http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=NDc0

Oh, how it seems as if the tables have turned, faggots...

I know it's a couple months old, but with all of the bickering and BS surrounding the current crop of nVidia and ATI video cards, I thought I would bring it to the front of the heap.

You know, you ATI Fanboys also have to admit your card is inferior sometimes. You cannot be number one everywhere and everytime.

Now for a little graphics card programming lesson:
Let's say there are two companies that manufacture DX9 compatible hardware. We shall call them BTI and mVidia.
Now, there is this super-hyped game coming out called Half-Price 2, made by a company called Gasket.
They claim BTI card's run an "unoptomized standard DX9" code path and have far superior performance over a certain competing mVidia product. The mVidia product cannot utilize the "unoptomized standard DX9" code path effectively and is forced into using a Mixed-Mode imitation for suitable performance. Gasket claims this code path (Mixed-Mode) was optomized 5x more than the "unoptomized standard DX9" path. However, that means only one chipset uses the "unoptomized standard DX9" path. Which means in standard optomization procedures it would be modified for best performance on BTI hardware. Now we effectively have two seperate and distinct optomized code paths for current hardware.

Conclusion (for those who like to skim):
Gasket optomized their game, Half-Price 2, for BTI hardware just as much as they optomized for mVidia hardware. (possibly even more for BTI cards compared to mVidia) Coincidentally, BTI and Gasket have a mutual agreement to push each others software/hardware. Very interesting...hmm.

Now, the smart ones out there (you know who you are) will claim that "unoptomized standard DX9" follows Microsoft's Standards for DirectX 9 closer. But hardware could support DX9 natively before DX9 was released...meaning there have / could have been changes to DirectX9 after silicon layouts and core designs were "taped" out and finalized for production. Conspiracy theory, you tell me...