... the more I get disappointed by the limitations ATI makes. Its all about money, all about getting more money from the customers. They do not think about our pleasure or usability. All they do [is] conquer the market step by step, making the customers mistaken with their choice, buying thing they dont need and buying things they will have to buy even if they dont like it. It makes me sick.
Well to be honest, I didn't think about your pleasure or usability when creating Eyefinity(EF). Really I didn't. I did think a lot about my pleasure and the fun that the gamers that I play with every day could have with something like this. I didn't think much about conquering the market step by step or making money (although that would be nice), but I did think about how much fun it would be to be immersed in the games I play.
Since I happen to be one of the creators of Eyefinity (EF), and made the decision to put EF into our products, I happen to know exactly what was done and why it was done.
... but what the hell they are doing 5870six for?
There will be a six output card because we built most of the chips to support up to six outputs. If you want to know why, go to
http://solidmercury.blogspot.com/. It would have been done sooner, but we don't have infinite engineers. We had to make a choice about which card to do first. I wanted to do the six output card (let's call that the "Six") first, but there were a few concerns:
First, almost everyone has older monitor technology (e.g. DVI). The six output card requires mini-DP. Building the Six first would have required everyone to buy new monitors or wait until the Three (5870) was done. Either way seemed less fair to the folks who would want this capability. Just imagine the complaints if the first card was the Six.
Second, the Six will cost more than the Three for a number of reasons I will not elaborate on. And six new monitors will cost more than one new DP monitor, or a DP-to-DVI adapter so you can use your older DVI monitors. For cost reasons we thought more folks would want to play around with EF using three monitors rather than six.
Third, the population of folks who have space for three monitors is larger than those who have room for six monitors. Our Sweet Spot Strategy (another thing I was the creator of) says that we want to support more gamers early in the product generation, rather than waiting for the goodness to waterfall from the extreme enthusiast space down to a broader base of users. Frankly I want to play games with a bunch of folks having fun with this, not feed the egos of small group who can afford the $$ and space to build a Six system.
Fourth, the Six is more complicated than the Three. It takes more time to bring the Six to market than the Three.
Fifth, EF was quite risky - it wasn't clear when this was started two-to-three years ago that EF would get a good market reception. Even two months ago it wasn't clear. Doing the Six first would have been incredibly risky.
So we decided to do the Three first. As for being able to use Crossfire (CF) with EF, it is AMD's intention to offer that capability as soon as possible. There is no evilness, no plot for world domination in this at all, just the cold hard facts of doing engineering. We wanted to have CF at launch, but we discovered that the engineering work to make EF happen was substantially more than was originally estimated. We are still working on CF EF today. We had enough engineering (barely) to make EF without CF happen for launch. If you want to wait for the Six, no-one is forcing you to buy the Three right now today. If you want to wait for CF to be working, again no-one is forcing you to buy anything right now. We are doing the best we can as fast as we can.
...I am mad about ATI they do nice things but in such a way they'd better did nothing.
Really? You'd really rather we did nothing? I suppose we could have withheld EF and launched the product without it, turning it on later when we had CF also working with EF. But if you bought any new graphics product or new monitor between the time of launch and the time of EF enablement, you would have been supremely angry at AMD for not letting you know what your choices could have been and how you could have spent your money.
I suppose we could have made it easier to use three old-tech DVI monitors, but that would have raised the costs for everyone, regardless of whether they used EF or not. Those extra timing sources cost money. What we did was more-or-less free (well, not really, but low enough that we decided to take the risk).
Instead of doing nothing, we gave all of you an interesting new feature to play with, for free really, because the sales price of 5870 wouldn't have been $1 different for not having EF. We have disclosed what EF in the current cards can and cannot do. We made it possible for you to use your old monitors. We have told you other cards will be forthcoming, and roughly what those cards will do (more we can't say for legal reasons). Everything we have done is to offer you the opportunity to make informed choices.
No-one is forcing anyone to buy our product. Anyone who thinks we should have done nothing should spend their money elsewhere. The few thousand engineers and marketing people who built the product so far, and who are still working on the product, do this as much for the enjoyment folks get from using our product as anything else. We are very talented people who can all go get a good paycheck somewhere else. Do you really mean to insult us all with the inference of your email? As for being in cahoots with nV, that is so ridiculous it doesn't deserve a response.
P.S. SunSp*t was my original name for EF. Out of sentimental reasons I have adopted it for my own username.
