What recourse do NVidia owners have?

OK, I can't help but feeling angry about the whole DX9 crap with NVidia.
But what does the law say on this issue? You know, if the GeForce FX 5900
were just a LITTLE slower than ATI, I could live with that. I like NVidia,
they are an American technology company, they make good drivers (at least in
the past), and they have helped push gaming forward. But their present
behavior is nothing short of devious, sneaky, and dishonest.

Facts:

1) NVidia knew the DX 9 specification for quite a while, yet they turned out
the GeForce FX cards, which so far.... underpeforming is too kind a word.
It cannot run DX 9 games acceptably. 30 FPS (average, it could fall in many
places) in Half Life 2 on a hotrod system, is simply unacceptable. By no
stretch of the imagination can I see this problem ever being fixed. The FX
cards simply have a broken architecture. Where did those millions of
transistors go? Are they just spinning their wheels in DX9?

2) NVidia worked with Valve presumably for a long time, and they knew the
GeForce FX was going to have problems with it. Yet they kept the industry
in the dark about these problems and hid the fact that the FX is a DX 9
product in marketting spin only.

3) Smaller developers will not be able to make NVidia specific code and hold
down developement time and costs, yet there are now thousands of FX cards
they have to support. Smaller developers are the lifeblood of PC gaming, if
they can't get their foot in the door, PC gaming is doomed. And I cannot
see NVidia simply helping smaller developers out of charity.

4) DX 9 benchmarks across the board are showing the FX cards
underperforming, so much so that a card that costs half as much is beating
it consistently. This is not a game specific problem, it's much deeper than
anything a patch will fix.

So what can NVidia owners do? Is there enough grounding for a
class-action lawsuit?

magnulus wrote:

So what can NVidia owners do? Is there enough grounding for a
class-action lawsuit?

IMO, it's a "tough-****" deal. And I just bought an FX5900 myself.

Only thing I intend to do is exercise the old saw, "fool me once . . ."

I'll probably get taken to the cleaners again somewhere down the road. But
it won't be nVidia doing the taking.
--
chainbreaker

If you need to email, then chainbreaker (naturally) at comcast dot
net--that's "net" not "com"--should do it.

magnulus wrote:
snip

Facts:

1) NVidia knew the DX 9 specification for quite a while, yet they
turned out the GeForce FX cards, which so far.... underpeforming is
too kind a word. It cannot run DX 9 games acceptably.

What DX-9 games can you currently purchase from a store or online vendor
that the FX cannot play?

30 FPS
(average, it could fall in many places) in Half Life 2 on a hotrod
system, is simply unacceptable.

Where is HL2 available for purchase?

By no stretch of the imagination can
I see this problem ever being fixed. The FX cards simply have a
broken architecture.

Do you actually have the technical expertise to make such an assessment or
are you simply parroting someone else?

Where did those millions of transistors go?
Are they just spinning their wheels in DX9?

Do you know what a transistor is? How about what it does? See above
question.


2) NVidia worked with Valve presumably for a long time, and they knew
the GeForce FX was going to have problems with it. Yet they kept the
industry in the dark about these problems and hid the fact that the
FX is a DX 9 product in marketting spin only.

DX-'anything' is a marketing spin. If you are not aware by now, the direct
x process keeps hardware purchases happening due to the idea that pc-gaming
and 3D modeling are a couple of niche's that happen to have some market
drive. If you think DX-9 is the end-all/be-all you are sadly mistaken. If
you think there won't be a Direct-X-10 just around the corner next year or
whenever, you need a quick reality check.


3) Smaller developers will not be able to make NVidia specific code
and hold down developement time and costs, yet there are now
thousands of FX cards they have to support. Smaller developers are
the lifeblood of PC gaming, if they can't get their foot in the door,
PC gaming is doomed. And I cannot see NVidia simply helping smaller
developers out of charity.

