Saboteur Launch Plagued By Problems With ATI Cards 230
An anonymous reader writes "So far, there are over 35 pages of people posting about why EA released Pandemic Studios' final game, Saboteur, to first the EU on December 4th and then, after knowing full well it did not work properly, to the Americas on December 8th. They have been promising to work on a patch that is apparently now in the QA stage of testing. It is not a small bug; rather, if you have an ATI video card and either Windows 7 or Windows Vista, the majority (90%) of users have the game crash after the title screen. Since the marketshare for ATI is nearly equal to that of Nvidia, and the ATI logo is adorning the front page of the Saboteur website, it seems like quite a large mistake to release the game in its current state."
I tested Saboteur (Score:5, Interesting)
I tested Saboteur across all platforms and, of all the titles I tested, the Pandemic devs were more open to fix issues than any development studio i've had experience with. Unfortunately the 360 and PS3 versions were much more thoroughly tested (we're talking a few weeks a piece). This was because 4 days into Saboteur PC testing (of which 4 of 5 testing stations were nVidia, btw) EA (the publisher and last end-tester before final submission) laid off 2000 people, which included almost all North American testers (essentially cutting the amount of testers globally by half).
The bottom line is this: the company's agenda is to release the product on a set day, and regardless of the quality of the product it WILL be out that day. You may see street dates pushed ahead a few months in advance but people test until a week or two until it hits the shelf, and if issues arise during the final hour most times the bugs will be swept under the table until one day they may get patched (if enough people bitch). It's sad that first day patches are not only considered acceptable, but are the norm these days.
Re:ATI bugs... (Score:3, Interesting)
I'll chime in on nVidia's side. Been using them ever since I switched to Linux, and thanks to their 100% consistent, solid Linux support since like 2000 or something, I will almost certainly never switch away. Out of the probably more than a dozen nVidia cards I've had, each one has worked flawlessly with great 3D in Linux and Windows alike.
In contrast to that, my friend who used to be an ATI fanboy had nothing but issues with both the open source and the ATI-provided Linux drivers until like 2006, when he finally gave up and switched to nVidia chipsets on everything.
The performance leader seems to trade off between nVidia and ATI depending on generation, but nVidia always has the driver support. There's just no reason to risk the driver issues by going with ATI.
Re:ATI bugs... (Score:3, Interesting)
Funny you should bring up driver quality; the latest nVidia driver update for my Win7 laptop (9600M GS) broke suspend (to RAM) and an older one (for a Vista laptop, 7600 GO) broke hibernate. I'm used to this kind of garbage with proprietary drivers on Linux, but on Windows I really expect better.
Furthermore, during Vista's beta period, ATI already had solid, functional, stable, and fast drivers. By comparison, at least for the GeForce 7600 GO in my older laptop, it was some 6 months after Vista RTM before I could get a driver that would give me decent performance (the drivers at release ran at about 40% the proper framerate) and features (many things, such as scale but maintain aspect ratio, were unavailable) without using hideously unstable beta drivers (that would crash every time I switched out of a full-screen 3D app). Even once drivers were available, they were initially only for desktop cards (modifying the .INF, or using downloads from laptopvideo2go.com, were workarounds that shouldn't have been required).
I will grant you that if a game is going to have problems with ATI or nVidia graphics, it's more likely to have a problem with ATI. However, in light of nVidia drivers managing to break parts of the operating system, I really don't think they can legitimately be considered better than ATI. Cost for performance, especially in the mid-range, they are also much worse - and in my experience you really don't get what you pay for there.
Wasn't that the exact experience with GTA SA? (Score:4, Interesting)
I friend of mine bought it, back then. And it hat not one, not two, not three, but four points in the loading of the game, where it could crash. Which means that pretty much everyone got into one.
And then, on all nVidia cards, all triangles were messed up. With one of the 3 points of each triangle being wayy off in its position, moving all over the screen. Like a ton of spikes.
There was not a single comment from Rockstar. Let alone a patch.
And now for the funny part: I loaded it of bittorrent, and as always, I went to gamecopyworld.com, to look for a crack.
They not only had more than one working crack. No. They hay patches for every single of those four crash points, *and* the nVidia bug!
I couldn’t hold back to laugh at him. ^^
With GTA 4 it was not much better. Right from the start, the input lag was around 3 seconds! The intro was full of weird graphical errors. And the game still runs slow as hell, even on computers that have the power to run a game with those weak graphics and physics twice or thrice!
18 fps at 1024x786 with a Radeon 4850? Are you fuckin’ kiddin’ me??