AMD confirms ATI Purchase

[Yegolev]

I'm running nforce 3 & 4 chipsets on my machines, but I recently put together a couple of socket 939  ATI RS480 chipset boards for other people. They're stable, decent performers. No odd issues in either windows or linux, which makes a nice change from VIA.

Awesome, this is what I was looking for.  Taking the ATi-as-chipset-manufacturer route, the buyout might make sense somehow.  Intel makes both CPU and chipset, and maybe AMD wants to do the same.

[Phred]

AMD will probably get even less use out of ATI tech as Nvidia did out of 3dfx.

I think Nvidia did quite well with the 3dfx tech they bought. Their antialiasing quality went up hugely, and they got sli. Who knows what other things they got that aren't so appearant.

I had a 3dfx 5500 and loved it. When I upgraded to a geforce 4200 the antialiasing sucked donkey balls, especially as I still had the 5500 in my other computer mocking me with the quality of it's rendering. About 6 months later Nvidia added the 2xQ mode which supposedly came from their 3dfx tech and their antialiasing looked a hell of a lot better. Next card I upgraded to was a 9800 pro ati and I have to say, it looked even better than the 4200. If developers tested as rigorously with ATI as they do with Nvidia I dont think ATI would get the bad rap for driver quality.

Now I'm back with another Nvidia 7600 gt and I'm quite happy with it. I'm glad ATI has been around to keep Nvidia honest, as it were.

[Alkiera]

Really, I think the reason ATI has so many issues with games is related to the 'NVidia - The Way It's Meant To Be Played' logo on the front of most of them.  If I'm a game dev, and one of the companies will give me hardware and hand-hold me thru the optimization for their hardware, in exchange for excusivity in that regard and a cheesy start-up video... hey, I win, right?

When was the last time you fired up a game and saw an ATI logo?  For me, I think it was the copy of mechwarrior that shipped with my Rage Pro Turbo(with 8 megs of onboard ram!).  I just don't think they're focusing on getting developers to build toward them, so devs build and test to nVidia, and are then befuddled when the performance tricks nVidia gave them just don't work on ATI cards.  Shocking, really.

With regards to developing OpenGL on ATI... I've done a good bit of GL stuff on several ATI-based machines, never had any issues.  Well, okay, when I ported my code to Solaris for a school project, it ran a bit slower, but I think that's because the graphics card on some of the Solaris boxes sucked(software renderer 4tl)  None of those boxes were really speed demons anyway, whereas my home machine was pretty decent for the time.

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Alkiera

[HaemishM]

When was the last time you fired up a game and saw an ATI logo? 

The Movies (and its subsequent expansion).

[geldonyetich]

As somebody who's been using ATI cards for the past 4 years or so, I can tell you that they're actually pretty decent.  They run games relatively fast and effectively.  So, as much as I may have dumped on ATI's driver support before, they seem to run 98% of the games just as well as an NVIDIA card -- sometimes better!  So, for the most part, ATI hatred coming from NVIDIA card users strikes me as completely irrational.

Yet, it's that remaining 2% of games that causes trouble and causes me to occationally stab at ATI's driver support from hell's heart.  Knights of the Old Republic!  Why couldn't it have been a crappy game that ATI's later drivers run absolutely unplayably?  Why?!  I don't particularly like having to downgrade from Catalyst 6.6 to 4.4 if I ever decided I wanted to play that game.

I will end on one more note that supports ATI: They have to try harder.  Most of the game industry developed their games to support NVIDIA drivers.  ATI more frequently had to develop the drivers specifically to support the games.  While there is some general DirectX compatibility going on, it isn't enough to say that ATI didn't have an uphill battle compared to NVIDIA.

Not sure what AMD is going to do with ATI's tech.  I've read that NVIDIA took 3dfx's tech and got Anti-Aliasing and SLI out of it.  Not really - NVIDIA cards were pulling anti-aliasing before the 3dfx acquisition and would likely have improved at the same rate without.  We didn't see the SLI functionality until several years later and in a completely different implementation.  (3DFX's SLI was a "Scan-Line Interleave" method.  NVIDIA's SLI is a "Scalable Link Interface" method.)  It's not that AMD doesn't know 3D at all -- 3DNow! anyone?  However, like ATI's struggle versus NVIDIA, there's a certain matter of actually getting the developers to write code that uses the hardware properly.

[Koyasha]

When was the last time you fired up a game and saw an ATI logo?

Prey.