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Recently I visited ATI' Headquarters in Markham Ontario Canada. This was a great opportunity to see ATI from a point of view most do not get to see. The visit started off with an interview with Andrew Dodd an ATI Software Product Manager. I learned quite a bit from him and he was quite forthcoming in his answers, after which I was lucky enough to get a brief tour of the software division as well as one testing lab.
Over the last 2 years the quality of ATIâ??s graphics drivers have improved immensely. Was this a part of an overall strategy by ATI and was it prompted by the perceived quality of the competitionâ??s drivers at the time?
[Andrew Dodd]: It was definitely a very high priority for ATI to be perceived as having software that is the most stable, high-performance, feature-rich in the graphics industry. I think most people will agree that we've succeeded in this goal. Our frequent driver posting schedule of WHQL certified drivers, is arguable the best and most frequent in the industry.
So needless to say I think we done an admirable job with our software :-)
ATI has always been quite successful at preventing leaks of its beta drivers. To what do you contribute your success in this department in an industry where leaks are an everyday occurrence?
[Andrew Dodd]: Basically anyone we select to work with they know it's a 2 way street. They know they are getting something early and if we trace a leak back to them, they will be cut out of the program, so it's in most people's interests if they get a beta to make sure it doesn't leak out.
When you look at your competition the leaks are off the scale and I was wondering what you think about that?
[Andrew Dodd]: I don't really know to be honest, so I can't really comment on what other companies do regarding their software leaks.
So it's an unoffical open beta situation?
[Andrew Dodd]: Could be - don't really know what the intention is.
In concerns of the beta drivers that have occasionally been made available to the public by ATI, how do you decide which drivers are worthy of release?
[Andrew Dodd]: We always want to ensure that users have the best experience possible with their ATI graphics cards, and sometimes this requires that we release a beta of the CATALYST software so that users don't have to wait for the official WHQL certified driver. This doesn't happen very often, and we always want to limit this type of thing to a couple times a year.
It is widely believed that if you choose a Linux distribution for gaming or everyday computing that an ATI video card is not the best choice and will suffer from the lack of â??robustâ?àdriver support. What can you tell us about your newly revived Linux driver program and what it will offer users in the future?
[Andrew Dodd]: ATI realizes that Linux is a very important community and we have committed to bi-monthly CATALYST releases. Within each of these releases we will be adding new features, improving stability and increasing performance where ever we can. But it is important to note that the Linux community is still quite small compared to the Windows community so until that changes, our primary focus is still going to be Windows. Moving forward our Linux support will increase significantly as we have doubled the size of our team and invested more resources in this area.
Recently rumors have been circulating through the community about AMR (ATI Multi Rendering), which appears to be ATI's answer to Nvidia's SLI technology. What can you tell us about this? Will this technology require special ATI graphics cards with AMR bridges, or will it be controlled via ATIâ??s motherboard chipsets allowing any of your graphics card to be used? Will AMR function with ATI graphics cards only and not those made by the competition?
[Andrew Dodd]: Unfortunately there isn't much I can say in regards to this issue, the only thing I can say is that we have a strategy for this technology.
In regards to ATI chipset drivers, what information can you provide us? Early testing is said to show their performance to be quite promising when pitted against Nvidia's latest platform drivers.
[Andrew Dodd]: Our chipset drivers are solid and comparable with other competitive
solutions in the market.
Are there any plans to introduce an AGP version of your motherboards?
[Andrew Dodd]: No, the direction we are going is PCI-Express moving forward.
When developing and testing your Catalyst graphics drivers how much communication do you have with game developers? Are they generally cooperative? Do you often have access to early game code for driver testing?
[Andrew Dodd]: Yes we have the whole ISV team working with all the big developers and they get betas of just about every new game in development. So we have great relationships with just about every game developer.
