Bits Interview: AMD on Game Development and DX11

[popcornuk1983]

Originally Posted by Elton

I do recall however an Anandtech article that interviewed the guy behind the HD4xxx series, and that was an awesome interview as well.

I remember that one. Very detailed but still interesting.

http://bit.ly/4rEqW5

[Horizon]

Good Interview, and

RH: We do, although, games developers tend to see that a CPU is a CPU is a CPU, and they are not willing to invest in a colossal amount of effort in optimising for them.

40 Comments and no one caught that caught that?

[Elton]

Originally Posted by Horizon

Good Interview, and



40 Comments and no one caught that caught that?

I did, but I decided to ignore it.

[Star*Dagger]

This is the best thing I have read in BT, since.... well ever. Less reviews more interviews and hardware focus.

[Nikols]

Excellent article, really enjoyed it.. The frankness of the responses were a joy to read as opposed to 99% of articles written about this generations gpu war on the net. One thing that was a bit annoying was the appearance of the nvidia way it's meant to be played logo advertisement... Tho it's probably part of their advertisement contract that wherever ati are mentioned the logo appears. Just looked sad and only serves to reinforce some of the points in the article, regardless well done!

[Bindibadgi]

Originally Posted by dec

really in-depth interview.
i bet this guy could do stand up tech comedy. nvidia bashing makes me lol.

He does. Richard has previously done "Dating tips for geeks" on many press launches. It's always worth going for a laugh

[Sebbo]

Originally Posted by paisa666

Eyefinity what??... wth??.. was i in a comma or something?

Is this Eyefinity kits something like the succesors of Spider and Dragon sytems?

Great interview Guys

Think Matrox TripleHead2Go, but supported directly on the GPU
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evergre...y_technologies
One of the best demos i've seen of it is with Hawx. Get the monitors on the side angled just right and the immersion is great

ATI was going to be bringing out an "Eyefinity" edition 5870 that would power 6 screens from the single card... i'm still hanging for that one

again, like pretty much everyone else who have commented, i really enjoyed this interview and was left wanting more

[alpaca]

yeah, didn't you ask for a bit-tech discount code?

[Kaldskryke]

I'm kinda cross-posting from another forum, but it's still about this article. Hope that's not a problem.

I love it when Huddy takes jabs at nvidia. Honestly, I definitely agree with his perspective.

However I wonder if AMD would say the same things if it were in a position of market dominance. NVIDIA might be playing dirty, but they have the market share to do that. They can push physx and other less-than-open standards because developers know there will still be enough nvidia hardware to make it worthwhile. If AMD tried to promote an AMD-only-ever feature, I think developers would be a lot more skeptical. So how much of AMD's stance on open standards is "because-we-care" and how much is "because-we-have-no-choice"? AMD is a struggling corporation, afterall. If playing a little dirty would help its bottom line I imagine it probably would.

As for DX11... you could argue that it's an AMD-only feature right now and that developers would be "locking out" nvidia (at least for the next couple months) but keep in mind that code written for DX11 will run on DX10, just without dx11-specific features. This is not nearly as much of an issue as having to write two separate code-paths.

[Krayzie_B.o.n.e.]

WOW this guy is alright with me. For a person to stand up like a man and say "hey we messed up and take blame for that" gets my vote. I guess that's why I buy ATI for myself and my friends. (A few Sli builds as well)

AMD/ ATi seem more in tuned to the needs and wants of Gamers and Developers than greedy shareholders who probably don't even play video games.

Why does an executive at a Microchip company have "Blue Screen" issues? Doesn't sound right, like doctors getting sick.

I have only blue screened twice and both times it was definitely caused by me re-engineering Windows.

Anyway Can't wait for bulldozer, HD 6870 sounds sweet to me (HD 6890 even sweeter)

[Bindibadgi]

Originally Posted by Kaldskryke

If AMD tried to promote an AMD-only-ever feature, I think developers would be a lot more skeptical. So how much of AMD's stance on open standards is "because-we-care" and how much is "because-we-have-no-choice"? AMD is a struggling corporation, afterall. If playing a little dirty would help its bottom line I imagine it probably would.

[Skiddywinks]

Originally Posted by Horizon

Good Interview, and

40 Comments and no one caught that caught that?

What's to catch? I see the phrase used three times quite often. Hell, I even use it like that sometimes.

[Horizon]

I was re-reading the article and had a curious thought what happened to the 58XX 2GB card with 6 mini-dp outputs? Will this be released before or as a response to Fermi?

Originally Posted by Skiddywinks

What's to catch? I see the phrase used three times quite often. Hell, I even use it like that sometimes.

Just found it odd, and that no one said anything about it. I usually see two instances but not three for emphasis.

[ritaturk]

interesting interview. Enjoyed his perspective, but have to agree with those here that say AMD could use deeper/more detailed messaging (not marketing!!) to convey their basic goodness. For sure Nvidia's TWIMTBP is more slogan and B.S. than marketing, but at least it's better than Intel's knee jerk response to graphics marketing with their Visual Adrenaline program. What is that anyway, a molecular compound will be shot thru thru our eyeballs every time we play on Intel HW??! pleeze... Rock on AMD !

[frontline]

Originally Posted by Horizon

I was re-reading the article and had a curious thought what happened to the 58XX 2GB card with 6 mini-dp outputs? Will this be released before or as a response to Fermi?

Just found it odd, and that no one said anything about it. I usually see two instances but not three for emphasis.

I guess it is related to the 'rule of 3' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_three_(writing)

" The rule of three in comedy also reflects a principle of pattern recognition because a set of three elements has the smallest number of elements that can establish and violate a pattern."

It's quite common to use a similar turn of phrase to emphasise a point (in the UK at least).

Originally Posted by Bindibadgi

I agree that you can't blame the hardware vendors for trying to get an 'edge', what i would question is the developer's decision to go along with anything like this. Potentially alienating a third of your target market doesn't seem like the best way of selling your product?

I would have purchased both Batman Arkham Asylum and Assassins Creed, but for what happened as a result of Nvidia's intervention (and subsequently decisions made by the developer in each case).

Maybe the investment made by Nvidia on these titles justifies the lost sales, i don't know. I've purchased plenty of TWIMTBP titles in the past, but knew that they ran just as well (and bizarrely, sometimes better) on Ati cards. Surely this should be the norm, not the way they acted with Batman AA?

[knownballer]

Great interview. You know, I found it interesting that some very similar things were said about amd's cpu portion in another article a few years back. It took a while to find it but I finally got it. Thank God for google lol.

http://www.tgdaily.com/hardware-opin...ona-back-story

I guess that it's a company trend to develop close relationships with their partners. Hopefully it's not just because of the position Amd is in as a company right now. Keep in mind that Amd has had their fair share of bureaucracy issues. I believe their former CEO Hector Ruiz was hired because he was a marketing leader. Maybe Scottiep was right and marketing led business leads to bad ethics.

Heres another article too
http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news...foundries.aspx

Hmmm. Maybe ati was a better fit after all....

[thehippoz]

you guys asked the right questions

let's hope the batman fiasco doesn't happen again fermi has always had spooge all over it's face imo

[rexfox2010]

Biggest liar I know....

[Rocket_Knight64]

On the same kind of theme, hot digity damn!

http://blogs.battlefield.ea.com/batt...details.aspx##

This sort of thing can only restore faith in the PC as a platform. And the colabortion with both gfx camps too! Oh, and the BF3 hint. lol