Nvidia has its own CG language that they encourage the use of. And quite
literally more than half of game creators today at least make *some* use of
it. If a game creator isn't interested (for whatever reason) in making
their code work on as broad a spectrum of hardware as possible, then they
quite obviously aren't interested in being in business long. Some companies
even take a moment to make their games playable in non-Windows environments
(case in point: Have a look at UT2K3 just for a good example in the last
year - Epic was kind enough to let one of their guys port it out to Linux
with OpenGl). So, you are ignoring the reality of all programming
situations by claiming that PC-Gaming is "doomed" under whatever real or
imagined circumstances that would cause coders to choose to or choose not to
write more than one set of paths to handle a variety of hardware. Generally
speaking, it is actually normal practice to write packages or modules that
are called under different hardware specific-situations.


4) DX 9 benchmarks across the board are showing the FX cards
underperforming, so much so that a card that costs half as much is
beating it consistently. This is not a game specific problem, it's
much deeper than anything a patch will fix.

Well, history might teach lessons here. Lately, nVidia has been under the
microscope for questionable optimizations in recent driver releases. Well,
look back a bit. During the early lifecycle of the TNT, there was a driver
release that gave about a one-third boost to performance across the board.
Nobody bitched about that. During the middle of the GeForce 2 lifecycle,
there were a pair of releases that both gave huge gains. Again, no one
complained. Then, the GeForce 3 and 4 came along (both being nearly
identicle technology, but one quite obviously more powerful than the other)
and we saw every driver release from the 26.xx through the 30.xx each
bringing better game compatability and better frame rates (with an exception
of some harware incompatabilities that cause tons and tons of people to BSOD
their WXP boxes regularily - keep in mind ATI was having the same problems
at that time). Not a single person cried that faster wasn't better.

nVidia tried to continue this trend with the 40.xx and up drivers but hit a
few snags. Most seem to beleive that the newest optimizations were only
designed to give inflated benchmark scores (could be. I'd be surprized if
any Vid card makers or chip makers or mobo makers or monitor makers or NIC
maker or Modem maker or 'whatever maker' wouldn't want better benchies to
brag about and I'm also sure that companies like Intel, IBM, HP, Dell,
Fujitsu, Maxtor, etc etc etc put a lot of time and effort into producing
better benchies). My point being here is that you are claiming nVidia
doesn't have the capability to fix their current driver problems. Do you
have the technical expertise and inside knowledge necessary to make such
claims?


So what can NVidia owners do?

I'll ask you again: What card do you own and what game is it not able to
play? Have you contacted their tech support about the issue of not being
able to play a game? Have you verified that it isn't a problem or
incompatibility with any of your other hardware? Have you even asked about
your problem in a forum like this one? Have you contacted the manufacturer
of the game in question? - What game did you buy that you cannot play on
your FX card? Are you sure (in the case you may have an FX-5200) that your
card meets the minimum requirements of the game manufacturer?


Is there enough grounding for a
class-action lawsuit?

For what? You want to sue because the current driver release causes the
FX-5900 to be slower than an ATI-9800 in a game that is not yet even
finished, let alone residing on store shelves where you could purchase it
and quite literally won't be for sale probably until the Christmas season?

On Wed, 17 Sep 2003 14:03:19 -0400, "chainbreaker"
wrote:

magnulus wrote:

So what can NVidia owners do? Is there enough grounding for a
class-action lawsuit?

IMO, it's a "tough-****" deal. And I just bought an FX5900 myself.

Only thing I intend to do is exercise the old saw, "fool me once . . ."


I also bought a FX5900 ( for $250), well aware of the DX9 discussion
and am very happy with my purchase. Runs everything that I have tried
in my huge collection of DirectX games with nary a problem (45.23
driver). For example, worst-case Morrowind FPS has shot up from 18 to
30 with all features maxed.........

I do not buy video cards for bragging rights. I buy them for
my professional work, mostly video editing and for trouble-free
gaming when I have time. Fiddling with benchmarks, driver
settings and driver-versions is not my idea of gaming-fun
at all !! Life is too short..........

nVidia has been stellar in the backward (and forward)
compatibility of their release-drivers ( except for 44.03, which
did have some problems in WinXP ).

