Quote Originally Posted by Manicdan View Post
people are getting mad cause a hardware company is offering time and money to help games get smooth results. whats so bad?
No, people is getting annoyed because of detected sabotage.

I find logical that NVIDIA invests money to help developers to optimize their code, and I find logical that NVIDIA don't invest a single minute in optimizations for the competitors. That's all good. Sabotaging it's not.

If hardware companies are allowed to pay money to software developers to damage their performance (or features) that should work perfectly on competitor's hardware, we will end up with "games for NVIDIA cards" and "games for ATi cards", like if it were "games for XBox 360" and "games for PS3".

That's no good.

disabling the AA ingame was done since they cannot verify with ATI that it will not cause any issues (this is my interpretation of if, since i do not know if anyone who help build B:AA could have done this by simply putting it on an ATI rig and testing onsite)
That would be a very, very bad excuse that any game developer would refute in a heartbeat. I, as a hobbyist game programmer myself, can assure that there's no need to contact with any hardware maker to verify if some code works on their hardware. That's the exact reason why intermediate APIs such as Direct3D, OpenGL, or the high level shader languages of both exist.

Yes, it can happen that some code that should work on certain hardware, doesn't because bugs on either side (your code, their hardware). Then, disabling that code would be a shoddy but quick (sometimes deadlines are like prisons) solution, at least in a provisional way.

But disabling it just in case? That makes me laugh. And why they don't disable the rest of the shaders too? You know, that AA filtering has been proven to work well with ATi hw making use of some tricks (including the crack to pass the Securerom in the game, of course)...