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ATI Drivers Geared For Quake 3?
alrz1 writes: "HardOCP has posted an article wherein they accuse ATI of writing drivers that are optimized for Quake 3, just Quake 3, and only Quake 3. Apparently, using a program called quackifier, which modifies the Quake3 executable by changing every "Quake" reference to "Quack" and then creating a new executable called "Quack3", they have demonstrated to some extent that the Quack3.exe benchmarks are around 15% slower than with the original Quake3.exe (same box, os, drivers, etc). The slant seems to be that there is something inherently wrong about writing game-specific optimizations into drivers, if in fact this is what ATI has done. I think this is perfectly acceptable: Quake 3 is the biggest game out there on Windows, and if ATI has invested a little extra time into pumping a few extra (meaningless) frames out of your Radeon 8500, is this really an act of treachery?"
Seeing that CounterStrike has the largest online community, killing both Q3 and UT communities, and that quality mods are still coming out of Halflife, wouldn't it be smarter to target the bigger audience??
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
How about the fact that Quake III Arena is commonly used as a benchmark to test performance? No, no treachery here... (If they have indeed done it)
When intel optimizes adobes plugins at the expense of amd processors -- so they can use it as a benchmark -- thats ok as well?
Free Techno/Jazz/DNB/MI Music by guys obsessed with monkeys!
I say good on em, why not, if all these benchmarking sites use Quake 3 for comparisons then they should expect to have the vendors gear their hardware towards it.. Makes sense, you could equate it to the AMD re-naming.. Almost Meaningless numbers that get ppl excited..
This is benchmark manipulation more than trying to give customers benefits. They know perfectly well that Quake 3 is used as a benchmark, so they artificially inflated their scores.
This is nothing new, and I don't think the fact that they're catering to a real program rather than an artificial benchmark makes it any less reprehensible.
ZFS: because love is never having to say fsck
Isn't this just the perfect example of what Katz was whining about a couple of article back?
They stab it with their steely knives,
But they just can't kill the beast.
Counter Strike/Half Life is the most played FPS, Quake 3 is what is the most common benchmark. hmmmmmm
I think this is perfectly acceptable: Quake 3 is the biggest game out there on Windows, and if ATI has invested a little extra time into pumping a few extra (meaningless) frames out of your Radeon 8500, is this really an act of treachery?"
Yes it is. It's writing for the benchmark rather than writing for the user.
I'm reminded of a Richard Feynman quote "For a sucessful technology, honesty must take precedence over public relations for nature cannot be fooled."
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
If the drivers were optimized for quake3, why would changing a text string affect the speed? For that to make sense, the driver would have to be doing an intentional slowdown for all games other than Q3.
Quack3 is still making the same display calls and whatnot. No reason it that should run slower, if that is really the only thing they changed.
...as long as the game still works!
Why shouldn't they optimize for a game if they know how to do that?
They should do that for the most popular games, it's a great idea!
(Though their primary intent may have been to 'cheat' benchmarks...)
A.D. 1517: Martin Luther nails his 95 Theses to the church door and is promptly moderated down to (-1, Flamebait).
I'm sure you've heard about the "wallhacks" for Half-Life Counter-Strike using modified Asus drivers. Hell, I've got a Voodoo 5 and I got accused of using those drivers. I bet this will cause similar "controversy". Obviously it's not the same as blatantly cheating, but it's an advantage based on circumstances not controlled by the game.
That's Mr. Eradicator to you.
trance-port
Why the hell do they not want everything else to be similarly optimized?
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.
---- I made the Kessel Run in under 11 parsecs.
I don't think that this is a problem unless it hurts the performance of other games. Quake 3 is still used as a benchmark, so it's understandable why they would want the performance higher. With ATI's past performances with their drivers, however, this is not something that will inspire knowledgeable buyers to go with ATI.
Anyone can see, by reading Slashcode itself, not the misleading or irrelevant comments surrounding it, that the code in question does not apply to people who try to abuse the "multipost" bug (which doesn't even exist anymore; it has long since been fixed), but to people who have been moderated down with a certain frequency.
Let me spell it out for everyone since you have so little regard for the truth as to actually attempt to hide this fact:
Anyone who is moderated down four or more times within a 24-hour period will have their ENTIRE TCP/IP SUBNET banned for the following 72 hours.
That is a fact. It can be confirmed by reading the slashcode. It can further be confirmed by simply posting a comment which will be likely to garner a few negative moderations (i.e., any comment that disagrees with popluar slashdot opinions) and observing the results.
So michael, the obvious question here is, why are you lying to people? Why not just tell the thruth:
The moderation system, combined with the IP-subnet-banning system, will automatically ban people for posting anything people disagree with.
Slashdot is clearly designed with the expressed purpose of surpressing unpopular opinions within its comment system.
That is, of course, your right, as this is your website and you may do with it as you choose. However, people should know that you are lying when you claim (in the FAQ and elsewhere) that people are never banned for their opinions, only for attempts at "flooding". That is complete fiction.
Something interesting to do would be to change Tribes2 to Quake3 and see if there is an improvement in tribes2.
If so, we'd have to ask ourselves questions about the kind of deal ATI is making!
It is the standard benchmark game used in reviews and cmdrtaco is a huge looser. Nuff said.
Although I would have no problem if ATI spent time optimizing for many games, ATI obviously knows that many benchmarks are based upon the Quake3 engine. They're trying to score higher on those benchmarks to appeal to more people.
Another important question to ask would be "How does this impact other performance in other games?" Are people getting fewer FPS in Unreal because of these optimizations?
..This is something they did extra to make quake run _extra_ fast, rather than slowing down everything else.
I don't think that they are trying to cast a light either way on what ATI is doing (in fact, they state this many times), they are just trying to point out what is happening because many people are on one side or the other on whether this sort of thing is appropriate, and informing those people that will think it wrong and stop them, or at least make them think twice, about purchasing a product from a company that (in some people's opinions) is deceiving it's customers. Me, I'm not that altruistic, but what the hell, to each his own.
-NrF
If they optimize the drivers for quake 3 then they are also optimized for any game built on the quake 3 engine. Optimizing drivers for a game engine is a GOOD thing and IMO is going above and beyond what they normally have to do in order to provide the best experience for their customers.
This comment was generated by a Squadron of Ultra Ninjas
I can't see how optimizing certain programs is wrong as long as that is what is going on. When you start deoptimizing everything else, you start moving into serious shithead territory.
`which fortune`
If they made the optimized quack3 to make the most popular game run faster for the users, or if they made it to make the specs and reviews look better.
If you ask me, they did this to make the specs better so they will be able to compete, which is inherently wrong. If this is not why they did it, why don't they advertise this "enhancment"?
