The GPU war

Just some thoughts on the recent "word-war" played lately by Nvidia and Ati regarding their respective counterpart. As usual, and as it normally happens in business especially at their level, both companies push their product against their direct competitor...publishing benchmarks, breaking published benchmarks (ironic), "leaking" Mature-rated internal presentations..and so on.

Well, we clearly support (read: "optimize for") Nvidia...as many logos here and there on our website demonstrate. But the real point here is that, till now, Nvidia supported us as well. (I bet you can spot the reciprocal sense of this sentence :))
In this "bi-polar" boards' market developers MUST support and test their applications and games for both manufacturers... and I can assure you we would love to!

While Ati in its "public-confidential" slides cries over the "Nvidia optimized Doom3" (...and I imagine rivers of tears for the Unreal3 Engine - GeForce 6800 presentation)... they actually seem to care much less for developers - at least from our perspective.
How do we know? No, no, it's not because we are registered Ati developers and we know things from within the very heart of Ati...nothing like that.

It's just because we're not actually registered! We gave up after some emails and two online forms to get into their developers program - complete silence on the other side.
Sure, sure we're obviously not Id Software nor Epic Games (which, from what everyone can see, they're more busy with Nvidia than with Ati, at the moment).
Nonetheless we're happily registered with Nvidia since months...and speak continuously with great engineers and developers' managers.
We do hope to get to test our stuff with Ati as well - as we need to - but sincerely, right now, we don't feel like spending resources and additional costs to ensure our code is ***optimized*** for the entire Ati line-up...we just need to know something will eventually "show up" on our old 9600.

All that Ati-complaining about "optimized Nvidia games" looks like pure and simple truth as Nvidia seem to care much more for developers, big names of course but also little promising ones.

...hoping Ati will change its strategy for developers relations as now it looks like a bad, bad loser - GPUs and business apart.