NVIDIA Corporation has demonstrated a document criticizing its rival’s latest products as well as revealing certain unpleasant facts about ATI Technologies to press members as well as its own managers.

The History Repeating

The presentation that is marked as NVIDIA’s internal document, says that ATI’s latest RADEON X800 PRO and RADEON X800 XT graphics processors are based on the last year’s architecture and have very suspicious drivers in terms of possible cheating and unfair optimizations. The document also claims that ATI Technologies could not implement Shader Model 3.0 in the RADEON X800 series and also mislead reviewers and customers about core-clocks of the flagship offering RADEON X800 XT.

NVIDIA’s representatives confirmed [H]ard|OCP web-site the authenticity of the slides from the presentation published by 3DCenter.de web-site.

NVIDIA is pretty well-known for pass negative judgments on competing products. In 2001 the company issued a special document for its sales managers and some clients telling that PowerVR’s KYRO graphics processor does not worth attention and is not a potentially feasible technology.

PowerVR’s KYRO competed with NVIDIA’s GeForce2 MX400 at about $150 price-point, showing decent performance in almost all games of that time, but did not support certain features, such as T&L engine. In a lot of cased the KYRO was faster compared to more expensive NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS and ATI RADEON 256 64MB DDR products.

In 2003 NVIDIA also released a document claiming that Futuremark’s 3DMark03 benchmark was unfair and provided certain benefits to arch-rival’s ATI RADEON graphics processors.

ATI’s flagship offering RADEON X800 XT graphics card outperformed NVIDIA’s top-of-the-range GeForce 6800 Ultra in a lot of cases based on the result of numerous gaming benchmarks. But ATI’s RADEON X800-series does not sport some capabilities NVIDIA’s new chips are able to execute, such as Shader Model 3.0.

Belittling Rivals’ Instead of Praising Own Products

Earlier this month ATI Technologies supplied reviewers of ATI RADEON X800-series of graphics cards a document suggesting that they should disable certain trilinear filtering optimizations of NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra GPUs from the ForceWare drivers to ensure “fair competition”. Later it was discovered that ATI also had similar optimizations of trilinear filtering for its RADEON X800-series hardware that could not be disabled by the drivers.

While this is not news that hardware developers bash each other internally and sometimes even issue special documents to humiliate rivals in the eyes of potential clients, the leak of this kind of documents is not praised by the community of hardware enthusiasts, who often start to criticize authors of the documents and issue negative feedback.

Both leading makers of central processing units – Intel and AMD – were noticed spreading documents humbling each other too.