There's no problem with writing version-optimized drivers.
The update or improvement of such software is probably intended, first, for the new Quake buyers. It's a company that occasionally serves a fan base, it's not enslaved to the fan base that has all previous versions.
It's like a new model of a car with a beautiful v-8 engine that previous models have always used. If the new model is configured to optimize engine performance, it's not discrimination against collectors of previous models.
Goat sex free since 2001
It seems as though having it optimized for Quake3 is pointless and used only for increasing benchmark scores. (Much like artificially pumping up a Mhz rating, eh?)
If they can modify it so that a mere name change causes it to lose performance, than even games using the Quake3 engine will suffer, furthering proof that this is a benchmark-only move.
Lastly, Quake3 is NOT the biggest game out there for Windows. Not even a close second. I can't think of a friend I've got (and I play lots of PC games) who has a copy. Why? We're all tired of running around and shooting stupid monsters.
Peace.
does the same thing happen to Duck Nukem?
Let's try to start a flame by not posting stories that have FLAMEBAIT in them. That's what the comments are for.
Quake 3 is the biggest thing... for people who haven't found that everything else is better. HA! Now let the flamewar begin!
Nosce te Ipsum
>and if ATI has invested a little extra time into pumping a few extra (meaningless) frames out of your Radeon 8500, is this really an act of treachery?
Not if they:
a) didn't sacrifice performance for other games ONLY to get more out of quake3 (probably not the case)
b) admit that its true, if it is true
I suppose the alterior motive isn't better quake3 frame rates for ATI owners, but rather more impressive benchmarks, seeing as quake3 is such a standard graphics card benchmark. So if they are claiming that quake3 didn't get any special attention, but they DID give it special attention for benchmarks, well, thats a little misleading. Otherwise, I don't see anything inherently wrong with adding some post-design juice for the benifit of all the quake3 players out there.
Personally, I think they did it for better visibility in benchmarking.
"Old man yells at systemd"
It's possible that a specific driver feature or features causes Quake 3 to run 15% faster, but at the expense of making the system unstable or unreliable in other games. It would make no sense for ATI to make the cards run as fast as possible on Quake 3 and only Quake 3.
It's also possible that the Quack-quake transfer screwed something up in Quake- I'd be interested to see how a quackified exe performed on NVidia's chipset.
See this statement at the end of the text:
John B. Challinor II APR - Director, Public Relations at ATI Technologies Inc. "ATI optimizes its drivers on many different levels, including the application level, the game engine level, the API level, and the operating system level. That is, some optimizations work only on specific games, while others work only on specific game engines or only on specific operating systems. In the case of Quake III and Quake III Arena, we were able to achieve certain optimizations specifically for that game, as we do for other popular games. "
Bah, I don't even see where the "Optimizing for Quake 3 only" comes in. The Quake series has been and still is the benchmark of 1st person, 3D FPS graphics.
That being said, it would be convenient to have a checkbox in their control panel "(X) Enable unstable 3D support. May speed up certain apps, may cause problems. Use at own risk."
--I hate people when they're not polite -"Psycho Killer", Talking Heads
That's just awful, ATI can't even cheat correctly! They obviously don't know what they're doing if they hard-coded the executable name.
I own an ATI 3D card and I still get my a$$ kicked in Q3A all the time. WTF! You'd think that if the thing were modified in my favor, I wouldn't be railed all the time, as if I were walking 1 MPH (sorry. I don't do math for you CA and EU types out there.)
Blarf.
In a world of FPS online communities where people playing those FPS worry about FPS than I don't think that writing drivers optimized for FPS to maximise FPS is such a bad thing... IHA
FPS = First Person Shooter
or is it...
FPS = Frames Per Seconds
IHA = I HATE ACRONYMS
"It takes many nails to build a crib, but one screw to fill it."
Optimizing your card/drivers for the popular drawing method is the natural thing to do. Even optimizing for the way a specific benchmark draws is fine.
The problem here is that it appears ATI has gained performance by reducing the image quality -- forcing a reduced texture resolution specifically in Quake 3. Compare the screenshots shown on the site. This means comparing their benchmark scores on Quake 3 with other cards is meaningless -- their card isn't performing the same task. This was a bad decision on ATI's part.
Alex Mohr
It seems to me that this is due, in large part, to the 'hardware review' sites. They almost always compare various cards using 'quake' FPS performance. This may or may not be a useful evaluation. This reminds me of all of the database benchmarks, tp1, tpc, etc; the database vendors always tuned their products for these....
Almost Meaningless Digits...... :p
As someone stated above, Half-Life and its associated mods is/are far more popular than Quake 3. So if they were out the help the community, the didn't exactly target the correct game. What Quake 3 is used for more than Half-Life, is benchmarking, which makes this seem just a little more than suspicious.
Errr, as the code is commented just above the part you pasted:
# logs attempts to break, fool, flood a particular form
That is, the people who are attempting to break, say, the comment posting form and post 500 comments at once are logged and may be banned by IP if they try hard enough.
Anyone can see, by reading Slashcode itself, not the misleading or irrelevant comments surrounding it, that the code in question does not apply to people who try to abuse the "multipost" bug (which doesn't even exist anymore; it has long since been fixed), but to people who have been moderated down with a certain frequency.
Let me spell it out for everyone since you have so little regard for the truth as to actually attempt to hide this fact:
Anyone who is moderated down four or more times within a 24-hour period will have their ENTIRE TCP/IP SUBNET banned for the following 72 hours.
That is a fact. It can be confirmed by reading the slashcode. It can further be confirmed by simply posting a comment which will be likely to garner a few negative moderations (i.e., any comment that disagrees with popluar slashdot opinions) and observing the results.
So michael, the obvious question here is, why are you lying to people? Why not just tell the thruth: The moderation system, combined with the IP-subnet-banning system, will automatically ban people for posting anything people disagree with.
Slashdot is clearly designed with the expressed purpose of surpressing unpopular opinions within its comment system.
That is, of course, your right, as this is your website and you may do with it as you choose. However, people should know that you are lying when you claim (in the FAQ and elsewhere) that people are never banned for their opinions, only for attempts at "flooding". That is complete fiction.
It is perfectly acceptable to write optimizations for specific games, applications, etc. It is not acceptable to make those optimizations at the expense of quality in order to acheive better benchmark results. It is not acceptable to represent your results (quality of rendering) as being equal in quality to the competition when in fact they are not. (they don't tell anyone they are switching to a lesser quality mode)
a re.zip
Let me explain:
It would appear from the images posted on hardocp that the drivers are running in a reduced color depth/dithered mode. There is obvious banding in the images in shallow gradient areas (shallow color ramps) such as the on screen text.
http://www.hardocp.com/files/cool_stuff/quackcomp
If ATI is really doing this (and I think they are) and they are quietly not telling the rest of the world that when they detect quake 3 they switch to this mode, then I totally agree with hardocp, its a cheat, not an optimization. If they provided the user with the ability to choose the mode themselves, then it would be ok, but they don't and its a sneaky little cheat in order to gain an extra few percentage points on quake 3 benchmarks.
