Anand Tours ATI and NVIDIA 220
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!"
IKOS is a company that makes gate arrays (Score:3, Interesting)
When I was there a few years ago, they would sometimes hijack all the desktops in the company for more power. If I remember correctly, they would boot them into linux at night and make (slashdot cliche imminent!) a beowulf cluster!
-Greg Daly, formerly of riva extreme, aka
Re:No wonder Nvidia is largely considered better! (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:No wonder Nvidia is largely considered better! (Score:4, Interesting)
Next we come to nVidia, I repeatedly came up against a brick wall, the case was the same for other developers, with David Kirk doing a fine politician-style non-answering of questions after his presentation. You generally got the impression that there were a select few that may be lucky enough to be given certain information, but it was very much on nVidia's terms.
Fair enough, companies have secrets which they need to keep, but from my experiences with the companies, ATI are far far more open. If anything this article backs that up. Would you prefer a bundle of photos or a chance to talk with a variety of the actual engineers?
Agree, agree, agree! (Score:1, Interesting)
But then along comes NVIDIA...I bought a GeForce4 Ti and was shocked and pleased to find FULLY FUNCTIONAL DRIVERS that actually WORKED, right off the NVIDIA site. Being a Woody user I was even more surprised to find that the NVIDIA Linux drivers worked with the ancient version of XFree shipped with Woody. No mucking with CVS snapshots, no rebuilding the XF86 source...just install and go.
It has been a long, long time since I've had working OpenGL on my system. I've NEVER had STABLE OpenGL on a Linux box until now. NVIDIA's drivers kick ass. Commercial support? HELL YAH! I could care LESS if they are binary-only drivers. In fact, having modprobe whine and tell me I'll be "tainting" my kernel by loading the Nvidia driver is downright INSULTING.
UT2k3 runs like a dream! I can use the GL modes of Xscreensaver! I can play Egoboo, BZFLAG, GLTron and crack-attack again! (Actually, Egoboo clocks in at over 200fps so it is too FAST to play
Re:NVIDIA open? (Score:3, Interesting)
Remember how the $600 Quadro2 hardware was exactly the same as a $200 GeForce2, except for a tiny little resistor? I'm sure there are a few places in the NVIDIA driver like:
if(user_paid_for_quadro()) {
make_antialiasing_fast();
enable_overlay_planes();
} else {
make_antialiasing_slow();
disable_overlay_planes();
}
So naturally a few days after they release the driver souce, somebody would provide a "magic" version of the driver that makes all of NVIDIA's low-end cards perform just like their high-end cards. Then they wouldn't be able to charge $600 for "pro" video cards anymore...