Beyond Radeon

The Pitfalls Of Intense Competition

The ATI fans rallied around the Radeon and the renewed effort to crank out drivers at a faster clip. This new level of responsiveness excited those of us who were pulling for ATI to help keep competition thriving in the quickly consolidating 3D market. I remember reading press clippings from ATI representatives stating they had more than doubled the number of people on their driver development team and how they would be releasing updates far more frequently in the past. We bought into the hype and for a while, ATI walked the talk. However, as the Radeon product matured and faced increasing competition from Nvidia in terms of raw speed, it seems that something still went missing.

ATI was working on their follow-up to the Radeon, and from everything we had seen, the hardware specifications were awesome. Here was one company that was able to keep up with the frenetic pace of hardware refreshes. They had the potential of going head to head with the best products Nvidia had to offer, and the buzz started reaching a fever pitch. However, underneath all of the positive vibes, there was some turbulence.

The pressure to put a product out the door fast was weighing heavily on ATI. Nvidia had a huge lead in the minds of consumers, and from all indications, gamers were more worried about frame rates than image quality. All you heard from people was how fast the Q3A frame rates were, or how well the card did in 3DMark benchmark suites. Not many people focused on the full spectrum of features. They discounted the incredible DVD playback and the awesome 2D clarity and all-around image quality. For ATI, it looked like it was all about the benchmarks, and nothing else.

As a result, the people in ATI’s marketing department made the regretful decision to focus more on beating the competition in those key benchmarks than on making sure they put a fully optimized, fully functional product out the door. As we know now, not only did they work hard to optimize their drivers for those benchmarks, they actually put benchmark game-specific code into their drivers to give the impression that their card was faster than it was.

Falling Off Of The Wagon

When ATI introduced the 8500, they had taken a step back to the Rage 128 days with their driver technology. The drivers themselves were barely functional for many of the testers that were going to review the board. Not only did they cause crashes and failures, they were also consistently inconsistent in performance and general compatibility. In some titles the card seemed very fast and fairly stable, but in other titles, they were slow and buggy. ATI had done it again, they had put the hardware to the forefront and neglected their drivers.

Testers were irritated to say the least, but the biggest problem was yet to come. Reviewers are often a lot smarter and more savvy than people realize. Apparently ATI forgot this fact. When reviewers started to give a long, hard look at the insides of the drivers and they noticed something interesting. There was a specific game title embedded in the code. After doing some more advanced research, they found a very disturbing fact: ATI had doctored their drivers to give themselves the upper hand in benchmarks. They conducted tests that undeniably proved this assertion and ATI was caught red-handed.

ATI ended up admitting guilt, but did so in a defiant manner -- they “had no choice” because all reviewers cared about were benchmarks. No matter how right they may have been, there was no excuse for ATI to pull such a stunt. They had betrayed those loyal to them and they had betrayed the consumer marketplace in general.