If necessary, I am quite happy to tone down water-effects
and other peripheral gloss in a DX9 game like HL2.
The graphics of HL2 elsewhere are far, far better than HL1
but still are are not anywhere near-realistic, so any such
toning- down will have a negligible effect on my
"immersive experience". FPS games on PCs with genuinely-
realistic graphics and first-class AI are going to have to await
a few more generations of CPUs, GPUs and buses, plus will
consume vast hard-disk space and RAM..

Anyway, HL2 will only be available November 19. Time enough
for another round in the video-card wars........... Also HL2
uses Steam's on-line copy-protection after any downloaded
bug-fixes of the retail-purchased game, which is a total disaster for
single-play and local-LAN.... see the relevant threads for the
details.

I personally have no intention of parting with my hard-earned
money on a retail product flawed by Valve's currently half-baked
pay-as-you-play distribution tool........... A decision which
will be reconsidered should Valve appropriatly respond
before HL2 release to all the major customer-concerns
about Steam..

John Lewis



I'll probably get taken to the cleaners again somewhere down the road. But
it won't be nVidia doing the taking.
--
chainbreaker

If you need to email, then chainbreaker (naturally) at comcast dot
net--that's "net" not "com"--should do it.

where you could purchase it
and quite literally won't be for sale probably until the Christmas season?

Major snippage

if your going to give someone your money, you have to know that it is
worthwhile and you are getting what you paid for.
In the golden ages when Nvidia had just released the TNT2 and then the
Ultra, 3DFX stated that 32bit colour would not take off. Opps, it did, now
where are they?

It simply seems to me that Nvidia have said a few similar things and you
cannot simply write a driver that reduces quality and then say, 'there you
go, fixed it!' There might be a problem with the hardware and I personally
should read more technical reviews that I am sure will appear shortly. If
Nvidia knew that their cards would not function properly within the DX9
architecture, they should have done more.

Direct X has been one of the most amazing unifications to happen inside a
PC.... maybe forever. Open GL, umm? does anyone use it? Nvidia's
language? Who cares? (I might be a little naive with those comments so
please forgive me) I simply want to install a game and have the maximum
features and eye candy right there. No questions. We may never need Direct
X10 but we all know that new features require new implementation, thus new
cards.

A friend has recently upgraded from a ti-4200 to a Rad 9600 Pro. In
Battlefield 1942 he has said that certain effects were simply not present
with the GF. That game is not new? Not Direct X9! He has noticed other
minor things. So how far does the optimisation go?

As I said, if your going to give someone your money, you have to know that
it is worthwhile and you are getting what you paid for.

"magnulus" wrote in message
...
OK, I can't help but feeling angry about the whole DX9 crap with NVidia.
But what does the law say on this issue? You know, if the GeForce FX 5900
were just a LITTLE slower than ATI, I could live with that. I like
NVidia,
they are an American technology company, they make good drivers (at least
in
the past), and they have helped push gaming forward. But their present
behavior is nothing short of devious, sneaky, and dishonest.

If you agreed to pay $400 for an FX 5900, and then you find out that a $200
Radeon 9600 performs better, well too bad.
You would have to demonstrate that NVidia lied about their product to make a
case.

Facts:

1) NVidia knew the DX 9 specification for quite a while, yet they turned
out
the GeForce FX cards, which so far.... underperforming is too kind a
word.
It cannot run DX 9 games acceptably. 30 FPS (average, it could fall in
many
places) in Half Life 2 on a hotrod system, is simply unacceptable.

This cannot be translated into personal damages.

By no
stretch of the imagination can I see this problem ever being fixed. The
FX
cards simply have a broken architecture.

They do? The card runs the DX 9 game. They may not be as well
designed as the Ati counterparts, giving you a much lower price /
performance ratio, but that's too bad.

I have a 590 and have no problems with it. It runs all the games I want it
to great right now.

Nascar4 1280x1024x32 in opengl @ 50-60 fps with everything you can turn on.

Battlefield 1942 1024x768 runs with nary a glitch

Planetside 1024x768 all bells and whistles never drops below 40fps even with
hundreds of other players fighting right in front of me.


My 5900 (with the 45.33 drivers) is only 3000 points lower than a system
nearly identical with a 9800pro. That's 3fps, just a little slower...but
nothing I'd ever see.



