Valve admits that it was premature in its release hopes for Half-Life 2
 

Valve kicked off quite a scandal last Fall when they chose ATI over NVIDIA for sponsorship of their upcoming guaranteed-hit, Half-Life 2. Such choices are made all the time, of course, but this instance was a little different. Valve's honcho programmer, Gabe Newell, publicly shamed NVIDIA and their then-current products at the time, saying that they weren't up to snuff for the new DirectX 9 code in beta (or alpha?) builds of Half-Life 2 (and technically, they weren't). NVIDIA was caught with its pants down for basically cheating at Pixel Shader performance, but the company also said that Valve had failed to ask them about the matter. ATI then enjoyed the perception that buying ATI meant you were guaranteed a better Half Life 2 experience, but then, that was ages ago back when some people expected to see the game even before Halloween. Now the scene is a little different. Was Valve out of line by publicly panning the compatibility of an NVIDIA product with its own game when its own game wasn't even finished? "No," most people thought, because it was almost ready. Right? Wrong. The famous source code leak gunked up the whole works, right? Wrong. At least, not according to a print interview covered by Games Fusion.

http://arstechnica.com/news/posts/1084127255.html