On Wed, Jun 29, 2005 at 12:12:06PM -0700, Allen C Brown wrote: > >>I believe ATI released their specs. NVidia didn't. It has > >>little to do with how good the proprietary driver is. > > > >They stopped doing so, however. > > Are you saying that ATI no longer releases specs to their video > chips?
That is correct. With the release of ATI binary drivers came the refusal to document any of the internals of any new ATI card. Those who swore that NV was evil and they only supported friendly vendors like ATI (whose hardware offerings were at that time totally inferior) suddenly had no idealistically pure 3D cards to choose from above about the Radeon 9000. NV's GeForceFX line was kinda underpowered, but they came back strong with the 6000's. They've had better drivers all along. John Carmack has long considered NV drivers to be his gold standard. He's also considered their rendering hardware to be likewise, in terms of features. (Let's not discuss the limitations of ATI graphics hardware here--the whole per-texel versus per-texture mipmap issue is hard to explain without pictures that don't fit easily into a mailing list. Likewise, everyone already knows about the Q3A benchmark hack, where ATI figured out if you were running Q3A and lowered its quality for the game just to claim higher FPS numbers with inferior hardware.. Or that they included a driver-level wall-hack cheat until competitive gamers screamed "WTF ARE YOU DOING!?!") _______________________________________________ EUGLUG mailing list [email protected] http://www.euglug.org/mailman/listinfo/euglug