Class action lawsuit for what? You are kidding, right? That would be like
suing Ford because the Mustang is slower than a Camaro.



"magnulus" wrote in message
...
OK, I can't help but feeling angry about the whole DX9 crap with NVidia.
But what does the law say on this issue? You know, if the GeForce FX 5900
were just a LITTLE slower than ATI, I could live with that. I like
NVidia,
they are an American technology company, they make good drivers (at least
in
the past), and they have helped push gaming forward. But their present
behavior is nothing short of devious, sneaky, and dishonest.

Facts:

1) NVidia knew the DX 9 specification for quite a while, yet they turned
out
the GeForce FX cards, which so far.... underpeforming is too kind a word.
It cannot run DX 9 games acceptably. 30 FPS (average, it could fall in
many
places) in Half Life 2 on a hotrod system, is simply unacceptable. By no
stretch of the imagination can I see this problem ever being fixed. The
FX
cards simply have a broken architecture. Where did those millions of
transistors go? Are they just spinning their wheels in DX9?

2) NVidia worked with Valve presumably for a long time, and they knew the
GeForce FX was going to have problems with it. Yet they kept the industry
in the dark about these problems and hid the fact that the FX is a DX 9
product in marketting spin only.

3) Smaller developers will not be able to make NVidia specific code and
hold
down developement time and costs, yet there are now thousands of FX cards
they have to support. Smaller developers are the lifeblood of PC gaming,
if
they can't get their foot in the door, PC gaming is doomed. And I cannot
see NVidia simply helping smaller developers out of charity.

4) DX 9 benchmarks across the board are showing the FX cards
underperforming, so much so that a card that costs half as much is beating
it consistently. This is not a game specific problem, it's much deeper
than
anything a patch will fix.

So what can NVidia owners do? Is there enough grounding for a
class-action lawsuit?

"Passion_Pilot" wrote in message
news:2k2ab.373629$Oz4.150011@rwcrnsc54...
What DX-9 games can you currently purchase from a store or online vendor
that the FX cannot play?


I want to buy Halo november 1st. I also don't want it to look like crap.

Where is HL2 available for purchase?


It won't be until around November something. But Halo is going to be
here very, very soon.

Do you actually have the technical expertise to make such an assessment or
are you simply parroting someone else?


No, I don't. I'm just making an educated guess. If NVidia can fix this
thing, it will be a ****ing miracle.

You remember the Radeon 8500. It had a "bug" with anisotropic filtering
that was never fixed because it was hardware. Your only fix was to not use
aniso. That's nothing next to the "bug" in NVidia's hardware. Is NVidia's
solution going to be "please use DX 8 and pretend you are running DX 9?" Is
it going to force all games to look like crap just so it gets good
benchmarks?

Do you know what a transistor is? How about what it does? See above
question.


Well, it's a been a while since highschool electronics, but isn't a
transistor like a switch that deals with logic states, etc.? They use 'em
in computers to make things go... just kidding.

Seriously, doesn't the GeForce FX has something like 120 million of these
things? What are they doing? On a coffee break?

DX-'anything' is a marketing spin. If you are not aware by now, the
direct
x process keeps hardware purchases happening due to the idea that
pc-gaming
and 3D modeling are a couple of niche's that happen to have some market
drive. If you think DX-9 is the end-all/be-all you are sadly mistaken.
If
you think there won't be a Direct-X-10 just around the corner next year or
whenever, you need a quick reality check.


DX and OpenGL revisions supply game developers with tools. It's up to
gamers to decide if the games are worth it. Most are deciding that having
better graphics is a worthy goal. I'm surprised you view it so cynicly.

Nvidia has its own CG language that they encourage the use of.

So they encourage developers to have do deal with another set of
programming outside of DX. Fascinating. Wasn't that the point of Microsoft
HSL that ATI and Microsoft were backing? To have a standard everybody could
use? Isn't that the point of DX and OpenGL?

And quite
literally more than half of game creators today at least make *some* use
of
it.

Most of these developers are churning out crap like Tomb Raider. I'm
talking about the small developers like Sick Puppies, Ratbag, or Irrational
Games, developers who will make truely unique games that push the industry
forward . Will they have the money to invest in seperate codepaths for every
single damn game? Moreover, why burden developers with this in the first
place? Is this NVidia's idea of "The Way it's Meant to Be Played?"

