Benjamin Gawert said:
Nope, it's not. For the market (remember that these cards are not aimed
at gamers or home users but the workstation market) it's completely
appropriate...
It's not the right strategy for any market, for any customer, if with two
days of programming time to expose some simple options in the driver
software, you allow users to easily workaround bugs or allow previously
unforeseen applications to work with your card. It's not a "feature" to be
able to call an officially supported application's vendor and spend four
hours with them explaining their bug to them.
The only reason to take out an option like anti aliasing or filtering from a
driver is when you need account control of some sort, which in this case I
doubt ATI needs.
Well, I don't know what software you have but if your flight simulation
software is not some game or something like FlightGear or X-Plane but
some really serious software (industrial level simulation) then FireGL
is probably the wrong choice for you, but in this case the additional
money for a comparable Nvidia Quadro card shouldn't be a problem. If it
X-Plane is used by Boeing to do early design verficiation on their blended
wing future generation aircraft. So that one is a perfect example of the
sheer stupidity of locking out a nice graphic card from use in any
unforeseen usage simply because of a failure to add some simple options onto
a device driver to force the use of antialias and filtering. It is simply
ridiculous that Boeing would need to convince ATI of anything in order to
get support for some application they use internally.
choice. You should be aware that ATIs OpenGL drivers never were as good
as the ones from Nvidia, even not the one of the FireGL. Unlike ATI
Nvidia uses the same drivers for Quadro and Geforce, meaning that even a
standard Geforce has the same very good OpenGL support like a Quadro.
Even industrial level flight simulation software usually doesn't use the
additional features of a Quadro/FireGL, so you should be totally fine
with a good(!) Geforce card. I'd recommend not to go for a fancy
overclocker card but fo a quality card from PNY (PNY is also the only
manufacturer of Quadro cards).
And that's reason #3 to never lock out options from a driver the way ATI is
doing: competition. Competition is not going to make the same mistakes
ATI does.
Looks like I may be getting yet another Nvidia card when I wanted to buy ATI
but couldn't because ATI has their head stuck in a very obscure marketing
cloud. That would bring to total about 21 ATI cards I wanted to buy this
year but couldn't because ATI makes weird marketing decisions. The other
cards were because they refused to support RADEON on Windows 2003. Windows
2003 and Windows XP have basically the same core OS and drivers, so if you
have developed for XP you get Windows 2003 essentially for free. Nvidia
supported it right out of the box. ATI instead wastes a lot of time and
energy by rationalizing that Windows 2003 is a "server operating system and
no one would need a RADEON for a server." So instead of getting some
extra market for free, they stick checks into their code and if you run
Windows 2003 they refuse to work. ATI doesn't seem to realize that the
market for something like a Windows OS is so large and diverse that people
sometimes use the OS in unexpected ways, and if you can get an extra 1/2 or
1% of market share just by supporting unusual applications with no
additional work, why not? So Nvidia got that order for 20 6800s and ATI
didn't get any RADEONs because what we wanted is something their marketing
group thinks is impossible.
