It was always embarassing to watch IHV dirty fights, tricks, accusations, lack of respect for competitors etc. Now when ISV joining this politics, the embarassment reaches unprecedenced levels.
>> Valve stated that the development of that special code path took 5 times the development time of the standard DX9 code path.
what’s the point of such announcement? Is this developer conference? Stinks like FUD.
>> Special optimizations for ATI cards were not nescesarry.
because they optimized for ATI from the beginning?
>> Valve was able to heavily increase the performance of the NVIDIA cards with the optimized path
Isn’t it his friggin job to do so? What’s a reason for inventing special “Mixed Mode” label for this? This conference? FUD as hell.
Anyway, it will be interesting to see the shader code when game ships.
>> but Valve warns that such optimizations won’t be possible in future titles, because future shaders will be more complex and will thus need full 32-bit precision.
And what’s a reason of such announcement there, apart from FUD? How on earth does this “warning” relate to Half-life 2 ?
>> 32-bit precision
oops, a typo? He was meaning 24-bit, of course? Some people should be more careful, as this would (if true) dismiss ATI HW for the future games… A careful reader will notice a table on previous page, saying that ATI does not support 32-bit precision, but the FUD effect remains for most people, I guess.
>> Newell strictly dismissed rumors that his comments about the disappointing performance of NVIDIA cards were based on a deal between Valve and ATi
Yes, I believe in your honesty fully. The whole conference was related purely to HL2. And the conference would be still be held even if there was no deal with ATI at all. In PR we trust.
Valve “warns”, Valve whines about “5 times development time”, it is all bent in one obvious direction. Have we ever experienced such attitude towards any hardware vendor from John Carmack? You can take him as reference point to judge Valve’s impartiality.
I’m truly disgusted. Valve, stick your FUD in your arse.