DH Interview: Valve's Gabe Newell

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DriverHeaven recently had a chat with Valve's Gabe Newell about Half life 2 and apart from being a very nice guy to talk to he made some very interesting comments. Here is a snip: Driverheaven.net: From a developer's perspective when creating Half-Life2 how did the major graphics card companies assist in resolving any issues? Were they quick to respond with driver fixes or technical responses, and would you have hoped for more input from them? Gabe Newell: If you look at the surveys we've done of the hardware our customers have (on Speakeasy.net), there are two companies that dominate - NVIDIA and ATI. We've spent a lot of time working with both companies. Right now for the DX9 generation, ATI is significantly ahead in terms of absolute performance and price/performance. We are working pretty hard with NVIDIA to try to optimize the situation with regards to getting their performance up to snuff. We spend more of our time with ATI working on new features like high-dynamic range rendering (HDR) which is a new technique to create more life-like lighting.