This seems like so much wasted effort for the developers involved, if indeed it is true. Of the hardware sites that I use to get a feel for the quality and speed of a graphics card (AnandTech and Tom's) neither use just one program as a benchmark. Thus, when reviewed on these sites, it would just render as a strange blip. One that wouldn't convince anyone about the card's quality. Are there so many review sites out there that only use one program to benchmark a piece of hardware that would make a move like this worth it? Are there than many games coming out in the foreseeable future that will use the Quake 3 engine, thus giving gamers an advantage? Would someone buy this card because they want a Q3 optimized experience? This just seems silly on so many levels.
changing?
It says it goes in and changes everything from "Quake" to "Quack". Could this also be mudging up the code just a little? I know that if I am writing a game(not that I have I deal mainly in crap code for manufacturing) I would think that I would tweak the ever holy shit out of it. This tweaking of the game requires everything to be perfect for it to work best. I know that if I change directories after installing, renaming whatever, some games don't even work and some just work real flaky. In summary I doubt that they have code in their driver saying If quake3 then overclock
else underclock. or something. That would make no sense.
I am 31337 or something.
Firingsquad has a article on this as well. It seems the texture quality is hit rather severely with no way to disable this feature (aside from the quackifier). They (firingsquad) also post their own quackifier, source code included, because they weren't 100% sure that the quackifier did only what it was supposed to do.
It seems the real problems are these:
* Quake3 is more a benchamrk than a game right now, so it seems to have been optimized soly to improve benchmark scores.
* There is no way to dissable it.
* It overrides ingame quality settings.
* ATI tried to hide the fact that it does what it does.
For details and damning screenshots go visit http://firingsquad.gamers.com/news/newsarticle.asp ?searchid=3456
I'm naming my next game quake3.exe. Anything for a few more FPS. ;o))
When a developer is making a game they end up doing tricks to get the best performance out of the most common cards. So what happens is the more prominent developers make contacts with the driver developers at the video card companies, who make specific changes to accomodate some feature or design that the game developer needs. This often works both ways, with the driver developers guiding the game developer on how to get better performance, etc.
The point is that 3d graphics are complicated enough to not make it as simple as having an API that performs the same on multiple games and cards. Both the game developers and the video card manufacturers are doing this stuff. I doubt you will see this changing in the near future. But I don't think it's a conspiracy.
The comments here miss the point. ATI didn't fine tune their drivers to run better on Quake III - they internally lower the visual quality of their rendering if the string "uake3" is detected. This allows them to render faster, and since more advanced engines are used in benchmarking for video quality, they get the "best" of both worlds (high quality in one test, high speed in another.)
It is manipulation through misrepresentation, and they should be called on it. They aren't making optimizations in the normal sense of the word - reaching the same (by some definition) output through faster means; they are reaching it through inferior means without telling anybody.
Except that they were caught.
ATI knows that just about every review compares cards primarily based upon Quake 3 (looks at any of a large number of sites to see this), often under the premise that it's totally relevant because so many current and up-and-coming games are based upon the Quake 3 engine.
As others have said, Quake 3 is one of the big benchmarking "utilities" on the enthusiast sites. Apparently someone was plugging through the driver code when they found a string which contained "uake." This, amongst a sea of numbers. They suspected driver optimization by ATI, and a few days later [H]ardOCP relased the "quack test" numbers. There was a lot of unsaid "nudge, wink" stuff in that review, though Kyle did get pretty blunt at the end. I'm not saying I don't trust ATI, but I've always carefully considered any purchases I've made from them- someone out there always dislikes them for one reason or another, and the reasons are usually pretty interesting.
Wrists killing you? Not in 2 weeks. Learn Dvorak.
I think it is acceptable BUT only if they make it known or different builds for different optimisations. Or have a build that can optimise for specific jobs at runtime.
----- Whats wrong with this picture? http://www.revoh.org:1234/whatswrong
Isn't there *ANYONE* out there who knows how to use a disassembler?
They make a big deal toward the end of the article about how when you open these drivers in a hex editor, you see this. They go into a lot of trouble trying to figure out whether this means what it seems to mean.
Could someone disassemble these drivers and find out what purpose, exactly, the cryptic "uake" string is serving?
And maybe, if you've got lots of spare time on your hands, work out beyond this if there is any clear idea of what, exactly, the quake3-specific things are these drivers are doing?
Note to do either of the above, you may have to be either an anonymous coward, in a country where you have a right to reverse-engineer things...
If i still used an ATI 3d card, i would be quite definitely miffed at this discovery for the sole reason that i don't play quake 3, and i would be quite put out if ATI *could* have optimized *all* my 3d apps, but to save cost only bothered doing this with quake 3...
Who cares about an antiquated benchmark like Q3? That game practically went out of style a couple of years ago, and its engine (while respectable) is outdated.
All this shows is that you need to take *all* benchmarks into account, the synthetics (SPEC, 3dMark, etc) as well as other real-world benchmarks when you are trying to determine which card is the fastest. Of course, there are other things you should consider, like stability, driver support, and image quality, as well as cost and expected life. As much as I hate supporting a monopolistic system (which NVIDIA is enjoying right now IMHO) ATI is known for terrible drivers, they always have been.
As for the rigging of benchmarks, I think that is unethical. The reason for this is that the motivation behind rigging the driver to perform better in one and only one benchmark is *not* to benefit the end user by eeking them 10% more performance, but to *appear* better to joe average.
They use Quake3 frame rates to sell cards. Like it or not, most kiddies buy cards soley on quake3 demo playback scores.
If you ask me this isn't an isolated case of 'data fixing' -- it happens all the time. Research *all equipment purchases.
buyer beware.
PRESS RE-RELEASE:
With the release of ATI's newest Radeon 8500 and 7500 graphics cards, hardware review sites have been proportedly using ATI drivers that have been sepecifically optimized for Quake III.
Various ATI fan sites are now reporting new "Quackified" drivers, originally authored by Kyle Bennett of [H]ard|OCP. Rumors are flying about this unofficial driver's unfair optimization of games such as "Duck Hunter 5: More Buckshot" and "Donald Duck's Red-Light District Exploration".
"Wow, the animated ducks are faster, and die better," one anonymous gamer said on a forum. "And Donald gets so better action with these new drivers!"
