ATI Vista Transition Going Well

[Lazybones]

http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=367

Much like NVIDIA in their recent interview, ATI discussed the sheer size of the Vista driver development project.  In all, ATI estimates that 200 man years or more was required to get their Vista drivers up to the level of performance and stability that was expected of them by both users and executives.  It was by far the largest software project ever taken on by the ATI software team simply because everything was rewritten from the ground up.

While the project was huge, Makedon was quick to point out that the software development and testing weren't necessarily harder or more difficult than anything else they had done before; there was just a whole lot of it.  ATI's team apparently planned out their development cycles so that they would be 100% ready for the OS launch and I was able to tell just how prepared the driver team was in our initial look at Vista gaming performance.  As with just about any software project, finishing on time and having a complete product largely depends on starting at the right time.  In this case, ATI's driver team was able to complete Vista support for their current GPU lineup without many issues at all which gives credence towards their preparedness.