Rapid Time to Market ... or Reliability?

Sorry for the lack of updates, I have been away on a number of trips. One of the trips I went on was not work related. I went with a bunch of friends from all over the world to Ensenada to do a Wide Open Baja tour. If anyone hasn't done this I would highly recommend it - it was a memorable trip - completely awesome, and I'll certainly to it again. Check it out at wideopenbaja.com.

I wrote this next article for print this month - it's probably going to raise a few eyebrows, but to be perfectly frank, I'm tired of people asking me why we haven't launched the latest and greatest video card while our competitors have. There is a damn good reason for everything.. read on, and feel free to comment.

When the concept of high-performance PCs came about in the early ’90s, very few people expected this once geek-only hobby would explode into something greater. We watched as new revolutionary hardware manufacturers like 3dfx turned 2D into live 3D. Even though they used our name (and I’m still bitter about it), we loved the new direction the industry took.

At that time, Intel and others balked at the notion that anyone would want a graphics card that did little more than spit a 2D image onto your 14-inch VGA display.

Both Nvidia and ATI drove the hardware to new levels, thereby freeing game developers and 3D content creators to dream about solutions they wanted to create rather than hardware limitations and “imagination ceilings.” AMD was a major grassroots supporter of performance gaming; the company had a dedicated staff of people who would ensure that companies like mine had access to the latest and greatest hardware.

Better late than never, Intel arrived on the scene with its edgy advertising and “street teams” who would spend most of their time trying to build bridges with the performance PC manufacturers in order to build the halo effect that AMD was already enjoying.

Back in the day, when your application didn’t work, you would either download a patch or wait for Nvidia or ATI to drop a new driver; our partners would acknowledge pressing issues and fix them quickly.

Those were the days when we hand-built PCs, and we could usually get everything working with just a few challenges. Hardware manufacturers would sell us hardware that worked for the most part, and when it didn’t work, they would acknowledge the problem and let us know they were working on a fix.

So what’s new?

Since Microsoft launched Vista, it seems like things have changed for the worse. Even the latest service pack, albeit an improvement, doesn’t fix all the bugs we run into. While we continue to struggle with these issues, we’re finding that leading in “time to market” with the latest hardware is more of a detriment to our customers than a benefit.

In other words, we aren't launching all the cutting-edge stuff because it's all coming too quickly, when everyone knows there are still considerable issues that need to be dealt with. Hardware manufacturers are getting way ahead of themselves. They’re trying to ramrod more GPU power, huge power supply requirements, and larger memory requirements into a PC that still has core issues.

Take, for instance, memory requirements. Anyone who’s in the know should realize that more video cards equals less addressable memory for the OS. One solution would be to install Vista 64 so a system can easily address more than 4GB of memory, but of course not everyone is ready with Vista 64 drivers, and so it goes.

When you play games with more than two video cards, your chances of “dropping the driver” in Vista increase exponentially. In other words, you might successfully play for two minutes or five hours, depending on the mood of your system.

For the sake of winning benchmarks, we’re witnessing many computer companies jam hardware that they know doesn’t work into their review machines. The reviewers run scripted benchmarks and they don’t spend the time actually testing the system beyond the surface.

Recently, one of our partners requested a quote for a press release on a new solution, and I had to decline. Whether it’s a hardware or software problem, why would we publically support a solution that we know is plagued with problems?

Although ATI has a unique way of dealing with the issue by disguising the error from the customer, it’s time that Microsoft, AMD (ATI), and Nvidia host a summit with their top engineers and gets these problems fixed.

It’s also time we dump 32-bit OSes: They simply do not meet the latest hardware needs.

Not all is doom and gloom, though—ATI just dropped a hotfix, and so far it looks to be going in the right direction.

Now that we’ve made our position clear to our partners (no more “time to market” until a solution is tight), they’re listening and actively working on the problems. (or at least we hope they are) You can thank us later. . . ;-)