AMD has some thoughts on NVIDIA

The lads over at KitGuru have an interesting interview with Richard Huddy of AMD.



The interview explains a lot about both business practices, benchmark's, the Batman AA scandal, DX11, the future of PC gaming and hardware and how every game up until 2012 will be developed around the AMD Radeon as they were the first GPU company with DX11 level hardware.

Here are some snippets from the interview:

"With one exception, every game released through to 2012 will have been developed on AMD's Radeon"

We asked Huddy about the ways in which differences in hardware design translate into the DevRel push. "AMD being able to deliver DirectX 11 hardware into the hands of developers a full 6 months ahead of nVidia, means that with one single known exception, every game released through to 2012 will have been developed on AMD's Radeon hardware. that gives us a huge advantage".

Huddy declined to comment directly on that game, but he did speak about the Batman Arkham Asylum AA fiasco which saw 2 versions of the game released in quick succession following a global flame war across some of the most influential graphics forums on the planet.

He explained, "Batman used a deferred rendering engine. That creates a special situation for applying anti aliasing. There are well known ways of doing it and, as luck would have it, there is a vanilla implementation that works equally well on AMD and nVidia graphics hardware. Let me be clear, this method is well known, works well on AMD and nVidia cards and there is a minimum impact on performance for the customers who have bought the game".

"Instead of releasing unified code that works on every customer's card the same, nVidia got the first release of the game to detect if the installed card was a GeForce or Radeon and, if it saw a Radeon, it would turn off the AA feature", said Huddy.

"The only person this harms if the customer who spent their hard earned money on a brand new game, believing that Batman Arkham Asylum had been written to work as well as possible on the customer's system", he pointed out.