omg i just spent about 3 hrs reading up on this whole controversy instead of doing my paper for Modern Political Discussion in English Seminar class....
all i have to say is this:
-one cannot know if Ati + Valve have been *in bed* with one another to the extent that valve will be willing to cripple nvidia but look at it this way. Nvidia users number 100+ million GPUS....Now as a company u cannot cripple some 100 million *potential * customers in the hope that everyone will run out and buy a $350 GPU...does this make some sense?
-Now, What about Nvidia being in bed w/ ID? Same issue right? Well for #1 the ati counterpart to the nvidia cards still hold up reasonably well w/out extensions and from (firing squad i believe) there was a quote from carmack stating that the native DX9 pixel shader 2.0 extensions run horrendously slow on the nvidia Fx series and instead of native 32 bit code he had to use a backdoor customization that runs the program at 12 and 16 bit instead of 32.....:...now this if this doesn't point to bad hardware then i dont know what else can
-the 3dmark '03 scandal. Nvidida has had a bad history w/ special *optimizations*...
-Why did valve say no DET 50.xx......well perhaps b/c they found that certain optimizations included outputting higher quality images whenever screen capture was detected?, or not rendering certain things, or blurring certain features?
-Look at the Lara craft benchmarks, aquamark 3, halo 1.5....this isn't only a HL2 specific problem. Can it be that all game developers just randomly decided to jump on the Ati bandwagon or there is something inherently wrong hard-ware wise
-*just wait till the next series of drivers*....to do what. cheat?, get rid of certain things so that only a select few wont notice them...
-Keep in mind folks. The majority of ppl find 800x600x16 playable. Get out of your elitist box. Companies ( i include ati here) know that they can sacrifice quality for higher fps b/c ONLy a select few will ever notice/bother.
Please read the above statements and take them to heart and stop this idiotic flame war. What is ...is what is. The future lies ahead so stop bashing one another so much.
oh and woot i'm super 133t for owning a 9700 PRo ...hehe i couldn't resist