By John Walker on August 4th, 2008 at 11:20 am.
The rivalry between Nvidia and AMD is hardly kept underwraps, but things have gotten pretty catty of late. Back in April, bit-tech spoke to Nvidia’s chief scientist, David Kirk, about their current competition. Dismissing Intel’s forthcoming GPU, ‘Larrabee’, Kirk went on to sneer at ATI and AMD as well.
“Well, ATI’s CTO left about six months ago and AMD’s CTO left a week ago. Now, what does that say when the chief technical person at a company quits? AMD has been declining because it hasn’t built a competitive graphics architecture for almost two years now—ever since the AMD/ATI merger.”
Read on for the depths of wit that followed.
He then went on to point out that AMD are losing half a billion dollars per quarter, and are eight billion dollars in debt. Not a strong position to compete from, he argues, despite the potential of Fusion – an integrated CPU/GPU chip. Pointing out that AMD say this is the future, he adds, “which there’s no evidence to suggest this is true but they just said it. They believe it and they’re now doing it.”
So today bit-tech approached AMD/ATI’s Ian McNaughton (Head of Product and Platform Marketing) to see what they had to say about it. The reply:
“David Kirk is full of shit.”
Succinct.
04/08/2008 at 11:35 Willem says:
Arf. Excellent response.
04/08/2008 at 11:35 TheLordHimself says:
That is possibly the greatest quote from an executive ever! It certainly cut the crap! Ahahahaha.
In fairness, he does sound a bit full of himself. Its never good for the heads of a company to get too arrogant. Its then that mistakes are made.
04/08/2008 at 11:35 Alex Grose says:
Nice witty comeback. You can tell he thought about that for a while, trying to come up with a well-structured reply.
Then decided against it.
04/08/2008 at 11:36 Cedge says:
Cute, but Kirk is still right. ATI has been handled dreadfully since the merger (as has AMD).
04/08/2008 at 11:42 iainl says:
Really? I know they’ve had a poor spell, but I thought the HD4850 was amazing for the price.
04/08/2008 at 11:50 Mark-P says:
That is fantastic. :D
The original statement was made before nvidia was savaged by the 4850 and 4870 though. I guess they shouldn’t have underestimated ATI/AMD so much.
04/08/2008 at 11:56 Dexton says:
“hasn’t built a competitive graphics architecture for almost two years now”
He must be eating his words now with the release of the 48xx series, which are getting a reputation as the new 9800pros of the gfx world.
Worth remembering that Nvidia is not exactly getting great press right now either, being in the middle of a mass product recall/warranty dispute for thousands of faulty chips.
04/08/2008 at 12:04 heliocentric says:
if ati are losing that much cash it doesn’t if their latest card is slightly better. They need to detestate nvidia. Not that it matters as far as i see it. The graphics future belongs to intel. I only hope they have some competition be that amd’s cpu’s or whoever.
04/08/2008 at 12:11 El_MUERkO says:
show, don’t tell
nothing says someone is a shit more than a box full of it special delivered
04/08/2008 at 12:40 ape says:
Subtlety and eloquence.
04/08/2008 at 12:42 derFeef says:
If you read more from that Kirk guy, you will notive he is [a man I don't like]. Maybe it was the right answer from ATI/AMD.
04/08/2008 at 12:44 Dreamhacker says:
I’m definitely on AMD-ATi’s side in this war.
04/08/2008 at 12:48 sigma83 says:
Ultimately I’m all for performance of the components. I don’t particularly care what brand I buy.
04/08/2008 at 12:55 GrogLvr says:
im all for the intel/ati.. uh.. merger.. in my machine. my next card will be the 4870 x2 or two. i think theyve actually made something worth the money and im gonna give it to them. that also means not getting one of the nvidia 7xx mobos but instead an x48. hows that for decline, kirk?
04/08/2008 at 13:19 Chris Evans says:
I haven’t been keeping up with the graphics card debates recently, but that response has peaked my interest in ATi again :D
04/08/2008 at 13:34 Gap Gen says:
There’s only one way to decide the NVidia/ATI dispute. Yo momma fight.
“Yo momma so fat she don’t even fit down our 16 high-bandwidth pipelines”
“Yo momma so ugly she look like she rendered by ATI”
Maybe.
04/08/2008 at 13:48 spirit7 says:
The 4870 is the best bang for buck card out. The 4850, also, is the best budget card I’ve possibly ever seen.
