This needs to be watched....

<font color=red>*</font color=red><font color=white>*</font color=white><font color=blue>*</font color=blue>
... And I'm proud to be an American, where at least I know I'm free, and I won't forget the men who died, who gave that right to me.

I dunno, but im hoping that it is just in the form of advertising, like at the beginning of UT2003 (which is amusing that it looks so well on my 9700 pro).

I really think its a shame, but lets just hope it is just words and logos, not restrictive code.

<font color=red>*</font color=red><font color=white>*</font color=white><font color=blue>*</font color=blue>
... And I'm proud to be an American, where at least I know I'm free, and I won't forget the men who died, who gave that right to me.

EA games blow most of the time anyways. Who care about them... So nVidia now have exclusive support from EA on Earth & Beyond and Motor City Online(dead)? Who gives a damn.

I signed up for Earthviewer and Nvidia has there name all over it as well <A HREF="http://www.earthviewer.com/index.html" target="_new"> earthviewer</A>

***************************************
When you feel that reality does not suit you, live a fantasy life.

EA has been neglecting their ATI users for a long time, I've had many games that took weeks or months for a patch to be issued curing a driver incompatabity.

<font color=blue>Watts mean squat if you don't have quality!</font color=blue>

I can see it now:
R450 gets 400000 marks in 3d mark 2003. Nv 40 gets 58.
R450 gets 45fps in Madden '04. NV 40 gets 400000.
If Nvidia is going to go down this route, then maby ATI should partner with John Carmack (Doom 3), blizzard (do I have to name 'em?), and valve (if there ever is a Half-Life 2). These games are way more popular than what EA could ever make.
This sort of thing I think is very bad for the gaming community as a whole.

Don't forget Battlefield 1942.

I hate EA because their games are usually really slick-looking, have good game-play, but are buggy as hell.

As far as the deal with nVidia goes, I wonder what's in it for EA. I can see why nVidia would want game developers optimizing for nVidia hardware, but how does it benefit EA to show preference to one hardware manufacturer? I mean, you would think EA would stand to lose far more money by pi$$ing off the ATI users than nVidia could shell out to line their pockets.

Why do I smell a back-room deal where EA's Directors of marketing and R&D are now driving new Ferraris?


<-----Insert witty sig line here.


<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by Twitch on 04/12/03 03:35 PM.</EM></FONT></P>

I edited it...I KNEW someone was gonna say that.


<-----Insert witty sig line here.

You miss the whole point people who have supported EA for a long time (I have most EA NHL'XX) and helped build THEIR company get pissed like any loyal customer when they take it up the hoop, or basket.

Yeah it's business, and we shall see how much they loose if they screw their fans. Rememeber EA isn't the ONLY player in gaming and 989 and Sega would be more than happy to take all their disgruntled consumers. And we will see what the overall impact is, if people boycott EA, <b>NOT</b> buy Nvidia (you don't get it do you?) then you may see this deal crumble.

<b> I have Cup Fever and have been Quarantined for the duration. <font color=yellow> GO </font color=yellow> Bruins <font color=yellow> !!!! </font color=yellow></b>

- You need a licence to buy a gun, but they'll sell anyone a stamp <i>(or internet account)</i> ! <font color=red>RED</font color=red> <font color=green>GREEN</font color=green> GA to SK

This is extremely worrying. Surely most ppl cant afford 2 state of the art pc's for gaming purposes. You may think that just swapping the card will do but you will need the software on a diff hard drive/partition because we all know what a pain it can be going from ati to nvidea and vise versa. Besides if this nonsense does go through i would not buy any software optimised for the other card that i have at the time because im not spending another 300 quid on a top rate card to play the thing! Anyways if this does go through i think it will slowly kill off pc gaming. Ive been playin pc games for years, still play counter-strike but it seems i wont be gettin many new games from now on 0_o

The most popular game in the PC world..... What is that? There are only about 30 games in the history of man kind that ever sold more than a million copies, all of Blizzard's PC games(BroodWar, StarCraft, WarCraft 1, 2, 3, Diablo 1, 2) Final Fantasy 7, Lineage, just to name a few. EA is definitly NOT one of the best out there. Their only saving grace is The Sims(not counting the expansions, those didn't sell as good as the original). And after chunking out 504985043253840523 bajillion expansions even that title has gone straight down the toilet.

Yes I HATE EA. They bought out WestWood, one of the finest pioneer in the RTS industry. They bought them, forced them to speed up their games. The result? Every WW game after Red Alert sucked major balls. Maybe Generals is a little bit better but it was no longer but then again it's still not that good. And you know what a few months ago they destroyed WestWood. Now that name is gone forever.

Uhhh, The Sims. Duh!!! Yeah I hate the damn game, but I know the reality of it's power. Yeah you may want to qualify their achievement, however they're still number 1 by a LONG shot on PCs.
Sure GTA-III beats it on the console and MAYBE overall, but for the PC platform, which is what we are talking about, Sims is still the all time champ, and that's not even including SimCity, etc..
You may Hate EA, but try to at least stick with reality.

I liked EA, only because NHL'XX was/is AWESOME, however their recent activities have ticked me off!

