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| Interview with ADAM FOAT - conducted by Zardon |
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Adam Foat - Product PR Manager For Northern Europe
Adam: My name is Adam Foat and I have worked for NVIDIA since February 2001. I have worked in the 3D graphics industry for a few years now, starting my working life at STB Systems. I then moved onto 3dfx, following their purchase of STB in 99 if I remember correctly. I then moved to ELSA before joining NVIDIA as Technical Marketing Manager. Given the increasing complexity of the reviews process and of course the products themselves, I have recently taken on the role of Product PR Manger for Northern Europe so as to better support you guys! I was very proud to get a position at NVIDIA as it has been pretty much my dream to work in this industry since I was young lad. I have been an avid gamer on the PC for most of my life. I started with a Cyrix 166+ with an S3 Virge and a Voodoo1 and I have had every high end gaming card ever since. (3dfx and NVIDIA only of course ;))
Zardon: How do you feel about the current state of NVIDIA hardware and do you feel your products are currently competitive? Adam: I feel that NVIDIA’s current range of products are very competitive. Firstly, we have the only complete top to bottom line up of DirectX 9.0 GPU’s. We spent 300 million dollars in R&D last year and brought to market the GeForce FX range – this was the first time 3 brand new GPU’s were launched at the same time in 3 different market segments. With our current refreshed line up including the GeForce FX 5950 Ultra, the GeForce FX 5700 Ultra and the GeForce FX 5200 Ultra we have hit some key milestones. The GeForce FX 5200 has brought DirectX 9.0 computing to the entry level gamer. The GeForce FX 5700 Ultra is being heralded as the new Ti4200, which was our previous generation mainstream product that won almost every award in every magazine for its perfect blend of price and performance. Finally we have the GeForce FX 5950, which is competing head to head with the best the competition can offer. Overall we have sold 17 million GeForce FX GPU’s in just three quarters, that’s 4 times more than our closest competitor so I’d say the product line is looking OK for the moment.
Zardon: I asked Derek Perez in our last nvidia interview about the negative publicity regarding “optimisations” for Futuremark’s 3dmark2003 which many have seen as inappropriate. Can you perhaps explain your feelings and viewpoints on this matter and exactly what you feel is an appropriate distinction between cheating and an optimisation. Adam: It is now possible to get dramatic improvements out of our Detonator driver through what we classify as optimisation. All optimisation efforts are focused on improving application (game) performance. Games used as benchmarks will, of course, also benefit from this effort, and vice versa as in benchmarks designed to precisely emulate games will likely benefit from this effort as well (3DMark). Purely synthetic benchmarks designed to test single features are not a focus at NVIDIA and will likely not benefit from our optimisation efforts. NVIDIA has several guidelines in place just for this. An optimisation must produce the correct image; compared to Microsoft’s reference rasterizer (Refrast), we obviously compare that with our competitor’s image and we also compare it with a completely un-optimised version. The optimisation must accelerate more than just the benchmark and finally an optimisation must not contain pre-computed state like pre-computed geometry, cached textures, movie playback, and must not rely on a particular order of state that is particular to a single application. Optimisations must produce the correct image, and must accelerate the normal running of the application, not just the benchmark mode. In our view, if an optimisation produces the correct picture it is beneficial to the end user and is legitimate. If a change in the driver does not produce the correct picture, or functions only in the benchmark, it is either a bug and must be fixed, or a cheat. Optimisation for games is desirable since it improves the game and makes it more playable. On the other hand synthetic benchmarks don’t describe the “playability” and the gamer’s pleasure. The highest priority for NVIDIA is the improvement of the image quality whilst maintaining the enjoyment of playing the game itself. Our new driver 52.16 is a perfect example, demonstrating both optimization capabilities, whilst maintaining image quality and performance.
Zardon: ATI have stated they are increasing driver releases to 12 a year what is Nvidia's stance on this, any forthcoming change in policies? Adam: A new driver can accelerate games performance, fix bugs or introduce new functionalities. We do intend to introduce new drivers if one of the above criteria matches. Delivering a new driver every month does not necessarily mean that it is a good thing. Most of the time a driver is there to fix bugs and if the newer drivers are posted very often it means that the previous generation had some issues. In our philosophy a major shift in release, like from 4x.xx to 5x.xx takes about 6 months. Detonator 5X as an example provides a significant boost in performance because we have added our Unified Compiler. We have also added several new IQ fixes that follow our guidelines and introduced a range of new functionalities for single and multi-monitor such as our Gridlines utility.
Zardon: Ill be honest, the 51.75 drivers that were sent to many reviewers for testing were pretty terrible, specifically the IQ side of the driver which certainly seemed to be sacrificing quality for performance, id like you to explain Nvidia's thinking when that driver set was given to many sites (including ours). Adam: This driver was a very early beta driver that was only meant to be released to certain individuals that wanted to see what kind of performance they would be seeing out of a final driver. It was explained the driver was still potentially buggy and the image quality was not representative of what a final Det 50 driver would be like. We hoped people would wait to make their final decision when 52.16 became WHQL’d and publicly available.