ATI spokeduck, Rob Erduckie, denies any involvement in these modifications. "The claims are just false," said Rob. "We do not believe in unfairly offering advantages to one side or another."
Rob also made reference to cheating, "We also vehemently oppose offering cheat options, such as Asus's 'See-Through Duck' modification. We're totally about fair game play."
Environmentalists have been picketing federal facilities today in protest of unfair portrayal of their favorite bird today, with writings on picket signs such as "Free the Ducks!," "No luck for Ducks," and "Ducks Need Rights Too!."
Department of Fish & Game officials were unavailable to comment.
The Linux penguin released a brief statement: "I understand the pain that ducks are going through right now. Did you read what Linus said about me? 'A happily drunk penguin who just got some'? Sheesh!"
There lies, damn lies and benchmarks. The very fact that they wrote the video drivers to specifical key to a piece of software can mean a two things. First, they are Eee-VIL (little pinky to mouth). They obviously value one piece of software over all others and saw fit to garner that piece of software with higher performance because of the bribe they got. Perhaps it was money. Perhaps it was the chance to sleep with John and his damn cute girlfriend. (Did they ever get married or split up?) Second, it could be that they optimized the drivers with a few hacks may not work reliably with other games. Because they knew the Quake software was stable with them, they got a higher frame rate on a very popular game. Now, which does it sound like to all of you? The simple truth is that anyone who relies on benchmarks gets what they deserve. Evaluate the product across a whole range of activities that you plan to perform, not one. The best benchmark is the IT community, as a whole, not one piece of software. If I hear a lot of people being disgruntled with the card, I won't buy it. If I hear a lot of people praise it for what I want it to do, I would.
Bel, the mostly sane..
Bel, the mostly sane.. "Of course I can't see anything! I'm standing on the shoulders of idiots." -- Me
This isn't a case of ATI working extra hard to improve the experience of their customers. Anyone in the hardware scene knows that Quake3 is the number one benchmark for comparing video cards. Not meaning it is the best, just the most commonly used.
It seems to me that ATI deliberately tweaked their drivers to make their FPS score on a Quake3 benchmark higher. It seems obvious that they did this so that their card could compete in the hundreds of Reviews matching the Radeon 8500 with the GeForce3 family of cards.
Question: Is this just a benchmark-boosting hack or does it actually improve the frame rate while playing the game?
Observation: With frame rates of 80+ at even the highest resolution on the HardOCP test box, it's difficult to see if there is any ACTUAL BENEFIT resulting from using ATI's drivers.
Suggestion: Repeat their tests with the original and with the quackified executables on a less powerful box so that the actual framerates are more like 10-15 fps.
Result: If the drivers actually help the game play, at that low frame rate, it should be readily apparent. If there's NO difference in the game play, then it's just a hack to boost the benchmark scores.
revision.
Everyone knows their current driver is horribly immature & the new Radeon 'II' drivers are due out (officially or otherwise) anytime now.
So what ? People use Quake 3 to benchmark new cards. It's like the energy cpu manufacturers spend on optimising fortran and c compilers for SPEC...
Personally, I don't give a fsck whether ATI optimizes for Quake or not, what I care about is who is making their specs open. It's ATI, not NVidia, so all I can say is: go ATI. Sell lots of cards.
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
Counter Strike contantly beats both Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament in number of servers and number of users. The point of the article is that ATI uses Quake 3 because all of the software reviews use it as their benchmark, not for any benefit for gamers.
Were there benchmarks for Nvidia cards under the same circumstances?
It's quite possible that rendering the different letters could account for the different frame rates. I'd be surprised if it were 15% but I think that if Nvidia dropped as well with the modified text, then that would show that the text simply took longer to render.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
...as do compiler writers. Look at the standard set of benchmarks for any processor/compiler and you'll see special compile tags for benchmarks testing. They've gone as far as making special instructions used only for benchmarks.
Uh, guys? ATI has already responded to this by saying that yes, they do optimize their drivers for games.
Did HardOCP search the binaries for references to other executables? Their site doesn't imply that they did. So maybe it's just ATI trying to give gamers a better experience. It's not like they fudged 3DMark results.
Actually, Intel and other x86 mfgs have instructions in their microcode to run Quake about 15% faster than other programs, this can be demonstrated easily by renaming win.com to quake.com (on most Windows systems). You'll notice applications start up quicker and your mouse pointer has been replaced with crosshairs. Some systems will require you to select a skill level as soon as you start Windows, be warned that if you choose "Nightmare" keyboard shortcuts will be disabled and applications do about double the damage they would normally.
AC's cheerfully ignored
Why didn't they just optimise the routines that Quake 3 uses, ignoring the executable name? Then it would possibly benefit all other 3D games, including those based on the Q3 engine, which would obviously have a different executable name. This would also have nullified the article author's test of renaming the exe (it would have produced the same scores).
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.
You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake.
Go check the PCData Top Ten list for the past 50-60+ weeks. What is either #1 or #2 on all of those charts?
The Sims
Quake isn't anywhere near the biggest game on the PC. The Sims is a $100 Mil industry unto itself at this point.
The argument could be made that The Sims isn't a game. But, it gets charted with other PC entertainment sales, so for this argument it must be treated as a PC game product.
If I was planning to buy a new video card, I would look at the results of a Q3 benchmark, and if ATI's card scored highest, I might think that it would perform better in other games as well. I would never buy a product based on one benchmark, but ATI probably isn't targeting the übergeeks, just regular PC owners with some extra cash. And they may not take the time to do all the research. Q3 can no longer be a benchmark if this is true, or at least not the only benchmark, so maybe we'll have to test with Black and White until ATI's next driver update.
But what I find most interesting is that the drivers apparently aren't aimed at the calculations Q3 will throw at it; they are more concerned with which app the instructions came from. Maybe it gives anything named Quake3 (or whatever its internal name is) a higher priority. Since an identical game with a different name won't run as fast, this is almost certainly the case (IANAP, so this may be completely wrong).
I really hate signatures, but go to my website.
people who think this is treachery spend too much time looking at the benchmarks, and not enough time playing the game.
just shut up and play!
so ati has put game specific optimizations into the driver... isn't this a good thing? isn't it better than no optimizations? this isn't the fist time this has happened, nVidia has a bunch of application specific optimizations in their drivers but no one complains about that. it just seems to me that people are so eager to critisize ATI that they are willing to accuse them of doing something evil when in fact this was done to give the users a better gaming experience. also, there are a lot of folks complaining about the drivers for the R8500 and comparing these drivers to nVidia's current drivers... this also confuses me. no one complained when the initial geforce3 drivers sucked but now that ati has a new product people expect the drivers to be perfect right out of the starting gate.
