nVidia orders Omegadrive to "cease & desist"!

[digitalwanderer]

I really should be over being surprised by nVidia, but I guess I ain't. They issued a cease and desist order to Omegadrive according to Richochet over at Driver Heaven's forums (http://www.driverheaven.net/showthread.php?s=&threadid=18884). He said:
Originally posted by Ricochet
Horrific news, extracted from another source (nforcershq) :-

For those of you that have been loyal fans of Omega's modified GeForce drivers (some of the best in the business), there's some bad news. nVidia has told him to cease and desist modification of their code, to remove all nVidia logos from his personal site, and no longer distribute what has become the driver of choice for many, many enthusiasts.

I don't understand why nVidia has to be so heavy-handed, especially if there's someone that is helping to give people a better experience than the stock, out-of-box setup. Oh well, at least ATI works with the guy! All the more reason (amongst many more) to switch to the world's latest dominating graphics card maker.

Seriously though, nvidia are far from being in a prime position to make decisions like these, what with the spotlight already focusing on several negative aspects of their operation nowadays as it is... they have been stepping on eggshells for a little while now, and this just adds more weight to the scenario.

:bleh:

Which Zardon's post here (http://www.driverheaven.net/showthread.php?s=&threadid=18877) seems to indicate may be pretty bang-on accurate! :eek:

Terry Makedon comments on ATi's stance towards Omegadrive from the Million Man Lan in Kentucky (http://www.driverheaven.net/showthread.php?s=&threadid=18892), basically saying:

Terry Makedon:
We are very pleased that gaming enthusiasts are interested in CATALYST and ATI product. We appreciate the efforts that Omega puts into providing alternatives to hardware enthusiasts. As such, Omega is one of the original members of the CATALYST beta testing program, and recently we have worked with him to help him provide Omega drivers on the same day as CATALYST's get posted. Although CATALYST is fully tested and fully supported by ATI, I dont feel that enthusiasts (that understand the risks involved) having an alternative to CATALYST is a bad thing. Thanks for the support to the ATI community Omega!
Anyone notice a night/day difference here too? ;)

[poursoul]

Damn!

nvidia actually continues to suprise me every day. i feel very foolish.

very bad move indeed nvidia. this kind of thing makes me even more suspicious of thier drivers.

[phye2002]

The way things are going, I feel that the end result is going to be nvidia spending all their time making the drivers, optimizing the drivers, but you won't actually be able to install the drivers under fear of being sued or having a rabid pack of weasels set upon you. It's common practice to tinker with things like drivers, and settings.. that's why ther are there. Let's see things in cronologica order....the Ti series was great, so Nvidia let everyone show their support but modding drivers. The Fx series is still under debate for some people, but it's not a home run like the company intended, not to mention shrouded in the murky haze of cheating allogations, and shady buisness practices. To counter these allogations Nvidia has now decided to punish all those people that support them for not fully supporting the Fx series.


Nvidia god-"I am angry that you didn't welcome my table scraps with unconditional love. I am to punish you by taking away something you love. Fail me again, and my wrath will be great"

[Matthyahuw]

if you spent 100s of hours on designing something, would you want some spoon-head to come around and mess with it? Plus all he's doing is messing with the LoD anyway, and mixing and matching dlls...

[EMunEeE]

Originally posted by Matthyahuw
if you spent 100s of hours on designing something, would you want some spoon-head to come around and mess with it? Plus all he's doing is messing with the LoD anyway, and mixing and matching dlls...

So, its the way nVIDIA is acting. nVIDIA ****ing sucks. They are acting like little ol children. If I were Omega I'd keep doin it and forget about nVIDIA. :afro:

[Sazar]

Originally posted by $E Mun$
So, its the way nVIDIA is acting. nVIDIA ****ing sucks. They are acting like little ol children. If I were Omega I'd keep doin it and forget about nVIDIA. :afro:

if you were omega you would not bother with this...

it is not worth it... :)

you would do as the lawyers said UNLESS you had a huge piggy bank to fight frivilous lawsuits...

[john19055]

It still makes you think Nvidia have something to hide,this way they make there driver's the way there meant to be played! It just wierd that it did'nt bother them with the TI sieres when he mix and match different drivers and added some LOD.I never used omega driver's with nvidia cards,I used them with 3DFX cards,but it still makes you think what are they afraid of,It not like he actually writes a different code for them.And some people swear by them,I just don't see what it would hurt.

