AMD v nVidia - nVidia moving away from gaming

[lowdog]

This is ripped from extreme forums regarding the goings on over at Hexus.net forums so check it out and see what you think. I for one agree with Huddy.

At the tail end of last week, AMD's senior manager of developer relations, Richard Huddy, told HEXUS that he believes NVIDIA is "somewhat abandoning the gaming market."

Such a sweeping statement isn't likely to go unnoticed by the green team over in Santa Clara, California, and NVIDIA's senior technical marketing manager of EMEA, Lars Weinand, has responded to AMD's remark in our very own HEXUS.community forums.

nVidia;

Hi,

it's an interresting opinion from Mr. Huddy but it's definately not true that NVIDIA is abandoning the gaming market. What Mr. Huddy describes is what is commonly known as "growth". We are on the route to GPU computing since the introduction of our CUDA architecture with GeForce 8000 series. Our leadership in GPU computing allows us to adress additional markets. GeForce 8800GTX was a very popular and successful gaming card and so are our current generation GPUs. Our next generation solution will follow in that tradion: for games with full DirectX 11, 3DVision and PhysX Support as well as GPU computing with support for OpenCL, Direct Compute, Cuda C, Cuda C++ and more. We also fully support all new technologies, like GPU support for Bullet Physics engine. Bullet is running on CUDA for over a year and is using many open source GPU algorithms from our CUDA and OpenCL SDKs.

Technologies like 3D Vision and PhysX are unique features and technologies made by gamers for gamers and we're not intending to change this. Our Devtech team is working closely with game develeopers all over the world, to ensure best support and compatibility of our GPUs for the latest games. If you're interrested to hear more on how NVIDIA works with game delvelopers, please feel free to watch the latest comments from Tony Tamasi on this topic.
blogs.nvidia.com/nTersect

There is no reason to belive NVIDIA would abandon gamers. People working at NVIDIA are gamers.

Lars Weinand (NVIDIA)


AMD;

Hi Lars,

Nice to hear something positive about DirectX 11 from NVIDIA for once!

Let me respond to those sections in turn.

(1) The positive mention of DX11 is a rarity in recent communications from NVIDIA - except perhaps in their messaging that 'DirectX 11 doesn't matter'. For example I don't remember Jensen or others mentioning tessellation (they biggest of the new hardware features) from the stage at GTC. In fact if reports are to be trusted only one game was shown on stage during the whole conference - hardly what I would call treating gaming as a priority!

(2) The tech of PhysX has still yet to gain any significant traction. I note from the most recent NPD sales figures that "Batman AA" figures at 96th place in the PC charts and yet that seems to be NVIDIA's ' showcase' for PhysX. I suspect gaming physics will be better adopted when as an industry we move away from the divisive proprietary standards that Lars advocates so heavily. [I note that you mentioned CUDA no fewer than five times - more than any other technology that you chose to mention!]

(3) There's every reason to believe that NVIDIA is moving its focus away from gaming. I'll list just a few:

* Not making it a priority at GTC is the obvious one.
* Arguing against the relevance of DX11 is another.
* Arguing, as NVIDIA did, that AMD working with Codemasters to add DX11 to DiRT2 is harming gamers is another.
* NVIDIA's behaviour in locking something as trivial as antialiasing to its own hardware (in Batman Arkham Asylum) shows that NVIDIA cares much more about money then gamers.
* AMD is already working with games developers on over 20 forthcoming games which feature DX11 tech. NVIDIA has been nowhere to be seen! And we're doing that while offering the world's best support for DirectX 9, 10 and 10.1 games too!
* NVIDIA is late to deliver DirectX 11 hardware to market.

If you don't agree with my fourth bullet point above then I'd guess you'd probably argue that AMD should lock DX11 functionality to its own hardware, yes? Something we haven't done!

You talk about your purported "leadership in GPU computing" but today that's simply an empty claim.

Ask yourself these questions:

1. Whose is the world's fastest available gaming GPU?
2. Which is the first and only company selling DirectX 11 GPUs?
3. Which company sells the GPU with the highest compute power?

I think if you look at the facts you'll have to concede that GPU leadership is presently AMD's - because the answer to every one of these questions is simply "AMD".

Richard Huddy [Graphics Developer Relations, AMD]

[Mau1wurf1977]

Catfight :-)

Well from a business point of view (and shareholders) Nvidia is much better off catering for the supercomputing / workstation market...

Heaps more dollars to be made...

But they will still cater for gamers, no doubt.

I reckon the focus on the supercomputing / workstation market is more about keeping shareholders and investors happy...

[Alba]

Damn, nice reply by AMD...lol

Gotta love it when the big boys in the playground go at it.

[Domokun]

Reooow!

