ATI's Developer Relations team
How many staff does the Euro devrel team now have?
[Richard]: The European developer relations team is presently just four members of staff - two account managers, and two technical staff. Alongside them we have developer relations groups in Japan, San Jose, Boston and Toronto. We all work closely together and I'm able to draw on a huge pool of expertise in the thirty or so staff who are exclusively dedicated to supporting developers.
Working with that team there are QA labs who do a fantastic job of checking games compatibility and driver folks who take our input on what driver changes would make developers' lives easier.
The developer relations team at ATI includes the longest serving staff members that I know. For example I've been working in developer relations now for 8 years and Mike Smith, who runs the group from Toronto has been in this area for close to a decade.
And along with old-timers like me, there are folks like Eric Lundgren who joined us in Europe about 6 months ago and who was previously the R300 product manager. That means that he has a wide range of experience since he was the guy who nursed the Radeon 9700 and 9800 series cards to market.
Is there any crossover between the driver team and worldwide devrel staff who help to tune GITG partner code?
[Richard]: The driver team offer us a kind of rapid-response unit which will cope with situations like those where we have on-site staff working with developers to get a final copy of a game completed or we're working together to get a great demo ready for a show. In those cases the driver team allocates dedicated resources to making sure that the game gets all the attention it needs. Sometimes that may be bug fixes, or helping identify bugs in the game. More often it's standard optimisation advice so that we know that when the game ships it's making the very best possible use of the hardware.
Working with the driver team at ATI is a great pleasure. The drivers have an attention to quality which is unmatched, and the driver team are passionate about quality without compromise. You won't find our driver over-riding game settings to make game-based benchmarks run faster, and you won't find us reducing image quality to do the same thing either. Our public drivers are released monthly and that means that games players get to the see the results of our driver team's work far faster than any other graphic chip supplier.