Quake 3 is used as a benchmark for video cards as some have pointed out. It is very common for hardware vendors to tweak their product towards a particular benchmark. This really points out why you should never rely on any one given benchmark result for a purchase decision.
I do find it a bit unethical to tweak to satisfy a benchmark but nothing can really be done about that.
I love ATI cards for their great image quality - that's why I got a Radeon instead of a geforce - but I'm totally disgusted with how ATI drivers are always crap. ATI ALWAYS takes months to come out with only slightly decent drivers. I'm sure the Quake "optimizations" are just to make up for more general driver underdevelopment.
image quality suffers, which results in higher framerates. Here is the google translation of a german article which compares the Quake/Quack screenshots from the original HardOCP article. Wave the pointer over the ATI pictures to see the difference. You can't get something (high framerates) for nothing (image quality).
It's not really optimizing, it's cheating.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
I don't know what the actual laws are or what the actual subroutines are that get optomized, but as a matter of principle I don't believe it's fair to make optimizations geared only to a certain application that could possibly benefit a wide variety of applications. This means that the ATI producer has a bias towards Quake and by making these optimizations hinders the speed and performance of Quake's competitors, and that's not right.
On the other hand, this benchmark seems sketchy to me. There are a lot of variables that go into large applications such as Quake and an example might be (although this is purely hypothetical) that there are resource files that are tied to "Quake.exe" first and then have alternate, slower methods being accessed. When the name is changed from Quake to Quack, the slower methods have to be used. That's just a made up example but it's they type of thing that needs to be taken into consideration. However, like I said before, if these people actually did make optimizations for Quake and only for Quake, I think what they did was unfair and harmful to computer users.
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Quake 3 is the biggest game out there on Windows
Not according to Gamespy. In fact, it isn't even close, and hasn't been for the past couple years.
OK, so Gamespy is hardly the final word in game popularity, but let's not forget that some of the most popular mods going today (CS, TFC, etc) are HalfLife mods.
First of all, obviously, nobody cares about fps in The Sims, so noone will ever optimize a graphics card for it. More generally though, the reason one would optimize for Quake III is that it's THE standard gaming benchmark used by practically all publications.
I don't agree at all..
First and foremost, you should keep in mind Quake 3 is a Game first and a benchmark second. Just because ATi optimize their drivers to improve Quake 3 performance to a certain extent doesn't mean they're manipulating benchmark scores. It means they're improving the performance of the Game for its customers.
There are at least a dozen other applications out there used for benchmarking graphics cards. Optimizing a single application like Quake 3 won't sell anymore cards for them. Especially since despite their optimizations the Radeon 8500 is still slower than the GeForce 3.
How would this be any different than optimizing a program to take advantage of instruction sets on an Intel Processor vs an AMD processor. Commonly done and a widely accepted practice, but when it's done to get more frames out of a graphics card people freak out.
BS.. total BS.
Different video cards give different quality video, so benchmarks have to take that into account. Some are butt-ugly or just plain wrong, and competent hardware reviewers mention that.
They always have to make trade-offs between frame rate and image quality, what makes tweaking this trade-off for certain games necessarily some kind of trickery?
Id's games have always tended to be a bit freakish, based on unusual, privately researched approaches. Maybe the standard approach isn't perceived as being as playable for Quake 3.
Ideally, they could tweak the system for every individual game, but maybe it's just a case of focusing such efforts on a particularly popular title. Others have pointed out that there are more popular high-performance games, but it would make sense that the default would be optimized for the most popular games, and exceptions coded only for those nearly as popular but different enough for the default settings to be sub-optimal.
I'd be interested to see how a quackified exe performed on NVidia's chipset
Well, then why don't you read the artical...
In closing we would like to say that all the same testing was run on the latest set of NVIDIA DetonatorXP drivers without any of the same issues.
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
read this site's article about the ATI card...
just from looking at the screen shots, it seems to me that the center of the screen is being optimized, and the everything else is being rendered at a lower quality.
kind of mimics the functionality of the eye, and how vision is most acute in the fovea.
A: None. The Universe spins the bulb, and the Zen master merely stays out of the way.
It's not unethical to optimize drivers for specific performance. Meaning, if ATI's drivers make Quake 3 faster than the competition, that has added value for someone out there.
From a business point of view it's not the wisest thing to do. PC games have a tendency to be an extremly rabid bunch. Buying mobo's, processors, graphic's cards and anything else that lets them milk that last bit of performance out of games. They do this frequently,by keeping up on all the latest hardware and it's associated benchmarks and purchasing accordingly. They will even go to silly lengths to make sure what they are buying is the best, such as doing a grep for Quake3 and changing it to Quack3, then seeing if the performance is the same. Even without such lengths, a gamer would be sure that more than Q3 was fast on their hardware, so that when the next rage comes along, they can buy the game and expect it to run fast. So, ATI is shooting themselves in the foot by focusing on one game's performance, rather than going for general performance and as such games won't buy their cards....
Burn Hollywood Burn
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.
Test your net with Netalyzr
I think the real problem is that web sites rely so heavily on just a couple games to determine the overall performance of a video card. Given this, people have to rely on Q3 benchmarks to measure not only Q3 performance, but overall game performance. This is problematic enough as it is, but hacked, game-specific drivers make it even worse.
If sites used a more games to benchmark, then ATI couldn't get away with this unless they also wrote optimizations for every game out there. When sites benchmark only Quake 3 and, knowing this, ATI writes drivers specifically for Quake 3, it unfairly biases the sample. Video card companies can do whatever they want, but review sites are supposed to be on our side, not theirs, and need to make sure that their numbers represent overall performance as much as possible in spite of any attempts to mislead buyers.
I've always had problems with the way sites typically do video card reviews anyway. They pick a couple of the latest games and some artificial benchmark programs and let the performance of those determine the outcome. Equally important things like image quality, stability, compatibility with older games take a back seat, so I'm left making a decision with incomplete information. As a potential purchaser, I want to know how a card will work with all my games, Thief 2, Deus Ex, heck, even my Playstation emulator. I don't expect them to try every game out there, but if each site at least picked a few different ones, I'd get a much better picture overall.
I'm a Voodoo 5 owner and still can't find a GF3 or R8500 review that answers one simple question: What settings (FSAA, LOD, etc.) do I need to achieve the same image quality that I've grown accustomed to with the V5, and how does the performance of the GF3/R8500 compare with the V5 at those settings? A comparison between, say, the GF3's 2x FSAA and the V5's 2x FSAA is meaningless to me unless they look the same.
Maybe now people will have to put a little more effort into their hardware reviews now.
Everyone and their mom can do a review with Quake 3 and report claiming to know what they're talking about. Reviewers will now have to come up with their own benchmarking tools to convince end-users of the validity of their benchmarks.