The GTX 260/GTX 280, however, are overpriced trash.
I think it’s silly to take ‘sides’ in a war like this: let them bicker, I’m going to use the best card from each generation anyway. Last gen it was the 8800GT, this gen it’s the 4870.
04/08/2008 at 13:49 jon says:
Awesome
04/08/2008 at 13:55 Colinmarc says:
He’s right, though. I’ve never been a fan of ATI drivers, and I think ATI cards have always been inferior. But AMD… their Athlon 64 line was freaking awesome, but now they’re just completely losing to intel, because the Phenoms, well, they suck.
04/08/2008 at 14:35 Mark-P says:
It certainly is painful watching AMD the moment. There’s no compelling reason to buy their chips except to spite Intel. :(
04/08/2008 at 14:41 Diogo Ribeiro says:
I can imagine his stellar PR at work.
“Hello, and welcome to our AMD conference. Today, we will be talking about our next unveilment. It’s called penis, and you will enjoy it and its awesome FSAA detail, smooth and wrinkled textures. Wait. Where are you going? I haven’t finished unzipping yet!”
(probably overboard on that one, I was, but he seems the type to do something like that, or at least to be mocked at Penny Arcade this way)
04/08/2008 at 14:50 Pidesco says:
While I have never bought an ATI GPU in my life, that talk about ATI not being competitive is, appropriately, full of shit. Both 3xxx series and the 4xxx series forced and are forcing Nvidia to cut down prices. It’s not by accident that a 8800GT 512Mb costs close to 100€, right now.
04/08/2008 at 15:20 Ginger Yellow says:
An integrated CPU/GPU? Isn’t that what we had before 3DFX came along? And wouldn’t it be a overheating nightmare? I find it hard enough to keep my 8800GTX under 70 degrees.
04/08/2008 at 15:30 Captain Jorge says:
I used to buy nvidia exclusively because I always thought they had superior performance. But what royally pisses me off is nvidia’s dwindling support for older titles. Infinity Engine games play like crap on Nvidia cards, and not just the 8800′s, earlier cards have the same problems. Many other classics play poorly or not at all on nvidia hardware. My next build will be ATI based for the reason alone. The fact that the 48xx series are kicking ass is just icing on the cake.
04/08/2008 at 15:31 ghotto says:
Nvidia have been petulant shits of late. Although this is mostly down to their millions of defective laptop chips, which they’ve tried to blame everyone else but themselves for.
04/08/2008 at 16:17 Mo says:
I haven’t been in the videocard market for a while now (buy a laptop, it’ll save you a huge amount in upgrades!) but I used to be an nvidia fan, but not anymore.
To me, it seems like nvidia is consistently taking the brute force approach of making bigger, more expensive cards that consume more energy. ATi (they’ll always be ATi to me) are actually putting more thought into their cards, creating cheaper but just-as-effective cards.
At least that’s what it looks like from here.
04/08/2008 at 17:00 cqdemal says:
@ Mo
Buy a laptop, save a huge amount in upgrades, lose a lot more on equivalent of budget/mid-range desktop parts, then cry when Crysis Warhead/Far Cry 2/ Mirror’s Edge/Prototype/OpFlash2/etc. come out.
Yeah, nice tip, eh?
04/08/2008 at 17:01 RichPowers says:
I love my 8800 GTS (ATI cards are terrible for forcing aspect rations on widescreen monitors, thereby forcing old games to display like crap), but NVIDIA’s mobo chipsets are atrocious. My Asus M2N-SLI sometimes freezes on bootup, necessitating a hard restart. Various forums warned me against installing 3/4 of the drivers that come with the mobo lest I wreck my system. After further researching SLI and NVIDIA chipsets, I really regret paying an extra $40 for that implementation.
My former graphics card, a Radeon 9800 pro, is a champ, one of the finest cards I’ve owned. Too bad ATI’s control panel sucks.
04/08/2008 at 17:13 Mo says:
@cqdemal: it was a joke. :)
I’m a student and/or game developer (see link) which means I spend a lot of time outside the house. A laptop makes sense for me as it’s more of a devbox than it is a gaming rig. Coding on the bus is awesome. :)
I could have got a laptop with a fancy-pants videocard, but I
valued weight/battery life over power. For real gaming I’ve got an xbox. /runs ;)
04/08/2008 at 17:15 Ginger Yellow says:
What Rich said about their mobos. My p532N-e refuses to play nice with Vista. The SATA drivers cause at least one BSOD every day, despite countless driver upgrades.
