose GLide as you did, but then I did start asking meself why did I, it must not be the Glide of 3DFX's API.

--
<A HREF="http://www.lochel.com/THGC/album.html" target="_new"><font color=blue><b>Are you ugly and looking into showing your mug? Then the THGC Album is the right place for you!</b></font color=blue></A>