<<<I still insist that my original post was pretty on topic. I was just describing the mentallity of people who feel the need to defend "the underdog" with such blind devotion. You might see me as doing the same towards nVIDIA. I'm actually trying to combat the obvious slant you and powervr tend to put on things. I never said people who dislike nVIDIA are ignorant, just that they are ignorant for looking at everything nVIDIA does as though the company had personally killed their own mother.>>>
What slant have I put on things? All I've said is that Nvidia have been unfair and underhanded and I'd prefer that companies just make good products and if they want to lie about other companies products they at least be brave enough to release the info to the public instead of sneaking around sending melicious documents to manufacturers. So far its you who seems to want to put a slant on this, either that or you haven't read the PDF file at all.
<<<The "insults" comment in my orignal post just came from your whole tone and demeanor. No reason to get your panties tied in a knot over this. You don't see me "grasping for straws" in the argument by quibbling about the correctness of making a word plural.>>>
I don't seem to remember writing anything that would say I was angry. If I'm angry I'll let you know. Oh and I'm not grasping at straws (why did you use quotes there?, who are you quoting because I never said anything about grasping at straws before). If you don't like me picking up on false statments then don't make them. If you don't remember what you said then here it is again "I'll respond to these two thinnly disguised insults against me" as you can see you didn't simply make a word plural you said that I had insulted you twice.
<<<AFAIK, nVIDIA did not admit they were ashamed by the .pdf file. They did said it should have never gotten out. Which is true. The "lies" in the .pdf are putting the rumors and speculations of the public in words, which is a crafty way to make your own product seem better. They never made a press release stating all these "lies", they were never intended to be shown to the public. Sure, it left them with a bit of egg on their face, but I'm sure any aggressive company with a good marketing division has tons of documents they would hate for the general public to see.>>>
Nvidia said that "yes unfortunately this document originated at Nvidia" you don't see this as being ashamed of the doc?
Please read the PDF because its obvious that so far you haven't, Nvidia did not just use rumours and they bearly ever mentioned there own products. They lied lots of times and I'm not talking about half truths but total lies. For one they claimed that the Hercules 3d Prophet 4500 was built using a GTS PCB because Hercules didn't have the skills to make there own boards. Thats a lie not a half truth, the Kyro II reference boards were all made by Videologic Systems and sent out to manufacturers like Hercules. They claimed that Kyro II boards "would look and run terrible in new games like Black and White" which is a lie. They said that Kyro II has "bad compatability on ALL games" which is so rediculess and obviously false its almost funny and obviosly a total lie too. They said that Kyro II was "still broken on MBTR just like Kyro was over a year ago" and they also said "new drivers have not fixed these problems" firstly Kyro wasn't out a year before this PDF file and secondly there were drivers that fixed this problem at the release of Kyro 1 never mind Kyro II so once again lies! They also failed to mention that there prize product Geforce 3 was actually worse then Kyro II ever was in MBTR, it missed almost all textures in MBTR at that time although this isn't a lie but I just thought I'd mention it. They then went on to show lists of games that apparently supported HW T&L, they obviously ranout of actual HW T&L games because that list includes non HW T&L games...once again lies.
<<<The marketing demonstration was most likely used train internal employees in ways to cast doubt on their competitors product. Don't really see that as "not fair". Sure, it's not nice, but what have I been saying about this? The KryoII was coming into the market unproven, and nVIDIA harped on this not to discredit the card, but to make their own stuff look better in comparison.>>>
Again read the PDF, its obvious you haven't if you think the PDF wasn't made to discredit Kyro II. When I first read the doc (a day before it went public) I was actually very suprised that Nvidia weren't mentioning there products in comparison very much, they were simply doing anything and saying anything they could (even outright lies) in order to discredit STM, PowerVR, Hercules and Kyro II.
<<<They never said, "the KryoII has problem X with game Y etc. etc." They just reminded the sales people that it was an unproven product, and their products have excellent stability.
I know I'm getting repetative but please read the PDF because you've just claimed they didn't do something that they most deffinately did do. They not only said that Kyro II had problem x with games y (eg, "Kyro II will look and run terrible in new games like Black and White, Gaints, Doom3" "Kyro II still broken in MBTR" but they also sad that "Kyro II has bad compatability on all games", all games???, thats insane don't you think? So as you can clearly see they did more then say it had problem x with game y they went as far as to claim it had compatability problems with every game ever made!
<<<No one even knew at the time what the KryoII's stability was going to be like.>>>
Yes they did, just look at Kyro 1 and up the core speed and you have the Kyro II.
<<<If the KryoII was truly a better product than any nVIDIA product in every sense, the consumer would decide what was better, not some marketing associate>>>
Thats the way it should be but thats not the way it would have been if Nvidia had anything to do with it and this is my main point. You say the consumer can decide which product is better, what if all Nvidia's lies had been as effective as they wanted them to be and Kyro II got no manufacturers outside the U.K? Until recently only Hercules were brave enough the bring Kyro II to the world (VDO only make U.K cards) so if Herc had also been scared off by Nvidia then no consumers would have had the chance to decide which product was best and thats my problem with Nvidia's underhanded tactics and lies. It takes away the choice that people should have and anyone that wants to be pissed off at the prospect of Nvidia trying to limited there choices is perfectly justified in feeling that way.
<<<taking a quote directly from Anandtech: "Taking some of the techniques involved in tile based rendering, ATI created their HyperZ technology. HyperZ enables various forms of compression of the data going to the Z-buffer and performs an early culling of polygons so that objects that aren?t visible to the viewer aren?t rendered". This is what made me lead to my assumption, so correct me if im wrong.>>>
Well that quote is wrong, HyperZ doesn't take any techniques from TBR, its nothing like TBR. TBR waits until every poly has been sent to the card and collected in a bin in video ram, it then cuts the scene into tiles and sends each tile in turn inside the chip were per pixel HSR is performed on each tile before rendering. Then the tile is sent to the framebuffer in ram. AFAICS all HyperZ has in commen with TBR is it attemting a loose form of HSR using per poly hierarchical Z buffering which really doesn't resemble TBR. But I can see why you made your comment about them being similar so fair enough
<<<You mention FSAA and EMBM, created by 3dfx and Matrox, respectively. Both were creted to compete in the 3d market, giving them an edge over their competitors. Competitors such as Nvidia. If Nvidia was not in the picture, it is highly likely that these two technologies would not have been created. Also, you mention it has the specs of a TNT2 Ultra. If Nvidia was not around, competition might have been a bit more stale, and the drive to get higher clock speeds mght not have been so great. So the Kyro2 would probably have inferior specs compared to what it has now, although still with TBR>>>
PowerVR 2 had FSAA years before Voodoo5 was released so 3dfx didn't invent it and they weren't even the first to make a product with it either.
<<<Nasty and underhanded? Yes... nVidia is definitely those things.
Evil? No.>>>
Spot on, of course there not evil but that was clearly an exageration by powervr2.