Anand Tours ATI and NVIDIA

logicalstack writes "The folks over at AnandTech have written an expose on their visits to both ATI and NVIDIA. Interestingly enough ATI's facility shrouded in secrecy and NVIDIA's is quite open, Including full color pictures of their server farm, and a pic of the NV30 test machine the 'Ikos.' The CEO even showed off the old school NV1 with 1MB of ram!"

Re:NVIDIA open?

[jmu1]

Hear hear! I refuse to use Nvidia based on that fact. I have an ATI Radeon 7200. It may not be as fast, nor may it be quite as good, but at least I'm not putting proprietary software on my machine when there is an alternative.

Re:Here's the real link

[Night0wl]

I was wondering where it was my self.
It's like the damn submitter thought we would know where to find it at anand tech, and what's this "the folks" Why is it I imagine a bunch of geeks all wearing heard hats of one color with nvidia or ati's logo on it, Being lead around by an older fellow with a diferent color hardhat.
Right, a tour group, It was probably just one guy who payed the guard 20$ and a bottle of jack to be let in after hours....

I like Hard|OCP's tour of gainward. They manufacture there video cards two to a PCB and cut them down the middle. That would be cool to build two systems which where connected by the unsevered agp card.
Like some freak siamese twin, "And here is Tommy and Timmy, identical twins sharing the same GPU'

Nice racks

[PygmyTrojan]

I wonder how many people are looking at those pictures like the would a playboy centerfold?

overclock IKOS!

[l33t-gu3lph1t3]

I wanna see some intrepid person use LN2 and overclock an IKOS NV30!

Re:No wonder Nvidia is largely considered better!

[Profane Motherfucker]

Exactly. I was quite fucking floored after the claim that ATI was 'shrouded in secrecy." They let a bunch of fucking people tour their facility. How the FUCK is this shit fucking shrouded?! Sounds pretty fucking open to me. Sounds like the fucking opposite of shrouded.

The picture thing I can understand. Maybe the intern has some saucy shit up on the screen and didn't read the motherfucking memo close enough to note that some fucking strangers were walking around the place ready to snap a billion digi cam photos.

Fucking christ on a moped: who give a fuck what the nVidia server farm looks like? I don't recall buying a video card based upon the size and configuration of some fucking SERVERS.

Binary only my ass

[fatwreckfan]

Do you look before you post?

Nvidia's driver page [nvidia.com] clearly has source tarballs for the GLX and kernel drivers.

Other crap ATI has done

[SethJohnson]

Since we're somewhat examining the corporate culture of ATI here, I'd like to relate an interaction I had with the graphics company at QuakeCon this year.

ATI was a major sponsor of QuakeCon. They put up prize money for many of the competitions. On the last night of QuakeCon, there was a party in a banquet hall where a band played and the Mr. Sinus Theater 3000 [mrsinus.com] guys performed some outstanding comedy. There was a pretty hefty line for beer. I was about 15 people deep in this line. A weasel employed by ATI (I know because I asked him afterwards if he worked for ATI) walked right past the line and asked the bartender for two beers. The bartender resisted and remarked that there were a lot of other people in front of him in line. He then said he was with ATI, a sponsor of the event. The bartender sold him the two beers. While in truth ATI actually hadn't sponsored the party is not of consequence. The real crime here is the lack of respect shown for potential customers of ATI. This was where ATI needed to seriously kiss some ass to gain respect & sales from a market dominated by Nvidia. What do they do? Cut in the beer line while wearing ATI polo shirts. I told that guy he was rudely representing his company and that I would take every opportunity to post critical rants against ATI on the interweb because of his behavior.

Don't cut in the beer line.

Seth

Re:NVIDIA open?

[Yohahn]

Define up-to-date?
Do you mean, same gameplay, more realistic graphics?

Please, (and I really mean this) Gaming industry, give us some kind of new game. It's just the same crap over and over and over. Like TV Sitcom's the games produced these days are stuck in a rut.