What is your opinion on user modded drivers such as Omega, DNA etc? Do you encourage them, or even assist in their efforts? What exactly is being done to these modded drivers that isn't already done by AT? Is there any reason why the Catalyst releases themselves don't include some of the â??enhancementsâ?àand â??fixesâ?àthat the modded drivers are said to contain?
[Andrew Dodd]: We definitely encourage this as it adds life to the community. We do have contact with the more reputable ones that have done many releases such as omega. What they do is alter registry settings and inf files. They don't "hack" the drivers.
Can you tell us more about your new Overdrive 4 feature?
[Andrew Dodd]: The initial version of overdrive that came out had very cautious maximum limits to how far you could increase the engine clock. The reason that was so cautious was we wanted to guarantee that the user would never see any corruption and that everything would work flawlessly. With Overdrive 4 we are giving the end user a lot more leeway in both engine and memory, so now it is possible you will see hangs or you'll see corruption, so we're giving more control to the end user. And if for some reason a hang does occur from over-clocking VPU recover will set the clocks back to the default clocks, so users can't ever get themselves into trouble.
ATI Catalyst drivers are released monthly. What are the steps taken from start to finish in order release these new drivers to the public?
[Andrew Dodd]: There's a huge amount of effort involved in releasing every CATALYST driver. Before any coding takes place the software marketing team will design features, a ton of performance work is always ongoing, and our multiple QA labs tear apart the driver every release to ensure we're releasing an extremely stable product every time. The whole cycle from beginning to end for each driver is at least 3 months (depending on the complexity of the feature were adding) from initial conception to final released on the web.
How important is your public beta to this whole process?
[Andrew Dodd]: The public beta is very important for ATI, it allows us to test out beta drivers in the real world (not just ATI's labs), they're great at providing suggestions for new features, UI changes too. They're definitely a great group of people.
With the introduction of 512mb of onboard graphics memory now in the history books, how will this affect performance in our current games? What effect will 512mb of graphics memory have on game development in the near future?
[Andrew Dodd]: The biggest benefit of an increased frame buffer is that you can store more graphics data on the graphics card instead of system memory which increases performance at higher resolutions. So games that really benefit from 512MB right now are games like Far Cry and Doom 3 with all of the eye candy turned on. Obviously as we move forward we will see more games will see benefits from 512 MB of memory.
In terms of load times and graphical performance, how do you see Windows XP 64-Bit Edition benefiting the gaming community?
[ Andrew Dodd]: Well Windows XP-64 will definitely take better advantage of the 64-bit processors out there. Games that are specifically written to use the full 64-bits of the CPU will see an increase over their 32-bit variants. The CPU plays a very important role in the over gaming experience, so if you increase the power of the CPU you increase the performance of the overall game.
What more can you tell us about what you do here at ATI?
[Andrew Dodd]: My position is Software Product manager. Basically, I co-ordinate and design many of the features that go into the catalyst drivers, and plan out the overall software roadmap. This involves working with our multiple offices across North America. I also interface with different customers presenting ATI' software roadmap, and gathering their software requirements. I'm also very involved in marketing our Catalyst software suite to the general public.
Whats your educational background, how did you get to where you are at with ATI?
[Andrew Dodd]: I went to University of Toronto, for electrical Engineering when I finished school I wanted to find something more involving both marketing and the more technical side of things, so my first position at ATI was Technical marketing engineer. After about a year, I switched over to software and have been doing that ever since (for more than 3 years now :-)
It has recently been announced that you are releasing 512mb based cards at the current show in Dallas. Is this only for your flagship X850XT card or will we be seeing this amount of memory on lower end x800 cards as well?
[Andrew Dodd]: Actually, we did not announce any productized 512MB cards at this time. You will see ATI look at this for future products. On the X800 series this would really come down to current market demand - which we continue to evaluate.
One of ATI's testing labs | The ATI lobby with some office shots. |
Finally I would like to thank Andrew Dodd, Terry Makedon and Jon Carvill for making this interview possible, I hope to work with all of you again in the near future.
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