Some NVidia engineers have been trawling internet forums and posting some interesting responses to common complaints popping up recently. A particularly good response comes from “NickStam” on the Hexus Forums. A few choice quotes:
What is NVIDIA’s answer to ATI Eyefinity technology?
ANSWER: With GeForce you would need to use more than one graphics board to support more than two active monitors. If this is a feature our customers want, we will look in to adding it for GeForce. Our focus has been on other display technologies like 3D stereo, and our 3D Vision products, but we understand multi-mon gaming with many monitors could be a cool addition.
Why does NVIDIA detect AMD GPUs in Batman: AA and turn off AntiAliasing?
“In the case of Batman’s AA support, NVIDIA essentially built the AA engine explicitly for Eidos – AA didn’t exist in the game engine before that. NVIDIA knew that this title was going to be a big seller on the PC and spent the money / time to get it working on their hardware. Eidos told us in an email conversation that the offer was made to AMD for them to send engineers to their studios and do the same work NVIDIA did for its own hardware, but AMD declined.”
Why do new NVIDIA drivers punish AMD GPU owners who want to leverage an NVIDIA card to compute PhysX?
Answer: We’re not trying to punish gamers. Our GPU and PhysX drivers are interconnected to optimize performance. In the future we expect this interdependence to deepen. This alone makes it difficult to support a third party GPU.
In order to make sure our customers have a great experience, we QA every release of our PhysX and Graphics drivers by testing approximately 14 NVIDIA GPUs for graphics processing with 8 GPUs for PhysX processing on 6 common platforms with 6 OS’s using 6 combinations of CPU and memory. This is over 24000 possible configurations. While we don’t test every possible combination, the work and cost is substantial. Adding AMD GPUs would significantly increase the necessary work and cost for NVIDIA so we decided not to support this.
He also discusses some of the recent SLI Restrictions, the Vista Driver debacle, and support for DX10.1 and DX11.
Opinions – A look back at NVIDIA’s GTC – Page 4 – HEXUS.community discussion forums.
