Oh No! Nvidia Conspiracy!

[GT98]

Off Hardocp.com

NVConspiracy:
You either love a good rumor wrapped in a conspiracy theory or you hate it. Being that the news has been rather lifeless for the last 48 hours I thought I would interject what is being thrown around the campfire...or my mailbox rather.

The UberGeeks over at the Rage3D boards are up in arms over NVIDIA getting chummy with EPIC and their newly released Unreal Tournament 2003.


It appears that the *nvidia the way its ment to be played* splash screen in UT 2003 is not just an advertizing gig. Apparently there is an *ultra high mode* that is not enabled in the current release. Mark Rein claims it will slow all current cards to a crawl (below 10 fps).

The argument goes on to surmise that the game will only be able produce this mode when utilized with an NVIDIA NV30 based VidCard. The information traces back to the Beyond3D forums and then to a German "PCGames" online publication.

Hellbinder, resident hothead and ATi fanatic goes on to say:


Just so you guys understand why i am so pissed, epic claiming that under any stretch of *standard* or *next gen* graphics technology implimentation that the 9700 would *crawl*.. is just flipping ABSURD!!! the 9700 playes frikking Doom 3 for pete's sake. I am really upset at this moment that I bought UT2k3 and have come accross pretty hard.. I appologize to some extent.. and will get over it soon..(grrrr).

Whether or not any proprietary technology will be used by the NV30 so that this supposed mode it playable is yet to be seen. Honestly, I don't see any egg on NVIDIA's face this time round, but certainly taints EPIC if it pans out to have any truth to it. This should also serve as a lesson for all of you to spell check your posts, especially when you rant, as you never know where it will show up.


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NVConspiracy II:
Here is a conspiracy theory dreamed up all by myself. Seriously what I see it as is clouding an already murky conflict of interest. If conflict of interest confuses you, as it does most webmaters, here is a good page that will explain to you the ethics surrounding it in plain English.

3DMark is one of the most widely used benchmarks on the face of the earth by PC Enthusiasts. It is easily accessible, and it is free. What's there to hate, right? What if money is changing hands between MadOnion and NVIDIA?


Saratoga, CA - October 8th, 2002 - MadOnion.com(TM), the leading provider of PC performance information and web services, today announced a strategic partnership with NVIDIA Corporation, the worldwide leader in visual processing solutions, which will result in enhanced customer support experience and drive down costs for NVIDIA system builders.

I will guarantee you that MadOnion is not doing it for free. Of course you have to stand back and look at MO's business model. Simply kicking out free benchmarks does little for their revenue stream. They have spent years now collecting data on all those folks that uploaded their benchmark scores and information, and now they are selling and using that information to capture revenue. Who else are they going to sell this stuff to besides the hardware companies?

The questions is: Does NVIDIA paying MadOnion for their database service create a situation where a conflict of interest exists? This is not to say that future MadOnion benchmarks will have an NVSlant, but surely it does provide a great backdrop for that argument.

Just my 2 cents.

[mutz]

...marketing in the graphics card business must be getting pretty desparate...

[Helevitia]

Your sources are wrong

I can assure you that we did NOT lock out anything from customers that is on the CD.

We pick (conservative) default settings based on detected HW and the code currently in place will only pick the highest texture detail on 256 MByte cards by default though you can easily change this either via the menu or by modifying the ini file.

At highest texture detail some levels might use up to 180 MByte of data (textures + geometry) and if you have a lot of players this number might be even higher

Here's how the detail settings work:

FWIW, we didn't ship with any textures that require a detail setting above High to be shown at full detail. The texture detail is basically a bias against the LOD level defined in the texture package. So e.g. large textures might have a "NormalLOD" of 2 which means at normal texture LOD ("Normal") the engine will skip the first two mip levels. At "Lower" it will skip 3 and at "Higher" it will skip only 1. To the best of my knowledge the highest NormalLOD used in UT2k3 is 2 which means that by setting your texture detail to "High" (ini and menus use a different notation as texture detail ended up being to fine grained and I'm refering to ini options) you'll end up with the full quality textures. We also do some clamping so small textures won't loose mipmaps at low texture detail settings.

Below are the ini options and their bias level.

-4 UltraHigh
-3 VeryHigh
-2 High
-1 Higher
0 Normal
+1 Lower
+2 Low
+3 VeryLow
+4 UltraLow

As this is too fine- grained for the regular user we mapped the words differently so XYZ in the menus doesn't necessarily map to XYZ in the ini so this might have caused some confusion.

-- Daniel, Epic Games Inc.

[thop]

now it's official

3.) Hi, my name is Kyle and I am an FPS junkie.

[Indiana]

What I find the most frightening about this whole issue is the fact that absolutely noone, not even then NVidiots think this was unlikely or even absurd....

Helevitia, where does this Epic representative quote come from? Do you have a link?

[Helevitia]

Yep, let me get it......here it is:

http://www.rage3d.com/board/showthread.php?threadid=33640750&perpage=20&pagenumber=2

[DGhost]

man, kyle is stuck on the conspiracy theory... and hellbinder is as much of an idiot as ever...

gotta love the web...

[TdB]

http://www.thedailybull.ca/article.php?id=119

they actually think this will put RSN to shame?

[dZeus]

they all stole it from Matrox...

http://www.bbspot.com/News/2000/8/video_card.html

[TdB]

Originally posted by dZeus
they all stole it from Matrox...
http://www.bbspot.com/News/2000/8/video_card.html

LOL!