Helping out developers and researching GITG
Carrying on with the developer assistance, are ATI willing to create tools such as ASHLI, should they spot a need for a tool that would help a broad set of GITG developers?
[Richard]: ATI puts a lot of work and thought into the tools that we provide to developers. If you go to the developer web site at ati.com/developer then you'll see tools like Ashli and Render Monkey. Both of those tools were created to fill holes in the industry. Ashli allows you to compile and run many standard RenderMan shaders, and Render Monkey creates a collaborative environment which gets artists and programmers more productive. We produced these because we believed that without these tools (or tools like them) it would be hard for games development to keep up with the pace of graphics innovation. But we emphatically do not produce these tools to take control for ourselves. As soon as there are tool vendors who produce high quality alternatives then we step aside and focus elsewhere.
ATI is doing this because we're working to enhance the ecosystem for games development. A games developer or artist who is more productive is more valuable than one who is busy writing tools. And ATI simply wants the games industry to remain productive. We want games out there which show just how awesome our hardware is, and so we go a long way to empowering developers and artists.
What's good for them is good for us.
The cheeky question now. Why is GITG barely visible and such a hard thing to research, when NVIDIA are so keen to push TWIMTBP? Aren't ATI looking for the same thing from their consumer-facing devrel efforts?
[Richard]: We've made quite a few changes recently to how much emphasis we're putting on GITG, and as time goes by you should see more from us. But it's really important to us that this genuinely helps games developers and players. We don't intend to invest money in getting our logo into the splash screens of games since we thank that is amazingly unproductive. Advertising like that is only aimed at making the advertiser richer. We want to enrich the whole process. We want games to be better, because that allows gamers to get at more of the value in their graphics cards, and we want games developers to be able to enjoy the benefits of faster production timetables and lower development costs.
Once games, games developers and publishers all feel the benefit then ATI will benefit too. It's a simple principle of win-win that we're following, but it does mean that sometimes we don't get the visibility that other programmes get.