[mcrow5]

Originally Posted by Alba

Gotta love it when the big boys in the playground go at it.

yep, its funny watching them fight, but wording it ever so professionally.

and with that dx11 crap, dx10 was never really used, so what makes AMD think that dx11 will be? who knows though.

[flinchy]

Originally Posted by mcrow5

yep, its funny watching them fight, but wording it ever so professionally.

and with that dx11 crap, dx10 was never really used, so what makes AMD think that dx11 will be? who knows though.

just have a look at all the new tech dx11 offers, dx10 was big stuff, but nothing ... big enough?

dx10+11 = big enough to make a move.

[iMomOx3]

Whoa.

Getting serious, next few months or by Q2 next year will be interesting.

Doubt nvidia will ditch gaming GPU's, but definitely won't compare to any AMD Gaming hardwares. nvidia still have the upperhand in making money from office/work use computers etc.

Will be interesting in the next couple of months.

AMD's comeback was superb, I was lifted from my seat by his backups hahaha. I want to see nvidia's reactins to that

[g0bbles]

Lovely seeing them go at it. Hope there are more fireworks!

Also goes to show you can have poor spelling and still make it to be Sr. Technical Marketing Manager at nVidia.

[lawrencep93]

Hmm if nvidia do not come up with a high powered DX11 chip by April next year I am buying ATI.

[Gillyske]

if they don't come up with one by april next year the nvidia will have given up on games all together lol.

[Fortigurn]

Originally Posted by AMD

Ask yourself these questions:

1. Whose is the world's fastest available gaming GPU?
2. Which is the first and only company selling DirectX 11 GPUs?
3. Which company sells the GPU with the highest compute power?

I think if you look at the facts you'll have to concede that GPU leadership is presently AMD's - because the answer to every one of these questions is simply "AMD".

Nothing about sales volume, stock value, market share? Is this guy running a business or having a mudfight?

Disclaimer. I went from a 1950 Pro to a GTX 295 single PCB last week. I moved to nVidia solely because of CUDA and the advantages it provides me in Photoshop. If it weren't for that, I would have bought ATI simply because of their price/performance ratio.

[Domokun]

Originally Posted by Fortigurn

I went from a 1950 Pro to a GTX 295 single PCB last week. I moved to nVidia solely because of CUDA and the advantages it provides me in Photoshop. If it weren't for that, I would have bought ATI simply because of their price/performance ratio.

Well that was silly. I will quote a post I made a while ago regarding this issue:

Originally Posted by Domokun

Adobe Photoshop CS4 (as well as Adobe Premiere CS4) supports hardware acceleration for both ATI and Nvidia cards. As far as Photoshop is concerned, an ATI 4870 worked just as well as a Nvidia GTX 285 (and yes, I have used both).

Nvidia simply has better marketing regarding this. It's as simple as that.

[anlashok]

Growth is right Nvidia need more Pie the, gaming market alone isn't enough and more low end cards are sold than Uber Highend Gaming Cards they are basically a "Who's Number One" thus dragging consumers to their brand regardless of which end of the GPU scale they buy at.

Nvidia have already done the dance with Intel and theres no x86 chip for them, they can make a decent motherboard chipset when they put the effort in. But as we have seen both AMD and Intel bringing all the important stuff on-die where does that leave Nvidia.

Corporate Clients, Big Boy Industry - Quadro yes but they already have their cut there and it doesn't hold the high growth arena Nvidia need.

Supercomputing.....You see what Folding@Home is doing on GPU's....People want power, lots of it to really crunch these are big $$$ contracts and cost/performance count. Nvidia is making sure their cards can run as many different engines as they can so these guys are happy just look at what a few thousand GPU's can do Vs current CPU setups.

Their focus on Gaming isn't as sharp and timed perfect as it could be because of this, if they play a close second for a brief time to grab a bigger slice of Pie that keeps the money rolling in Nvidia are not going to worry. After all ATI is now a bigger AMD/ATI, Nvidia need deeper pockets to keep up, as long as they don't drop the ball entirely, it will be ok.

We all better hope the Green team pulls through, otherwise its a one horse town and we be seening nothing but red.

[Fortigurn]

Originally Posted by Domokun

Well that was silly.

Not at a secondhand price, at least. I wouldn't have bought it new. As it turns out the price ended up the same as a brand new 4870X2, but ASU$300 cheaper than a brand new GTX 295 single PCB (local Taiwanese prices).

I will quote a post I made a while ago regarding this issue:

Is that the whole review, benchmarks and all? Last time I looked at Adobe's list of video cards tested on CS4, they hadn't tested anything higher than a 4850 512 MB.

Nvidia simply has better marketing regarding this. It's as simple as that.

They must have fooled a lot of Adobe users then.

[Nian]

I just particularly like how he mentions the underhanded tactics nvidia are employing to make games run poorly on ati cards.