Get In The Game Intro and ATI's basic participation
Can you give us a very quick overview of what ATI's GITG program does, and how it helps developers?
[Richard]: Get In The Game is an umbrella term for a collection of activities, all of which are aimed at ensuring that games players get a 100% satisfactory experience when using ATI hardware. We work closely with developers to ensure that their games take full advantage of our hardware, we ensure excellent driver compatibility, and we try to make sure that games players know which games have been specifically tuned for ATI hardware.
We try to make this a pure win-win for the games developers and players, and we do this without throwing marketing money around. This means that you don't usually see many ATI logos at the start of games, because paying for that is just advertising, and GITG is not an advertising campaign.
Instead you see recommendations on our web site, you see frequent driver releases on there too, all of which are tuned to give the smoothest and highest quality playing experience, and you see games developers and publishers walking around with smiles on their faces because we reduce QA problems for them.
The GITG programme is basically available to all game developers and publishers, but we also have a focussed set of publishers and titles that we work more closely with and we give them a kind of "Platinum Service".
These top tier developers are the guys who get frequent on-site visits, we regularly listen to them about what they want in our next chips and drivers, and we publicise their games on our web site. We guarantee to keep their games in our QA lab for longer than most, and we help to co-market their games to our board manufacturing partners. It's an expensive process for us, and it costs us a huge amount of effort - but it's all worthwhile because we're able to make that gaming experience the very best imaginable.
That presumably means Get In The Game developers receive new hardware and driver samples before general retail availability?
[Richard]: We give early access to both hardware and drivers to bona fide developers, and you'd be amazed by the scale of this operation.
World-wide, ATI has seeded approaching ten thousand graphics cards to game developers over the last two years. And that's purely with the aim of ensuring that people who buy our graphics cards get the best possible experience. That's a pretty expensive commitment from ATI.
Along with that we give access to pre-release drivers to our registered developers, but realistically we find that our regular driver releases mean that any issues tend to be visible to the developer well ahead of when their game is completed, so only a small minority of game developers make aggressive demands on our beta drivers.
Two or three years ago a majority of my work involved handling driver bug reports and chasing fixes. These days our drivers are so good, and our QA procedure so extensive that games developers love working with our public release drivers and don't often find themselves uncovering bugs.
How active are ATI in helping GITG developers write general code and shaders that runs well on that ATI hardware, using those drivers?
[Richard]: We have a small but very active technical team who help with this kind of work. Around the world we have about a dozen engineers who are willing to go out and work on site with developers. Recently a colleague of mine, we'll call him "Dave" to preserve his anonymity though his real name is Dave Horne, went to Digital Illusions in Sweden and spent a week on site working with them on the code for a future version of Battlefield. Dave has also spent time working with the Tomb Raider guys. Previously we've also put staff into other locations including England, the Ukraine and even California for one of the Medal of Honour titles. It tends to be pretty demanding work, but I'm pleased to say that ATI have the best staff in the business so we get great results.
More often we get requests for single shader effects, or help understanding what's wrong with a complex shader. These usually get solved through e-mail or on the phone, and obviously with finite resources we need to focus our attention on the games that players will see most of all, so high profile franchises like Medal of Honour or Battlefield get the most special attention.
An unexpected strength of ATI's recent hardware (that's numbers from the 9500 upwards right up to the X800 range) is that it's very general in the way that it handles DirectX and OpenGL programming. In particular "optimising" DirectX 9 code for our recent hardware usually comes down to nothing more than writing fast, efficient code. There are no special tricks, no hoops for the programmers to jump through and as a result games just run better and faster on ATI hardware. That's one reason why gamers get a better "out of the box" experience with ATI. There's a very real sense in which all DirectX games are tuned for ATI simply because they're written in DirectX - and that's about 90% of shipping games!
