This falls into the category of tin foil hat conspiracy theories where you take a few cherry picked facts completely out of context and extrapolate the worst possible scenario.
First off, AMD is a multi-billion dollar corporation that has tons of expertise in openGL which only in recent years has taken a back seat to Dx for video games and is still the de facto standard for enterprise use. In fact, they have made a fortune listening to Carmack and working closely with him to take the industry to the next level. These people might as well be kissing cousins and its routine for Nvidia and AMD to supply money and expertise to developers to ensure new games come on the market that are capable of using the latest bells and whistles they cram onto a video card. Batman has Nvidia physx, Crysis 2 and Metro 3D vision, and so on because video card manufacturers pay the developers to put them in the game and, if necessary, supply technical expertise. Rage uses Nvidia cuda for gpu transcoding and has had far fewer problems with Nvidia drivers. AMD's newest video card has hardware acceleration for megatextures, but they had endless problems with the drivers for Rage.
The reason they keep having driver problems is the video card manufacturers have followed the standard industry practice of pushing new products out the door as fast as possible and cleaning up the mess after the fact. If you buy the latest and greatest video card to come on the market you takes your chances. Very likely it will have driver problems that may not be fixed for months. The same with new games being released on the market. AMD and Nvidia create basic drivers for the game, but the only way to know how compatible they are with every possible computer configuration and program on the market is to throw them into the deep end of the pool and see what happens. Sometimes a larger game developer might beta test drivers first, but id is a small company and it still doesn't account for AMD's failure to fix the thing for 4 months.
First off I would like to state that I am a political scientist, cynical calculations and dabbling in conspiracy theories are what I do.
I would like to know what you claim is cherry picked. Everything I have stated is verifiable. Let me be clear, what I was saying had nothing to do about AMD competency from a technical standpoint. What I did say was that they in recent times have not invested much in supporting the platform that Rage uses. Hence all of the technical problems. Which is why I also stated it wasn't AMD's best interest to bother with a game that sold so poorly. Let me know what part of that is not correct. This is why in two different posts I talk about game sales. Ultimately this is about what is making money for game companies or video card manufactures. Which is why we have more driver releases for games like Skyrim over Rage at this point. If that is tinfoil then I guess I am wearing a hat.
As for your statement about drivers being release and fixed afterwards; you're right nothing else needs to be said about that. I don't disagree; I have more than a decade of PC gaming under my belt. I expect PC games and video drivers to be buggy.My questions about why Id seemed ill-prepared to deal with all of the issues are still salient. All I can do is speculate, it seems from their interviews that they thought they had a working driver solution. Yet, we are all still waiting. At this point I could care less who is to blame; I want my 60 dollar piece of software to work consistently and without three weeks of trial and error troubleshooting by me. My problem with Id is that they didn't provide much in the way of support. The community resolved most of the major issues. To me this is not acceptable.
I am picking on Carmack because he made the statement. It is his words, he stated, that consoles make more money. And given that the PC port was released with so many issues, from the drivers to basic video options missing. No one seems to be asking why this PC port wasn't ready, and has received little support. I understand that has a lot to do with whether or not AMD or Nvidia has working drivers and more importantly how good the support they provide is. The trend from a lot of companies lately is that PC ports release anywhere from a month to a year later. This is done for a reason, the PC platform is difficult to develop for. I imagine this release was rushed out because the game was in development for about 6 years, and to the sales people, more development time wasn't acceptable. That still doesn't justify no response. I believe the last one was a twitter remark made in November about waiting for drivers.
Again I still claim that this is an excuse, which is why I brought up other companies like Blizzard. Blizzard has always strove to ensure that their games work on the broadest range of PC's. I have never heard them say "oh sorry you don't get patches or support because we are waiting on a 3rd party." I brought up Rocksteady and AA because it is an example of how a work around can be created by a company. I understand that Physx is a proprietary engine that was pushed by Nvidia. And this practice got them in some legal trouble. Rocksteady could have just told everyone to go out and buy an Nvidia card. Instead they released a crack to get the game working on AMD cards. The example was again intended to highlight the fact that these types of solutions can be effective. So I have to ask once again apparently when is Id going to take this approach? How long do we wait around for DLC or a patch?
Which brings us right back to AMD. I still argue that we won't see anything done because it is not in their interest to do so. Ask yourself this, which makes more sense for AMD? Spending resources to try and fix a niche game, which AMD is having a lot of trouble supporting. Or using those same resources to ensure that the game which has sold 3x as much is working at its best. Supporting Skyrim makes them a lot more money in this calculation, lets not kid ourselves, for AMD this is about making money.
» Tue May 15, 2012 11:52 pm 