[Dazz]

I never used Omega drivers b4, anyone got a link to them or have they all been taken down. Omega hasn't got a choice, it's contiune what they are doing or be sued with no chance of wining for more money then they could ever make. It's a no win situation.

[CWB]

*Yawn*

[hjs]

Originally posted by Matthyahuw
if you spent 100s of hours on designing something, would you want some spoon-head to come around and mess with it? Plus all he's doing is messing with the LoD anyway, and mixing and matching dlls...

What has nVidia got to lose? If omega drivers are crap and only some LOD mods (and thats only in the HQ version) nobody would use them. But many people, myself included, are running omega drivers. We have a choice and that's over all we can do is use newer or older drivers from nVidia.

As soon as i have some cash i get rid of my ti-4200 en get me a Radeon :cool:
ATI spend the same kind of money and they don't care, they support omega !! :angel:

[digitalwanderer]

Originally posted by hjs
ATI spend the same kind of money and they don't care, they support omega !! :angel:
They not only support Omegadrive, they also support the community as a whole just about as well! :cool:

ATi, it ain't your daddy's video card company! (Well, except mebbe in the case of me son & daughter... :bleh: )

[hordaktheman]

A month ago, my ti4200 burned out and I got myself a 9500 pro. I'm no fanboy, and having used an nvidia card for the past 4 years, the time had come for change (not to mention that the 9500pro's are the better choice at the moment).

I've seen nvidia go from being a friendly, charming small company to an unethical monster, and I really have to say that now I'm glad I jumped ship at the right time.

Even though ATi haven't been perfect, NVidia has been reaching for ever lower lows.

[PsychoSy]

Originally posted by Matthyahuw
if you spent 100s of hours on designing something, would you want some spoon-head to come around and mess with it? Plus all he's doing is messing with the LoD anyway, and mixing and matching dlls...

If the said spoon-head manages to seperate the wheat from the chaff - the good code from the junk code - accross a sea of mutiple driver packs, and in do so, his results show an improvement in image quality and performance (two things the end-user ALWAYS wants), then the paid code monkey deserves to have his 100s of design hours flushed down the proverbial hopper.

The practice of "driver salad" is nothing new. In fact, when 3Dfx was on life support just before The nVidia Purchase, the overall asinine quality of their official & beta drivers spurred people to experiment with some mixing and matching. The result? Mixxed drivers that improved performance, image quality, installed correctly, and were leagues better than anything 3Dfx offered. It was so bad that it got to the point where many end-users would only trust those mixxed drivers because they worked and didn't bork their machines.

When some unpaid random jamook takes peices of your work over a course of time and the compiliations of that work equals improvements accross the board, YOU are the one that needs to take notice and go back to the drawing board. Omega is simply doing what many other reliable 3DfxGamers.Com mainstays did and they did it mainly for themselves but also as a way to show 3Dfx's driver team at what period of time their driver code was robust or useless.

If 3Dfx's - and now nVidia's driver team - had any inkling of common sense, they would've seriously looked at what the community stumbled upon with their mixing and matching of DLLs and VxDs and used that knowledge to better optimize their driver code. Doing so would've drastically reduced their 100s of hours of design time because they'd be focusing soley on the parts of those drivers from the salad that works instead of wasting time fooling around with their more recent garbage coding that doesn't.

Instead, 3Dfx sat on their duffs hoping to ride wave after wave to the bank on their "brand recognition" and "logo" (which ultimately served as one aspect of thousands that eventually sealed 3Dfx's doom). I call it the poisons of pride and arrogance and it's apparent that with nVidia's purchase of 3Dfx's patents along with the hiring of a good portion of 3Dfx employees, some of that poison has spilled over, slowly pickeling what were once brilliant minds at nVidia.

And that is the difference between ATi and nVidia. When you're the leader, you feel no threat from anyone and honestly believe nothing will knock your 400-pound girth out of the banana tree. That's why ATi has established a working relationship with Omega - they don't view him as a threat. But when you've been knocked out of the banana tree and scrambling to hold the reigns together, that's when you make goofy decision after goofy decision. In this case, nVidia is viewing Omega as a threat purely from their own sense of Yousarian-esque paranoia. And for those that have ever read or watched "Catch-22", Yousarian's paranoia was purely a figment of his own imagination.