Even though it is underhanded of ATI, it'll all work out in the end. Sort of a "can't fool all of the people all of the time."
These optimizations have been in ATIs drivers for 6 months now.
So obviously they didn't just pop them in so their upcoming products could look better in benchmarks.
They did it so all their products would get a boost because that's what users wanted.
Thresh's Firingsquad has a great write up on this (in English!) including benchmarks and image quality comparisons.
a ck /default.asp
http://firingsquad.gamers.com/hardware/radeonqu
It is not the first time ATI creates quake-specific drivers. I remember couple of years ago they wrote specific OpenGL driver for win9x to run GlQuake.
"Our amps all go to eleven..." "And that's good?" "Yeah well see, it's one louder."
The scarey thing is that I worked for a company whose president actually used that as a slogan for a pep meeting. Oh my!
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Has anybody bothered to search for other specific game names in the driver code? How bout checking drivers for other cards? I am a programmer (on the unix side) and I am always optimising code for a specific os, app, hardware, what ever. From what I have seen in my company as well as those where friends of mine work, optimizing a driver for a specific app is very common. Just my 2 cents.
No reason to cater to a game that older cards are already tearing up anyways. How many CS players are planning on getting new cards? How many Q3 (and probably Wolf) players are planning on getting new cards? And (as pointed out earlier) what game is used as a benchmark?
They'll go with Q3.
What exactly had them poking around in the first place, looking for evidence of this? Not that I think they're being disingenous or have anything to hide, but it's not like we all just get the idea into our heads to run strings on drivers and come up with ways to "quackify" binaries :)
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
I don't read gaming magazines anymore. Most writers for these publications are self important idiots who think they know more than they do, and think that because they play games, they are fit to design them and even talk about hardware.
The truth is, many are a kissing losers who will often give a piece of software the review they want to give it, then complain about the same piece of software later. This is especially true with windows reviews. How many Windows ME reviews were overwhelmingly positive? How many references to Windows ME are actually positive today? (hint:None)
Even with hardware, reviewers will try to present hardware in the best possible light because they want to believe that the hardware is good (how many good reviews are out for Savage4 based chips? How many reviewers later say that they wouldn't recommend it?)
Personally, I'll just buy reputable parts (athlon 4 or XP(original works well too), geforce 2 or 3, good stuff like that)
...
Just a little rant -- food for thought.
It's been a long time.
Quake vs Half-Life arguments aside, this is a problem because they have deceitfully and specifically massaged the drivers to yield slightly better performance under Q3 because they know it is often used as a benchmark in video-card "shootout" articles in magazines and web-sites the world over. There is no problem with app-specific performance enhancements to a driver (or anything for that matter) if the purpose is to truly provide better performance to the user, but this is not the case here - this is an underhanded trick to get better numbers and more favorable comparisons printed in magazines.
I seem to recall that somebody (quite possibly ATI) looking for specific strings in the WinMark benchmark set and doing something special in the driver, just to pump up the numbers.
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
If someone based their decision on a side by side comparision of what all the cards, looked at the Quake3 benchmark, and used that info as part of the reason they picked the ATI card, they'll be pretty damn upset.
Why? Because in ramping down a few key variables to sacrifice image quality for speed, they have CHANGED the level playing field most benchmarks intend to set up.
If a tester KNOWS what image quality settings ATI dials down to make it faster, perhaps ramping down the same sorts of things (anti-aliasing, for example) might make an even MORE significant impact on another card. The trouble here is that there is no way to tell. ATI does this transparently and independnt of any settings the user CHOOSES to implement.
So a "Full Quality" benchmark between two cards is no longer fair, nor is it a valid comparison. If the driver ramps down settings no matter what, there may not be ANY fair comparisons at any quality.
To be sure, we don't even know if they are dropping frame renderings in these tests, providing absolutely false readings!!!
This practice is to be shunned as much as the "PR-Rating" for they are mere marketing tactics and do nothing for the consumer.
ATI has just lost all of my respect today.
Why are they testing on 1.17, which was released over a year ago, instead of on the latest patch, 1.30?
Jeez how do they get off writing game specific optimizations into their drivers!?! Thank God nVidia hasn't ever done something like this! I mean, where would the benchmark idustry be if things like 3dMark or even API's like DirectX were optimized for one brand of cards? God bless an open market!
Bottom line is that everybody does this. If you are supposedly savvy enough to be comparing benchmarks in the first place, then you should also be savvy enough to know that benchmarking only one game is inconclusive. Unless of course, all you do is play Quake 3...in which case, it is perfectly reasonable to select a video card based solely on its performance in that benchmark.
Gaming magazines (like PC Gamer) benchmark video cards on a slew of games in order to measure performance against all the major 3D engines. What's more, they run the tests at resolutions from 640x480 all the way up to 1600x1200, at 16 bit and 32 bit color. If you're using benchmarks to make a purchase decision, you have to look at all the engines you want to run, and at the resolutions you like to run. Only then are benchmark numbers a good guide.
It's not funny till someone gets hurt.
In the HardOCP article there is a link to a .zip with two uncompressed screenshots -- one from their run of Quake, and the other from "Quack".
The screenshot from Quake is clearly of a lower quality than the one from Quack -- it's especially obvious on the texturing of the teeth of the "mouth". From this I can only conclude that they are getting the extra boost by sacrificing image quality for a specific game used in benchmarks.
As to why they don't have a checkbox - because anyone who actually wanted to get higher framerates at the expense of quality will do so within a game's settings menu. What compromise you want to make between quality and speed will vary from game to game. This checkbox would be system-wide, and not satisfactory.
Plus, no benchmarker would have ran with the "15% faster" option, as that would violate the benchmarks run under "highest quality". So if they did that, their little hack wouldn't have helped their quake scores.
The enemies of Democracy are
Adobe has been doing this with Apple software for years.
They are optimizing the drivers for one of the most popular 3D applications, not some artifical benchmark. Personally, if there was a checkbox which allowed me to disable "cheating" optimizations for specific applications, I would sure as hell leave the optimizations enabled!
Maybe it's just me then - I got bored of it after about an hour of watching these crude little isometric figures hobbling around their isometric worlds.
... well, that and the fact I couldn't get two of the women to indulge in a hot lesbo session, despite 55 minutes of trying. I need realism, dammit!
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
The only place I know of where Quake3 is the biggest game out there is for benchmarks. That's why it's unethical. ATI is trying to manipulate benchmarks to make their product seem better than it really is.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
They get this improved framrate by secretly turning down the visual quality. Nothing has been improved. This is just part of lame ass ATI's last attempt to save themselves from nVidia's dominance.
