The gamer's benefit from Get In The Game
Finally, what's the most obvious tangible benefit to ATI that's been passed onto the gamer, that's resulted from active developer relations over the past couple of years, since ATI dropped R300 on the world when DX9 hit?
[Richard]: My personal view is that the single most tangible benefit from ATI over the last two years (i.e. since the launch of the 9700 Pro) has been the 'out of the box' experience.
The hardware we produce is, in a sense, very generic. Here I mean that it simply handles DirectX 9 really well. We don't have to go to extraordinary lengths to get the best from the hardware, and neither do games developers.
Our drivers are mature, robust, clean and fast. You can take a Radeon card and install the latest drivers and you then know that all games (past present and future) are going to play well. We have drivers that don't cheat, they work first time on almost all games, they crash less than other people's drivers, and they give a smoother playing experience.
And on those rare occasions when you do meet a problem, then our commitment to a driver release every month means that you know how long it will be before you can expect a fix. I think ATI has gone a long way to improving the game playing experience on PCs and in many ways its now a more console-like experience.
Wrapping it all up
Before I move on to Get In The Game specifically, I think the thing that's most apparent from Richard's answers is that Devrel at ATI is a fun process. He gets to work with very capable hardware, making his life a lot easier, and he gets to work with the smartest games developers around. Get In The Game therefore seems like an obvious public-facing access point to ATI's existing devrel work, and the developer relations team world-wide slot into that process quite nicely. That Richard was happy to be interviewed about the process is something that might not have happened so easily in the past, prior to Get In The Game's new outgoing personality, if you'll forgive the human comparison.Some of his answers are quite telling of the way ATI have changed over the last few years, since R300's inception and ATI's strong performance ever since. His statement that working at ATI now is similar to working his first couple of years at NVIDIA is particularly insightful (even if he has said the same thing elsewhere before!).
He touches on the Catalyst driver team's focussed efforts which again makes his job much easier, and a lot different, to what it used to be like.
He's also happy to admit that ATI aren't going to rest on their laurels, something that they've maybe been accused of recently by some.
Overall, it's clear that at least some of ATI's recent hardware and driver successes have been the result of direct input from their developer relations programme. And to sum up, that seems to be basically what Get In The Game is all about from a developer's point of view, which leads on nicely to the consumer benefits.
ATI use Get In The Game, by close collaboration with developers, to allow their hardware to run the latest and greatest games as well as possible, as fast as possible, with very little problems. That is your direct end user benefit from the programme and something to latch on to, rather than any corporate game tie-in or endorsement. His "console-like" comment has arguably never rung more true, although it's unlikely that it's ever going to reach that kind of install-and-go nirvana, unless the basic tenet of PC consumer hardware changes drastically.
Even if we don't see that startup logo any time soon, your real gaming benefit from Get In The Game seems pretty clear, and it's down to ATI's developer interaction.
