Andrew Underwood

A battle’s end?

Two knights have been battling since they first met. Every fight they start gives them new experience, a new understanding of their weapons and armour. The fight hardly hardly ever produces a clear winner and the meeting of the knights is different every time. After every battle they go back to their tool shops and develop new and better armor, better swords, and other new technologies to help them win. If one knight dies or stops caring, is that the end of the incentive for the remaining knight to keep developing his battle system?

I’m talking about ATI and nVidia, two compainies that developed graphic card technology. Personally I always rooted for ATI since it was a Canadian company. There was a HUGE competition between these two companies, driving 3D development ever since 1996 when 3d cards first started appearing. The last decade has witnessed a change in availible graphics technology.

Recently AMD, a company that mostly makes CPUs bought ATI. Since AMD has always been about cheaper chips (compared to Intel) I’m worried that it will pull ATI from the front lines of high end, high cost 3D development and leave nVidia the whole high end market. It will be an end to the competition that was responsible for driving the amazing 3D developments over the last ten years. They can’t stop now! Not while we are so close to photorealism.

Hopefully the opposite will happen and it will use it’s ’synergy’ to develop entirely new platorms that make the most of CPU power and graphic chipsets. Only time will tell… or perhaps an interview with AMD. All you real journalists out there, get on that pronto!