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Domain: 3dcenter.de

Stories and comments across the archive that link to 3dcenter.de.

Comments · 8

  1. ATI's 'Quake' optimization. by oneiros27 · · Score: 3, Informative · on Truth in Advertising?
    I assume you're refering to the discovery that ATI did some cheating if it saw that Quake was being run:
  2. Re:Geforce4... Wowee... by linzeal · · Score: 1 · on NVIDIA Unveils (And Tom's Reviews) The GeForce4
    Personally my bet is on powervr to bring tbr to the masses. My kyro 2 runs at 175 mhz with SDR memory and easily beats a gf2 ultra 250mhz with DDR memory at most resolutions so there is far more room for improvement on the kyro side.

    The rumored kyro 3 offering soon may to have to compete with nvidia's new tbr patent dated the 5th of febuary. Let's hope the best video card wins and nvidia doesn't just crush them with dirty tactics (warning pdf file linkage).

  3. I'm never thinking about buying an ATI card again by brunes69 · · Score: 2 · on Radeon 8500/GeForce3 Ti500 comparison

    .... after this fiasco.

    For those who don't know, ATI was basiclly hacking their drivers, so that when someone ran Quake3, it turned down the quality of the rendering, so that you could get better framerates. They did this becaus emany 3D sites use Quake as a benchmark. More details, and a better description of what they did, can be found here.

    Now, I know, "well in Linux, this wouldn't be an issue since the drivers are open source". Well guess what, WHO CARES? If a company is going to be this underhanded with its users, I sure as hell am not going to support them.

  4. Re:Tell me again: How is this bad? by denzo · · Score: 2 · on Carmack On ATI's Driver Modifications
    Let me get this straight. ATI takes the time to create optimizations in their drivers that make Quake III run faster, and people are unhappy about it?

    [snip]

    Maybe I'm wrong, and folks just haven't taken the time to think about this issue and instead are reacting w/o understanding. Frankly, I'm not sure which thought depresses me more.

    I agree with your last paragraph. You need to understand what you're talking about before you make assumptions. Take a look at some of the graphics quality comparisons between the original and quack executable names for Quake 3. It's pretty damn obvious that ATi forced some reduced visual settings (which are normally settable by the user in-game) in order to gain extra FPS, which is really really bad. ATi is causing uneven visual quality when compared to a GeForce at better image quality in order to get better benchmark scores.

    It's not the job of the graphics card manufacturers to dictate visual qualities; benchmarkers will benchmark each game with the same settings (when available) for all cards. When the reviewer loses control of these settings, the benchmarks become tainted and meaningless, and become just a tool for ATi marketing.

  5. ATI is cheating by kill-1 · · Score: 3, Informative · on Carmack On ATI's Driver Modifications

    A lot of people still don't realize, what ATI's "optimizations" are about. It's not a optimization specific to Quake 3 which noone could complain about. ATI's drivers forced some features to be disabled massively sacrificing image quality only when Quake 3 is run. It's not clear what they did exactly, but it looks like they were forcing 16-bit textures and/or using lower-resolution mipmaps. See the results here. (The site is in German, but they have some nice details of screenshots, showing the difference onmouseover.)

  6. Comparing the effects of the quake3 "optimization" by nweaver · · Score: 2 · on ATI Drivers Geared For Quake 3?

    http://www.3dcenter.de/artikel/2001/10-24_a.php. (In german), they compared the effects of the "optimizations". Apparently, ATi is fudging the quality in order to get the frame rate up. This fudging only occurs on "Quake3", and is how the improved frame rate occurs.

  7. Define "optimize" by ShrikeDOA · · Score: 1 · on ATI Drivers Geared For Quake 3?

    I think the difference here is the drivers have been modified to run Quake 3 faster (thus improving the benchmark results) but at the expense of image quality. This page shows some side-by-side comparisons between Geforce 2, normal ATI, and the optimized ATI (which is the default for Quake 3). Article is in German, be warned. Note the ATI pics have mouse-over events, displaying the "optimized" version when you mouse over.

  8. It IS wrong... by levendis · · Score: 5, Informative · on ATI Drivers Geared For Quake 3?

    Take a look at this article, its in German, but the pictures are worth 1000 (english) words. Mouse over the ATI pics to see the "cheat" version versus the normal ATI version. Clearly they are sacrificing image quality for speed.