Zardon: With the 52.xx available do you feel Nvidia are getting "back on track" with driver support? Adam: 52.16 obviously puts right some of the previous wrongs, but to be fair to our driver team, in terms of compatibility, stability and reliability (CSR), NVIDIA has never lost ground. Our recent Editor’s Day event saw key developers and publishers (including EA, Epic, Gearbox, Ubisoft and id Software) commend NVIDIA for the stability of our drivers – with regard to tech support calls, significantly less calls are made to these companies with GeForce related problems than they are for competitive solutions – this is simple fact and is a major reason for us having excellent working relationships with these leading gaming companies. We had a great deal of work to do to implement our Unified Compiler, and this great addition to the driver set is proof of a lot of hours of very hard work – now it’s there, things will get better and better!
Adam: All I can say is that we are committed to making our drivers the best with regards to CSR, a feature that forms the spine of our “The Way It’s Meant to be Played” programme where we guarantee compatibility across a host of new games on GeForce products – this is an important thing for many PC gamers out there – give a PC gamer the same peace of mind a console gamer has when they buy a game, and we have done our job. And it’s always worth remembering, as we still get asked what driver can users of older cards download, if you have a TNT you can still download our latest Detonator 50 driver, see performance improvements and still benefit from the new features you get from Forceware.
Zardon: How do you feel about using applications like 3dmark and Aquamark to ascertain card performance? Do you feel this gives the whole picture or should more games be used? Adam: I feel for you guys at times when it’s comes to testing 3D graphic cards because it’s certainly not as easy as it used to be. To get an accurate result of how a graphics card performs you need to test a lot more than just a standard synthetic benchmark. A whole host of game benchmarks need to be used as well as testing at different resolutions and AA and AF settings. And then you need to decide what settings to use? Do you use 16x12 8x AA and 8xAF or do you use 4x AA and 4x AF? I think synthetic benchmarks do have a use, but nobody actually plays a benchmark do they? They do play games however.
Zardon: In the past,
nvidia has focused on major steps in its process Adam: NVIDIA pioneered 0.15, and we pioneered 0.13 – when the next generation requires this leap of technology, you can bet NVIDIA will be there, but unfortunately I cannot talk about specifics at this time.
Adam: Now that would be telling!
Zardon: Any plans involving PCI express you can tell us about? Adam: PCI-Express will offer 2-4 X the current bandwidth provided by the AGP slot so there are performance gains to be had with the transition to the new interface – it’s a pretty exciting time. NVIDIA is very actively involved in the development process of this new standard, and we’ll be there when it’s ready.
Zardon: There has been a rumour floating around the net for a while now which a few of our members have been commenting stating that Nvidia's future plans may not involve producing video cards on any level, any truth in this? Adam: Don’t you just love the rumour mill ? What kind of company leaves a market it has a 62% market share in? Graphics remain our core business, it’s the platform upon which everything else was built and we will remain focused here. It’s fair to say we are expanding our business; we now have Platform products (nForce), Mobile (GeForce FX Go), Software (Forceware, Detonator, nView etc.), Handheld (GoForce) and we will continue to investigate other market opportunities if they seem viable.
Zardon: Derek stated in our last interview that Nvidia "a new way of working and interacting with the enthusiast community. There are a lot of details in the works – more online chats, Q&A’s, forum support and more." We know you held an IRC live chat with Bjorn3d, whats happening next that you can tell us? Adam: We in Europe are linking up with our US colleagues so we can get the right engineers lined up to do similar events over here – we have already been quite active in Germany with AMD and our AIC partners on live forums – it’s pretty time consuming so we won’t be there every day, but we are making every effort to increase this kind of activity. Stay tuned!
Zardon: We are hearing a lot about the forthcoming Nvidia hardware, are you excited about this? Adam: Take a guess? ;¬)
Zardon: Are you guys working closely with Valve and ID software for the forthcoming Half life 2 and Doom 3?, ive seen on our forums and many others unhappy nvidia users selling cards for competitors products after the slew of negative press which im sure you have read specifically coming from Gabe in Valve...... can you reassure our readers that these DIRECTX 9.0 games will run great on their top of the range Nvidia hardware ? Adam: NVIDIA take matters like this extremely seriously - it is very important to us that HL2 and all next generation games run well on our hardware. If the rumours are to be believed, the game appears to have been pushed out a few months from its original schedule, meaning that what has been seen in the media so far is potentially unrepresentative of the final game – changing hardware now before the game even ships is pre-emptive and may not mean the best solution at the end of the day. We continue to work extremely closely with Valve, despite the rumours, and we are fully committed to ensuring that the millions of GeForce owners out there have a great experience with this title when it arrives. We won’t let you down!
Zardon: What games are you playing right now and can you tell us your home PC spec, im guessing you are using a 5900 ultra right ? Adam: Fifa 2004 (I am a sucker for football games). My PC at home is an Athlon 2400+ on nForce2 running a GeForce FX 5900 Ultra, I am trying to get my hands on the new 5950 Ultra though! ?
Zardon: Have you ever attended any Lan parties, or have nvidia any plans on cool UK based sponsored parties or events coming up you can tell us? Adam: I have been to a few LAN parties in my time. I was at the World Cyber Games just recently in London, it was a pretty big party. We have also just got back from our NVExperience tour in London, Paris and Munich where we had a LAN party in each town. I have enclosed a couple of pictures!
Adam. Keep it Green
! :¬)
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