ATi will inherit their own Yousarian-esque sense of paranoia and will make simular stupid decisions as nVidia has. But their stance on Omega's drivers is proof positive they won't be inherting such paranoia today or anytime in the near future.

[saturnotaku]

But he's not really separating any good from from "junk code." He's just switching some files around. Separating wheat from wheat, to use your analogy. And for a lot of folks (myself included) who have used his NVIDIA drivers we haven't seen improvements in either speed or image quality.

While I don't condone the way NVIDIA handled this situation (they probably could simply have sent a nice e-mail asking him to stop) I can understand why they did it.

[digitalwanderer]

^^^^^^^^
GREAT post!

[PsychoSy]

Originally posted by saturnotaku
But he's not really separating any good from from "junk code." He's just switching some files around. Separating wheat from wheat, to use your analogy. And for a lot of folks (myself included) who have used his NVIDIA drivers we haven't seen improvements in either speed or image quality.

Well, those folks who have tried Omega's drivers purely have an edge over me because I never have - I just use whatever nVidia (or some OEM) releases/leaks to us. :p So, I don't know personally if his driver salad works. I just take the position that what he's doing is nothing different than what happened many moons ago with the 3Dfx community and I don't see nothing wrong with it. Apparently his driver salad is working for a specific niche while not showing much a difference for others.

While I don't condone the way NVIDIA handled this situation (they probably could simply have sent a nice e-mail asking him to stop) I can understand why they did it.

Better yet, a simple honest question like, "What is it about our drivers that suck so much that motivates you to whip up driver salad? And give us a detailed explaination along with detailed criteria like BIOS version, RAM, motherboard, OS, etc."

If he's claiming performance or IQ increases with his driver salad, then nVidia should be able to reproduce it themselves - which is the kicker right there. During the 3Dfx driver salad days, 3Dfx often were able to confirm such performance and IQ increases and sometimes done their own salad tosses with their own Betas. So, clearly, if nVidia or ATi can't recreate or confirm Omega's finding when they test his driver salad packs, then perhaps Omega is offering lemon juice that's really nothing more than urine. ;)

But then again, even if nVidia or ATi can't, there's still the community and if they're getting performance and IQ increases, then I think the whole thing dovetails into something deeper than just driver salad alone, like the vasts differences in hardware the community may be using in their rigs.

No matter how you shake it, driver salad is more of an art that relies more on blind luck than science. Nevertheless, making a stink about it is pointless because whenever somebody does, someone else will crop up in defense of Omega. In light of that, I think nVidia has more important things to worry about and ATi might just be humoring the guy for PR's sake much along the same lines as Sega did during the whole emulator craze a few years back.

When Nintendo and the IDSA were shutting down sites left and right, Sega's attitude was merely, "Yeah, it's illegal but we're not going to go out of our way to stop the Genesis emulation and ROM distribution scene as militantly as Nintendo and the IDSA are. We've got bigger fish to fry and it would be best to pool our resources into them than our dead legacies. In other words, we don't officially condone or frown about it..." And many eumulation nuts flocked to Sega's side. In fact, one of their own free-lance developers - Steve Snake, I believe his name was - was also the author of one of the more popular DOS based Genesis emulators at the time (there was his emulator and another emulator - GeneCyst - written by the same folks behing Nesticle).

[StealthHawk]

Originally posted by PsychoSy
But then again, even if nVidia or ATi can't, there's still the community and if they're getting performance and IQ increases, then I think the whole thing dovetails into something deeper than just driver salad alone, like the vasts differences in hardware the community may be using in their rigs.

Have your seen screenshots of the supposed IQ increases on Omega's own website? There is so horrible texture aliasing in those shots. In fact, I wager that the IQ is worse than the stock drivers.

Don't know how good his performance drivers are.

[The Baron]

I haven't heard anyone say anything good about the NVIDIA Omega drivers... just LoD adjustments.

[Pandur]

The only thing I liked with the Omegadrivers is the modified .inf file he used for the install which added more resolutions and had coolbits enabled as default etc. I always installed the version without LOD tweaks etc. I tried the tweaked ones once and I couldn't stand the horrible texture aliasing they provide so I retweaked the LOD etc which nullifies the whole meaning with those drivers.
But I like what he did to the inf file.