04/08/2008 at 18:35 Dr_demento says:
@ Gap Gen: LMAO.
That will be all.
04/08/2008 at 18:51 Mark Stephenson says:
Sometimes you just have to say it as it is.
The amount of times I’ve been in a meeting and everyone in the room has wanted to say “Suck my balls” as a reply but you have to sanitise it so it’s nice and peaceful, mundane and pathetic ….
I have no problem with two companies in direct competition and the only ones really in the market saying “Come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough!”
Rather that than weak assed press releases.
04/08/2008 at 19:38 kadayi says:
Although I’m running an intel/Nvidia rig atm, I’ve never really forgiven Nvidia for the filthy Geforce 3 series debacle, where they made hay off the back of the ground breaking Geforce 2, to only then dump the range barely 6 months later for the Geforce 4s. I flipped to ATi after that and loved my 9200 & 9800 pro, and I’ll probably look at heading back to them when my 8600 begins to feel the strain. Love the quote though. ;)
04/08/2008 at 20:36 Heliocentric says:
can i suggest “Yo mamma felt the incredible power of my pipeline(s) last night”?
05/08/2008 at 00:06 Scandalon says:
Pedantic correction: Title should be closer to something like “…contains poo…” not “made of”.
Also, where does this “ATI Drivers are/were crap” come from? I’ve never seen any evidence of this…
05/08/2008 at 00:44 mkreku says:
I am using a 4870 right now and it’s easily the most impressive GPU I’ve ever owned. And it cost HALF of what my last top-end GPU did! Don’t count out ATI just yet.
05/08/2008 at 04:00 Jetsetlemming says:
Have AMD/ATI fixed the Godawful technical problems the Phenom CPUs shipped with yet? If not, any and all defense they have for themselves is shit.
05/08/2008 at 04:26 Erlam says:
“AMD has been declining because it hasn’t built a competitive graphics architecture for almost two years now—ever since the AMD/ATI merger.”
Wait, isn’t the ATI Radeon 49xx absolutely annihilating Nvidia? 47xx? Something like that. I read that of the top 10 sold cards, 1 is Nvidia, the rest are AMD.
05/08/2008 at 05:00 Colinmarc says:
Whatever, the 8800 will remain the best card for the next 3 years. ATI’s drivers just suck ass, a lot.
05/08/2008 at 07:53 Alarik says:
8800? Hardly. Well, see you 3 years later :-)))
I’d say 280 would be perfect, but considering its price it is worth purchasing probably only for people with 30″ displays, playing in native res.
05/08/2008 at 09:19 Chris says:
@Scandalon:
“Also, where does this “ATI Drivers are/were crap” come from? I’ve never seen any evidence of this…”
It’s a hangover from about 6 years ago, and a staple of lazy interwebz opinion ever since. ATI drivers really were crap about the time of the Radeon 8500, but they haven’t been crap for almost all of the time since then. My last few video card purchases have flip-flopped between ATI and NVidia, and to be honest these days I far prefer ATI’s efforts. NVidia’s Vista drivers were a complete joke for getting on for a year, and as mentioned they have real problems with a lot of older games.
05/08/2008 at 10:04 Dexton says:
@Scandalon re: Bad ATI drivers
Owning a 9800pro then an x800gto I was plagued with bad drivers for years, as a previously avid WOW player my computer would regularly lock up during play or crash to the desktop with a VPU recover error. After alot of troubleshooting I found that rolling back to drivers from about a year previously was the only solution. Any current Cat drivers from would result in intermitant crashes in games, sometimes after minutes sometime after hours.
Fingers crossed that the drivers for my new 4870 does better.
05/08/2008 at 16:07 MeestaNob! says:
ATi drivers aren’t that bad anymore at all, and they get updated regularly (once a month, like clockwork). I cant complain about my experience with their products.
The only thing that doesn’t impress me greatly is the Catalyst control centre, it’s Fugly with a capital “Good Christ my eyes.”
05/08/2008 at 21:27 redrain85 says:
ATI cards are terrible for forcing aspect rations on widescreen monitors, thereby forcing old games to display like crap
@RichPowers:
Not any more. ATI fixed that a while back. Aspect ratio support for widescreen monitors is working properly on the desktop, now.
07/08/2008 at 16:55 KindredPhantom says:
Best reply ever candidate.