Fraud?? I guarantee that there is no claim about image quality, nor even one about frame rates. Furthermore, I'll bet the EULA for the drivers makes it clear that they are not making any particular claims and are not liable if it doesn't somehow live up to your expectations.
Personally, I'm glad to see application-specific enhancements. This whole thing is wildly overblown.
.... if I renamed everything on my computer quake, would that make my computer 15% faster???
I think this is perfectly acceptable: Quake 3 is the biggest game out there on Windows, and if ATI has invested a little extra time into pumping a few extra (meaningless) frames out of your Radeon 8500, is this really an act of treachery?
This isn't what they've done, though. They haven't optimised it for Quake3; they've crippled the card for every single other game out there. If they have made improvements to their drivers to make the Quake 3 engine run faster, surely this wouldn't depend on text strings inside the executable, or the name of the filename?
Feel free to flame me if I'm wrong. =)
Goddamn it, stop modding up the adequacy.org trolls!
... 'bout sums it up.
Back in the dark days of consumer OpenGl support, many vendors like 3DFX, Rendition and Matrox released MiniGL client drivers specifically for Quake/QII engine games.
After they released working ICDs, most of these vendors continued to improve and release MCDs because they simply performed better.
If ATI's drivers were simply doing this seamlessly, ie: activating an MCD for a particular game, this would not be a problem in an sense. After all, what was acceptable a year ago should be acceptable today so long as it doesn't come at the cost of usabaility/features.
However, evidence has ramped up that this "enhancement" actually does affect the image quality negatively.
So, you say, how could ATI do this to us? Its simple really, they've done it before...or have you all forgotten already about ATI's Rage Pro TURBO driverset released early 1998? The drivers that gave an amazing %40 increase in Winbench 98, the Direct3D standard benchmark tool of the time, but came at a substantial cost in real game framerates?
Some companies never learn.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
Here is the problem:
p hp
ATI sacrificed image quality for a 15% boost in frames per second in Quake 3, which is NOT something that the drivers do for other games -- including the hacked "Quack 3".
Here is an article about the image quality loss (in German, try feeding it through babelfish):
http://www.3dcenter.de/artikel/2001/10-24_a.php
Or, here is a link to the page in which they show all their comparison screenshots at once -- this is VERY conclusive:
http://www.3dcenter.de/artikel/2001/10-24_pic1.
Optimizing your drivers for the most commonly used applications is not a bad idea, but when you deliberately decrease image quality to get a better benchmark score, you have cheated the trusting consumer.
Just have some prebuilt "profiles" that you can load on the fly. Kind of like how you can do with Nvidia. Just make a little utility that lets you pick a game that you are going to play, and regularly release new "profiles" Then you are optimized for that.
http://firingsquad.gamers.com/hardware/radeonquack /default.asp
They are not "Optimised" for quake 3. The image quality is seriously suffering to gain performance. This is purely wrong. When I set textures to be 32 bit in a game that's what I mean. If I want faster I'll set them to 16 thank you, I don't need my driver doing it for me (Note that that was just one of 3 cheats used)
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!
Correct me if I'm wrong but weren't they grepping a .DL_ file for 'uake 3' as opposed to a .DLL? now, I dont use windows a great deal but afaict, a .DL_ file is an LZ compressed .DLL file... considering compression tends to munge the original contents out of recognition, this is probably little more than a coincidence.
Having said that though, if a symbol swap did indeed cause the drivers to slow down and output different images, this makes the point moot anyways. Can someone clarify here?
Which gets us back to the issue at hand. I don't know anything about the inner workings of the Radeon driver, but there are probably a number of similar tradeoffs involved in its design. The most reasonable interpretation is *not* that Radeon has optimized for Quake 3 at the expense of other programs. If that were true, it would run at the same rate whatever it were named. The better explanation is that when the driver knows what program is being run (such as Quake 3) it optmizes itself to the known characteristics of that program, and when a program which the driver knows nothing about (such as "Quack") is run, it uses default settings.
Thus, it's not necessarily favoring Quake 3 over other applications, but is instead using optimizations for for known programs which are not available for unknown ones. There's nothing in this article to indicate that similar optimizations haven't been made for Counter Strike, Half Life, or any other popular 3D programs.
Morally, it's not okay for ATI to optimize a product for a benchmark unless the product is specifically gearned towards, or at least advertised towards, that benchmark. Therefore, Unless ATI begins marketing their chips as "optimized for Quake playing," they should not be faking benchmark tests.
Would you find it morally acceptable for a car company to build their seatbelts to adequately hold the weight of a crash test dummy, but not that of a full-grown person?
However, the market will determine whether or not it is truly okay for ATI to do this. One of the reasons AMD survives against Intel is because of the well known quality (i.e. clock cycle time) of their chips. Otherwise, why would anyone buy an AMD? Therefore, informed consumers may choose to buy ATIs if they want to play quake, but go get an NVidia if they want to play CS (as they should!)
Read jack phelps dot net
that the only thing some people look @ is the FPS rate their getting in the corner on some game. If I was benchmarking the 8500, I would look @ the image quality above anything else. I mean cmon: what is better: 100 FPS @ best image quality, vs 115 FPS @ shitty @!#$%^& 640x480? at least certain ppl I know (even tho they are COMPLETE and UTTER ATI freaks and call everyone else NVIDIOTS) look more @ the image quality (namely because they 22" monitors), and not at the shear FPS.
On the other hand, reducing image quality to gain FPS in a game like quake3 is pretty low, especiallu blowing the pride of all those ATI fans (yuo know who yuo are: when yuo cried upon reading this article)....
BSD is for people who love UNIX. Linux is for those who hate Microsoft.
Hercules did something similar to "improve" their display card "performance" about ten years ago. One part of a popular benchmark (PC Magazine?, Byte?) involved displaying strings. Hercules hardcoded the benchmark strings into their display cards ROM - they really smoked everyone on the string display portion of the benchmarkgood results. When someone examined their ROM, the benchmark strings were changed and Hercules got both a much reduced benchmark, and a lot of really bad press.
Once upon a time (8088's were the big thing then), a clone chip (NEC v10?) got really good benchmark ratings, because a manufacturer screwed with the software clock to make things seem faster. Slower clock means that the self measured time was shorter. Of course, since the machines couldn't keep actual time time worth a damn, the scam didn't last very long.
You either believe in rational thought or you don't
Your line of reasoning stands like a drunk one-legged man in a hurricane.
First off, the only thing the "quackified" executable screwed up was the string Quake.
Second, if you look at the screenshots taken with Quake vs. Quack, you'll see that the Quake screenshots are of far worse quality. Their "optimization" was to detect that quake was running and reduce quality to get higher benchmark scores.