The reality is they have POWER, the thing is it will only affect me a BIT, since I don't play 1942, or MEdal of Honour or C&C, but I will be pissed if I lose NHL2004 to this deal.

But Hey, I've never really tried 989 or Sega's hockey; or even Microsoft's new Hockey game. Man ya' really gotta tick me off to force me to turn to MicroSnot!

- You need a licence to buy a gun, but they'll sell anyone a stamp <i>(or internet account)</i> ! <font color=red>RED</font color=red> <font color=green>GREEN</font color=green> GA to SK

lol business? what is business? business is giving your customers what they want and giving your investors returns for their investments, period. however, customers MUST be happy or your investment goes south, as well, the company. on the other hand i agree in that i dont see why ea, esp. with the recent sucess of bf-1942 would want to align themselves with nvidia exclusively. one could say bribe, payoff ect. but that still wouldnt make sence, as we now see ati is getting a great deal more customers. as for code specific games, i will have to admitt most times they look and play much better (remember 3dfx). but it is ironic that in retrospect nvidia chooses to tout their unified driver platform as a base for sales and customer satisfaction, which has been a great sucess. i personally use nvida for my graphics choice at present but if i had to choose based on whats best at present i'd own a ati 9700 pro ONLY if ati would go to a unified driver platform as nvidia has. i also think you'd see a reverse attitude in the gaming world if ati did this. one can not get around the fact that ati cards have always been buggy with certain games because of their driver platform not being unified. i personally feel that from a consumer stand point a unified driver aspect needs to be adapted that supports all games not ones the graphics card companies determine for us (ie. reason for direct-x). in truth we the consumer pay for this "choice" of which video card we will use. now your prob saying wtf is this idiot talking about, well we pay for the games that that we play, we also are forced to pay more for said games because game companies have to do the best they can to insure that the games we buy will work cross platform and that cost money to do, ie who pays for it in the end, you and i. do you smell a 3dfx attitude here.

(old person by trait)<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by alpha_03 on 04/13/03 08:48 PM.</EM></FONT></P>

.....and some Americans too.

My Score..<A HREF="http://service.futuremark.com/compare?2k1=6258104" target="_new">http://service.futuremark.com/compare?2k1=6258104</A>

Why is it I wish that I was Canadian right now?...I'm a big Terrance and Phillip fan budday!

My Score..<A HREF="http://service.futuremark.com/compare?2k1=6258104" target="_new">http://service.futuremark.com/compare?2k1=6258104</A>

saw this in another forum, about the only suggestion I have is e-mail EA and tell them you will not buy any games as long as they code them for nVidia cards, even if you own a nVidia card. This is not good for business's. If nVidia does this to enough company's, bye bye ATi, bye bye competitive prices. I hope nothing like that happens -_-

"What kind of idiot are you?"
"I don't know, what kinds are there?"

Mmm'kay!

My Score..<A HREF="http://service.futuremark.com/compare?2k1=6258104" target="_new">http://service.futuremark.com/compare?2k1=6258104</A>

Crashman u hard ...

You have the wisdom of the da-lai la-ma.

"And if the temptation NOT to BUY the game when they already own a warez copy is too great, well, that's the price EA pays for their decision."

Point taken all. When we grow up we want to be the Crashman.

Looking at the computing market history, we all see the same trend. One smart guy comes out with an idea to make software or hardware -> he starts a company -> making money -> beat the competitor -> make more money -> purchase the defeated (or poor) competitor -> become arrogant and stink -> lose market -> law suit -> beaten by another smart guy, but the original smart guy already suck up billion of dollars from loyal consumers, especially fanboy and thus he can use his money to hire a hitman... (I made this up ^_^') So yesterday we point our gun at Micro$oft and Int$l, today we may point at nVi$ia and EA Game$, tomorrow may be AT$ and $MD. This is common in bussiness world, there is no friend or fued forever. We don't like monopolic trade but sometime it's beyond our control. If we really have to boycott every monopolic company, we should stop eating bread because the whole world's wheat bussiness is under control of 5 companies. Where is the equality of competition phrased by WTO in this?
And the 'warez' theory made by Crashman has been practising well in Asia. You know in my country, Micro$oft gives the computer retailers cash reward if they sell original copy of Windows XP. And origianl copies of games is almost non-existence. A warez copy of pc game only selling at USD$1 while original copy is selling at USD$50. And I must say this is illegal but nobody cares. I don't want to deny that every games by EA I've played is warez, so EA already lose its profit on me!

You never know how stupid you are until you have done something stupid enough for you to realize it.
<A HREF="http://www.anandtech.com/mysystemrig.html?id=22996" target="_new">My System Rig</A>

Unified drivers? I thought thats what the Cat's were all about. And I do remember all the games I played that had the 3Dfx splash screens... Ah the days of Glide.. and all those extra damn files you had to get... I love my voodoo3...*shakes head*

Anyhow.. I think if you wants a game to look exactly one way.. put it on a platform. But if they start taking and making games that perform worse on an equivilent or better platform, just as a pitch to market sales, I will vote with my feet and my wallet.

<font color=red>*</font color=red><font color=white>*</font color=white><font color=blue>*</font color=blue>
... And I'm proud to be an American, where at least I know I'm free, and I won't forget the men who died, who gave that right to me.