Continued:

Now, lets say your goal is to play Half-Life 2 and Doom III. Which card should you go for? After your research, you know for a fact that no matter which card you buy, performance will be sacrificed in one of the industry’s leading titles. I place the blame for much of this on the game developer’s shoulders, since they are optimizing their games for specific hardware or as they like to call it "taking advantage of specific hardware features". Whatever the name, the bottom line is that it obscures our decisions. So, maybe I should e-mail these developers and ask for the best solution. But then again, I have a feeling that I already know what their replies will be. The fact of the matter is even they have don’t even know what graphics card to buy. They are end-users, too, and when they leave their corporate structure, they have to make decisions just like us. But unfortunately for them, the games are heavily sponsored by either NVIDIA or ATI. We can see the joint advertising that goes on with sponsors and I don’t know if money is exchanging hands, which I doubt, but whatever the reason may be it needs to stop. And it needs to end with Doom III and Half-Life 2.

Quite honestly, I don’t want the upcoming, next generation games to favor certain graphics cards. Not only will that skew performance numbers in graphics card evaluations, but it just won’t be fair to those of us who like to play a broad range of games. Does this mean that we will have to purchase cards from both companies in order to get the maximum performance in our favorite titles? I sure hope not. In my opinion, all of these companies should compete against each other fairly in the market. When you start adding "partners" and "sponsors" to the list, you can expect a crooked path sooner or later (we are already there). Whatever happened to all the commitments and promises that these companies made to us when they first launched their latest products? Shouldn’t they just take care of their customers and end these partnerships? We can only hope that enough consumers put pressure on them to bring an end to the much-criticized partnerships. I completely understand that they have to do business, which means generating revenues from wherever possible, but a word of caution: please keep your customers out of this.

I think it can be a good thing that games take advantage of hardware features available form both ATI and NVIDIA, but the support should be equal and justified. In Half-Life 2 and Doom III, it seems obvious that the developers first coded for their sponsored hardware partners and then ported over the game to run on the competition. This is not the way it should work. Another way to "take advantage of certain hardware features" would be to just do that. It would be perfectly fine with me if Half-Life 2 took advantage of NVIDIA’s SM 3.0. After all, the feature is there for us to use and it would only be a justice if it gets utilized. That being said, I would like companies to take advantage of these features and not manipulate them to get higher performance results for their partners. Altering the shader model would be fine, but tweaking the rest of the code to support NVIDIA GPUs to a much better degree would not be. We, as customers, demand fair treatment for our chosen hardware. I know we can’t and shouldn’t expect hardware companies to play fair with each other, but I am largely talking about game developers here. I think that if they were to take a little more responsibility to deliver similar performance in all hardware (unless of course the hardware itself is optimized to take score higher in performance results), then picking the right graphics card wouldn’t be as difficult a task. Right now, it’s fairly worthless to even test Half-Life 2 and Doom III performance in graphics card evaluations as the outcome solely depends on the relationship between the developer and a specific GPU manufacturer.

Once again, I am not against game developers doing business. They have the right to generate revenue form all sources and to compete with each other. However, I must request that they keep their customers in mind when designing and optimizing their games. They must treat all GPUs equally and allow them to perform to their maximum potential. After all is said and done, us consumers are the ones spending money on their products. We also want our hard earned graphics cards to work at their full potential and not be compromised in these new games before we get a chance to play.