I have an impression that Tom's not fair anymore. Why does he stalk ATi, especially in the last two previous graphic card reviews? He's supposed to be a critic, not a PR guy for nVidia. nVidia being honest? oh, please....
Tom, no matter what you say, HL2 is a BIG thing and ATi is going to win this time. You could say that it's only a game, but remember the good old days when wing commander II (literally) forced people to buy 386DX with HD?
Note: don't get me wrong. I use nVidia cards (I have been using them for 5 years), but I am gonna buy 9800P for HL2. Benchmarks mean nothing when it's obvious ATi cards are way better for HL2.
Why shouldnt he mention ATI cheating ? It's ok to say nVidia cheats but not ATI ? It's the point of such reviews, nVidia did great efforts to deliver acceptable performances and IQ, it's true and he's right to say it.
And yes, HL2 will probably be better on ATI cards, but who cares at the moment as no one had a real version to test ?
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The thing is, it took him 6 months for him to report on ANY nvidia cheats, even when it wasn't confirmed to be a cheat yet. But it took him only 6 hours to report on uncomfirmed Ati cheats without any explanation
When you read posts on the other forums Tom's is belived to be writing revievs in favour of nvidia
Oh and i got enough of all this cheating issues I'm going to buy this new XGI dual processor card (if the prices are similar to that of ati/nvidia similar models)
And you suppose XGI will turn out completely cheat free?
Remember SiS' wall cheats?
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I think this is due to the fact only a few days before the article, there was a convention with credible people from the development company of the games, that reported potential cheats. Compared to reports on the web, it's not always easy.
As for the cheating after six months, which one are you talking about?
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And when they criticize nVidia they're accused of bias toward ATI. You guys are a bunch of idiots, Tom's doesn't change sides every 2 weeks, they simply report facts.
<font color=blue>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to a hero as big as Crashman!</font color=blue>
<font color=red>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to an ego as large as Crashman's!</font color=red>
And when they criticize nVidia they're accused of bias toward ATI. You guys are a bunch of idiots, Tom's doesn't change sides every 2 weeks, they simply report facts.
<font color=blue>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to a hero as big as Crashman!</font color=blue>
<font color=red>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to an ego as large as Crashman's!</font color=red>
And yeah, reporting facts can easily be seen differently. I'm still waiting to see that 6 months claim explanation.
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Sometimes when you want to reach two people you have to post twice, and the easiest way to do that is copy and paste!
<font color=blue>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to a hero as big as Crashman!</font color=blue>
<font color=red>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to an ego as large as Crashman's!</font color=red>
Funny, I now get what Svol was getting, my light grey body post area has a pixel or two on the border exceeding to the left side. Notice under Resident how it is pushed to the left a bit?
Heheh.
I think I've been here way too long...
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<A HREF="http://www.lochel.com/THGC/album.html" target="_new"><font color=blue><b>This just in, over 56 no-lifers have their pics up on THGC's Photo Album! </b></font color=blue></A> <P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by Eden on 10/26/03 01:39 AM.</EM></FONT></P>
Well not if ATI reacts better than nV to it. There is no indication that it is a cheat. So far it only looks like a bug, and even some of the 'cheats' that Lars found have been debunked. So calling them cheats when they don't use application detection to increase performance or do things SOLELY for the sake of benchmarking is ignorant.
Quote :
nVidia did great efforts to deliver acceptable performances and IQ, it's true and he's right to say it.
Actually nV's PR department made bigger efforts first, and they only changed their ways once the community reacted negatively to those actions.
The main problem is, as some people have pointed out, that these reviews were quick to point out issues that were PROVIDED by nV, yet it took them quite a time to write about issues found by many other independantly, and even the ones ATI was finally forced to comment on didn't get the coverage that these small aonomalies are getting. And to compare these to nV's actions in 3Dmark and UT2K3 is just stoopid.
I'll reserve judgement on these 'cheats' until ATI makes an official statement, or if they are shown to be something more than glitches. I'll wait for a Catalyst driver release that has had a chance to address this, and see if those issues are still there, I think it's too late for them to be in the 3.9 release so whatever's after that (4.0?) will be the litmus test for me. If it does come out that these are cheats then I will be pi$$ed and I'll even write to ATI about it. But until then I'll reserve my judgement.
And BTW, it's not just HL2 it's many new games, look at Max Payne2 as well. The thing is that nV needs to use on the fly recompiling of HLSL to a more nV friendly format to make these new games work well on nV hardware. The run-time compiler needs to be optimized for in the drivers, so until nV users get their next driver release they will get significantly poorer performance than the ATI card do running right out of the box. This may not be the case for 'the way it's meant to be played games' (<A HREF="http://www.nvidia.com/object/game_tombraider_aod.html" target="_new">although TombRaider had it's issues too and it's an 'nV' game</A>, which even the run-time compiler couldn't fix at first [ran best under CG path]), but for anything where nV wasn't involved in the development process expect a wait for full performance, at which time it will rock (and perhaps even better than the comparable ATI products).
The fact that these things aren't prominent in the reviews but the ATI anomalies are is disturbing. nV also STLL has their share of rendering issues, even with the new 52.16 drivers, but they didn't get that much play despite this being ostensibly an FX review. I think Digit-Life covered botht the nV issues (Halo one surprised me a bit, RtoCW is an ongoing one) and the ATI issues (the one that disturbed me the most was the rightmark issue).
I like Lars' new reviews, but I think you need to read more than one review to get good picture of any situation. Pick a review and you could've seen the FX5700 beat and R9700, or an FX5950 lose to the R9600XT.
The more you read the more you 'know' IMO. But then again as Mars university says, 'Knowledge brings Fear'.
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