Get in the game
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Get in the game (GITG) is a developer relations and marketing program of ATI Technologies, a technology company best known for its PC graphics products. The program is designed to ensure that PC games take full advantage of ATI hardware, ensure driver compatibility, and publicize games which have been specifically tuned for ATI hardware. GITG is comparable to the "the way it's meant to be played" campaign of rival NVIDIA Corporation.
Driver and game engine optimisation has become an increasingly sensitive issue, with hardware reviews routinely making decisions based upon performance margins of 10-20%, well within the bounds of driver influence. As a result, both ATI and nVidia are now willing to go even further to ensure popular games are optimised for their respective chip architectures. For example, NVidia sponsored Doom 3, and ATI spent a reported $6m on Half Life 2.
When Doom 3 was released, unsurprisingly nVidia held a large performance lead. ATI analysed the code, and found shader calculations were being performed manually through a look up table, to compensate for the relatively poor performance of the FX series in this respect. Through application recognition, on the x800 card ATI reportedly found a 30% speed gain, just by moving shader calculations to hardware. To this extent, the question of who has the best graphics architecture, is becoming ever harder to answer, as with the increasing complexity of GPUs, performance becomes ever more optimisation specific.
External links
- ATI Technologies, Inc. (http://www.ati.com)
- ATI's Get In The Game web site (http://www.ati.com/gitg/index.html)
- GITG interview with ATI's Richard Huddy (http://www.hexus.net/content/reviews/review.php?dXJsX3Jldmlld19JRD03OTQ=)