AMD exec says NVIDIA neglecting gamers

[Apoptosis]

Saw this over at Hexus and thought it was an interesting read...

Lars,

Many of the points you've come back with have been well dealt with by other people here, but there is one snippet that deserves a swift response from me.

Originally Posted by Lars Weinand View Post

Batman AA is not our property. It is owned by Eidos. It is up to Eidos to decide the fate of a feature that AMD refused to contribute too and QA for their customers, not NVIDIA.

If it is relatively trivial, Mr. Huddy should have done it himself. The Unreal engine does not support in game AA, so we added it and QAed it for our customers. As Eidos confirmed (Not allowed to post links here, but check PCper for Eidos' statement) AMD refused the same opportunity to support gamers with AA on AMD GPUs. I'm sure Mr. Huddy knows how important QA is for game developers. I recommend AMD starts working with developers to make their HW work in a proper way. That's not our job. We added functionality for NVIDIA GPUs into the game. We did not lock anything out. AMD just did not do their work. This happened with previous UE3 engine titles before, where ATI owners had to rename the executable to make AA work on that title (Bioshock in example). It’s not NVIDIA to blame here.

...

Lars Weinand, NVIDIA

I’m surprised and pleased by authorised NVIDIA spokesperson Lars Weinand’s clarification that “Batman AA is not our property. It is owned by Eidos. It is up to Eidos to decide the fate of a feature that AMD refused to contribute too and QA for their customers, not NVIDIA.”

AMD received an email dated Sept 29th at 5:22pm from Mr. Lee Singleton General Manager at Eidos Game Studios who stated that Eidos’ legal department is preventing Eidos from allowing ATI cards to run in-game antialiasing in Batman Arkham Asylum due to NVIDIA IP ownership issues over the antialiasing code, and that they are not permitted to remove the vendor ID filter.

NVIDIA has done the right thing in bowing to public pressure to renounce anti-competitive sponsorship practices and given Eidos a clear mandate to remove the vendor ID detect code that is unfairly preventing many of Eidos’ customers from using in-game AA, as per Mr. Weinand’s comments. I would encourage Mr. Singleton at Eidos to move quickly and decisively to remove NVIDIA’s vendor ID detection.

It’s also worth noting here that AMD have made efforts both pre-release and post-release to allow Eidos to enable the in-game antialiasing code - there was no refusal on AMD’s part to enable in game AA IP in a timely manner.

I trust that you will also confirm that no similar activity will take place on any other games?


Richard Huddy, Worldwide Developer Relations Manager, AMD's GPU Division

[skier]

TWIMTBP first and now this? nvidia is digging their grave in the eyes of the gamer because of their legal department

i sure hope to never hear about anything like this again

[Merlin]

So is ATI now beating Nvidia in GPU performance? Why else would they want to insure,throught the legal department , that their cards are in use.

[ckthecerealkiller]

So is ATI now beating Nvidia in GPU performance? Why else would they want to insure,throught the legal department , that their cards are in use.

As much as I don't like to admit it, I wouldn't say that ATI is "beating" Nvidia in the GPU market. They are certainly on the right track to take a good lead though.
ATI still needs to step up it's driver support. While Nvidia needs to seriously lower it's failure rates.

Anyway, this sort of corporate sponsorship echoes through every market.... This has become the norm and no matter how little consumer sense this makes, it isn't going to stop anytime soon.

[skier]

i'd have to agree that ATI is better than Nvidia at the moment(agree with Merlin that is ) i mean, they were one step ahead with release date, working units, better performance across the board, DX11 and Hardware tesselation; what does nvidia have? an unreleased board that has not been proven to work still, and is likely on track to be released in H2 '10 AND may or may not out-perform ATI offerings, likely not