If a game creator isn't interested (for whatever reason) in making
their code work on as broad a spectrum of hardware as possible, then they
quite obviously aren't interested in being in business long.

Or they could juts code to DX 9 with HLSL and have it work on ATI hardware
and anybody else who cares to follow things like industry standards. Valve
said they basicly didn't have to make many optimizations for ATI. Yet, they
spend 5x the time on NVidia optimizations. That's not good. That sucks.

My point being here is that you are claiming nVidia
doesn't have the capability to fix their current driver problems. Do you
have the technical expertise and inside knowledge necessary to make such
claims?


I don't have to be an engineer. I just have to be an observer of human
behavior.
NVidia's behavior, the cloak and dagger industry-secret crap, the
strong-arming EIDOS to remove TR benchmarking patches, just indicates to me
that they are desperate. And why would they be desperate? Because they
have a major problem that they cannot fix. NVidia has some good engineers,
but if they have to resort to lawyers and PR, that indicates to me they have
an unbeatable engineering task ahead of them with no solution.

Is there enough grounding for a
class-action lawsuit?

For what? You want to sue because the current driver release causes the
FX-5900 to be slower than an ATI-9800 in a game that is not yet even
finished, let alone residing on store shelves where you could purchase it
and quite literally won't be for sale probably until the Christmas season?

Halo is gold. Sorry you didn't read the news. Just check out the
screenshots running on the 50 drivers, and compare them to the ATI ones.
It's truely pathetic.

No wonder Microsoft ditched NVidia for XBox 2. They simply lost the drive
to compete honestly.

Frankly, it's my own fault. I should have seen the writting on the wall
the moment NVidia started pushing proprietary standards like CG. Caveat
Emptor. If they have to resort to a proprietary language just to get their
cards to work right, what does that say about the underlying hardware? That
it cannot meet industry standards.

"Dam6" wrote in message
...
where you could purchase it
and quite literally won't be for sale probably until the Christmas
season?

Major snippage

if your going to give someone your money, you have to know that it is
worthwhile and you are getting what you paid for.
In the golden ages when Nvidia had just released the TNT2 and then the
Ultra, 3DFX stated that 32bit colour would not take off. Opps, it did,
now
where are they?

It simply seems to me that Nvidia have said a few similar things and you
cannot simply write a driver that reduces quality and then say, 'there you
go, fixed it!' There might be a problem with the hardware and I
personally
should read more technical reviews that I am sure will appear shortly. If
Nvidia knew that their cards would not function properly within the DX9
architecture, they should have done more.

Direct X has been one of the most amazing unifications to happen inside a
PC.... maybe forever. Open GL, umm? does anyone use it? Nvidia's
language? Who cares? (I might be a little naive with those comments so
please forgive me) I simply want to install a game and have the maximum
features and eye candy right there. No questions. We may never need
Direct
X10 but we all know that new features require new implementation, thus new
cards.

A friend has recently upgraded from a ti-4200 to a Rad 9600 Pro. In
Battlefield 1942 he has said that certain effects were simply not present
with the GF. That game is not new? Not Direct X9! He has noticed other
minor things. So how far does the optimisation go?

As I said, if your going to give someone your money, you have to know that
it is worthwhile and you are getting what you paid for.



Ummm, yeah who uses OpenGL, well actually ID does... Doom III will use it,
and it won't even touch D3D9...

------
Mark

I personally have no intention of parting with my hard-earned
money on a retail product flawed by Valve's currently half-baked
pay-as-you-play distribution tool........... A decision which
will be reconsidered should Valve appropriatly respond
before HL2 release to all the major customer-concerns
about Steam..

John Lewis

I agree with just about everything you say. But it's becoming quite
apparent that nVidia's been giving us a ventriloquist act, at best. I'm not
all that dissatisfied with the product, but I absolutely loathe the notion
of doing business with a company that's evidently been playing us for fools.
A little smoke can be ignored, but this has turned into an inferno.

--
chainbreaker