Nvidia should be boycotted by XS members. [opinion]
Competition is great, it keeps prices low, makes companies try hard, and stimulates innovation at a fast pace. As competition gets fierce, sometimes companies do things that are not considered "fair" by most people.
One example is intel paying dell not to do business with AMD. While this is not yet 100% proven, one can safely assume intel did things that border on the edge of legal, to keep AMD out of certain market divisions. Something intel will likely have to pay for when investigations in several parts of the world come to a conclusion.
Some companies however go a step further and spend money and energy on -instead of improving their own product- making the competing companies products worse.
What the hell? How can a company make someone else's product worse?
That would be like intel going undercover in AMD's development team, screwing up designs of upcoming processors.
Ridiculous?
This is what nvidia does.
Not going undercover in ati's development team of course, but spending money and energy into making ati's offerings perform worse.
One of the examples that -so far- has been revealed is the rendering issues with the game Tiger Woods Golf.
In this game it is impossible to select a certain high resolution, or to see the water rendered properly, unless you play on nvidia hardware. A hardware issue with ati hardware maybe? Not really. If you trick the game into thinking your ati card is actually an nvidia card, all issues are resolved.
http://www.rage3d.com/board/showthread.php?t=33727194
A more recent example is the Assassins Creed controversy.
First a tech-site (rage3d) finds out that Assassins Creed uses directx 10.1, an api supported by ATI and S3 hardware long before nvidia supported it.
Then after some testing, it appears directx 10.1 improves performance and IQ.
And then Ubisoft suddenly says directx 10.1 support will be removed in the next patch, because the current implementation is flawed. How it is flawed, or why it is wrong is not specified, and according to the tests, the directx 10.1 screenshots show no decrease in IQ, in fact it shows an increase.
http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...=184822&page=9
For now the most logical theory is that nvidia pays Ubisoft to remove directx 10.1 support from the game, just like they paid the tiger woods development team to make the game run better on nvidia hardware.
Some think this theory is far fetched.
Why would nvidia pay any developer to cripple a game on competing hardware?
The first reason is to generate negative publicity about competing hardware.
Those that like to play golf games, do not really care about why the water looks crappy on ati hardware, they just want to play the golf game without hassle, so pick nvidia hardware.
One other reason in regards to the AC issue, is that nvidia has been yelling quite loud that directx 10.1 is merely a minor extension, not attributing much importance to it. A 20% performance improvement for the competition is not only bad for benchmarks, but also for the public image of nvidia, as it makes the company look rather dumb, taking their previous statements about directx 10.1 into account.
http://www.neowin.net/news/main/07/1...ay-directx-101
These theories are always hard to prove, as companies will do everything to twist and turn the facts untill they are not to blame for anything, but to me, based on the information currently available, it is not far-fetched at all to think that nvidia may be playing dirty again.
What is the importance of all this? Why should XSers care about how companies try to compete with eachother?
Because all you tech enthusiast have the choice to support a companies strategy, by buying their products, or not support it, by buying the competitions hardware.
If noone cares about fair play and innovation, we will all end up with one company that becomes so big it can buy other companies into oblivion, using strategies such as used by nvidia and intel, raising prices and stalling innovation.
Originally Posted by naokaji
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