There is always the chance that their honestly-intended game-specific optimizations somehow had as a side effect reduced quality in Quake AND breaking any other game, such that these results were produced. But Occam's Razor cuts that to pieces, since at that point you're still not doing anything but turning down a detail slider.
The enemies of Democracy are
Many years ago I bought an ATI expert@play card because it had good Quake benchmark numbers. Guess what, they had written the drivers for that benchmark and the card itself couldn't actually play games at the speed the benchmark indicated. Nothing new here. This is also why I stopped buying ATI cards.
Do really dense people warp space more than others?
Personally, I'll just buy reputable parts (athlon 4 or XP(original works well too), geforce 2 or 3, good stuff like that)
Athlon -- Reviewers exclaim superior performance from certain AMD motherboards that turned out to be too unstable to be used as regular production machines.
GeForce -- Reviewers exclaim wonderful game benchmarks, never mention that the 2D quality makes your desktop look as bad as with the Cirrus Logic card you had in 1994.
I agree that the review business (including Tom's and other web sites) is cracked, but to a very large degree, the community recommendations are based on the reviews and are also cracked. End result -- No good information.
It appears to me that hardware sites such as [H]ardOCP are falling for NVidia produced FUD regarding ATI products, ...which appear to be a possible threat to NVidias' line of GF3 cards.
Wasn't NVidia the one who selectively released to hardware sites their latest 'detonator' drivers at the same time as ATI's product release, said drivers not being released to the public until months after? Yes. They were. But you didn't see [H]ardOCP crying about that, did you? No. You didn't.
[H]ardOCP has been a 'known' NVidia whore for a while now, kow-towing to everything NVidia, like a whipped little boy fearful of displeasing his master.
Until sites such as [H]ardOCP wean themselves from the teat of NVidia, this type of 'name calling' will continue, to no one's benefit.
After all, if it wasn't for competition, NVidia would just end up being another Microsoft, and we know how 'good' for the public-at-large that is, don't we?
It's not unethical to optimize your hardware for a particular piece of software.
It is unethical to then use that software for a competitive benchmark, without telling anyone you've done the optimizing.
The first is an example of giving your customers what they want. The second is an example of manipulating independent reviews to give misleading data.
Remember the compiler whose authors hacked it so that it would recognize the Dhrystone benchmark and perform optimizations that happened to work for Dhrystone but which couldn't be applied in general? (It's mentioned in Hennesy and Patterson, if memory serves.) This is the same sort of thing--doing something special for the benchmark that can't be done in general. It makes the benchmark figures misleading for their supposed purpose. Based on other messages already posted, this case is in fact worse than the compiler hack, because the compiler hack resulted in a program that would at least generate the expected output; the driver hack, according to the referenced pages on other posts, degrades the display quality to get speed. If I had bought that graphics card, heck yes, I'd be upset.
They worked with Id to have their card perform a bit better with Quake 3 (and maybe other games based upon the same engine), which just so happens to be a game that a lot of people play. Betcha there are similar calls for Valve software's Half-Life games, considering the card comes retail with three Valve games. And so what if they did? Those folks who are swayed by such thing play those games and will reap the benefits, and those of us who aren't will buy the card based upon other real-world merits.
This story really seems to be nothing more than turd-stirring, especially since they haven't looked for any other improvements. Poor journalism brought to us by a bunch of hacks.
The more you know about how a tool is going to be used the more you can optomize it for that purpose. Adding Quake optomizations doesn't necessarily introduce any instability or speed penalty. In fact it could add stability to Quake since it's a known target for the driver.
The other thing this test doesn't do is rule out the possibility that some other games aren't optomized - unless there is a popular game named Quack.
Is it wrong to optomize a game to particular hardware? I didn't think so. Why then is it wronfg to go the other way around? If this was an open source driver would it be such a conspiracy?
ANY company, ESPECIALLY a computer hardware company, will trumpet any 'optimizations' to anyone who'll listen in multiple press releases. Stupid little minutiae that make no difference in frame rate for the average user (AGP, anyone?) are announced as if they were the next generation in computer 3d graphics.
So. If ATI didn't think they were doing anything wrong, there'd be something like a sort of freaky stepchild of an iD/ATI agreement where ATI would plaster "Quake 3 optimized!" all over their boxes and take underhanded swipes at Nvidia et al. in their press releases about it being an exclusive.
They didn't. So it's clear, to me, that regardless of what the Slashdot/HardOCP/etc. community thinks, ATI thought it was scummy enough to keep it under wraps, AND make a non-statement regarding it once they'd been caught.
Pretty damning, I'd say. I can't wait to hear what Tom has to say about this. (Or has he spoken up already?)
-- If we were in any other industry they would've shot us a long time ago.
First I think the naming convention is a classic example of duck and cover.
The unmitigated gall of some companies, what is next? A post sequil to Moon Over Orion being called Moo3.exe? When will the horror ever stop.
Ok, my sarcasm and stupidity stops now.
In essence ATI is trying to make their hardware look better. Compared to the current GF3's I understand they stack up very well, but in "classic ATI fashion" their drivers blow goats/ducks/chunks (insert colorful phrase).
ATI has always been a mass hardware producer and now is trying to break into the high end gaming market...they have the visual quality, that is a given, but their speed is/has always been lacking until recently.
But, their lack of quality drivers has been dogging them and they have always tried to duck the issue...so maybe there is a subliminal message to this "quack.exe" thing.
( i could not resist, sorry, that was too good to pass up).
I just sincerely hope we do not end of with a ATI only version of D3D or GL or Gl-ATI-ide.
They will just be painting themselves into a corner like 3dfx did to some extent.
Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
"...and if ATI has invested a little extra time into pumping a few extra (meaningless) frames out of your Radeon 8500, is this really an act of treachery?""
Quake ]|[ is THE standard for PC game benchmarks. John Carmack's engines are generally regarded as the best and fastest in the industry, and test overall performance of a system without getting bogged down on the CPU like other engines do. The Quake X engines also tend to support just about every performance enhancing feature they can (Even if the games themselves may not take advantage of it.). Quake X engines also tend to be the most OpenGL compliant engines around - something that figures greatly into why ATI would do this.
By focusing driver development on Quake ]|[, ATI is able to produce a card that will perform very well on the standard PC benchmark. Honestly, I would rather have a card that performs well on any system out there. ATI has always had horrible problems with OpenGL performance caused by weak drivers, and this has long been one of the biggest criticism of their cards. By rewriting the driver to show a great amount of Quake ]|[ performance, ATI is able to convince potential buyers that they have been fixing the OpenGL code; which if Kyle's speculation is correct, is probably one of the sleaziest things in the history of computer hardware.
I will be keeping a close eye on this one in the next few days. If this is true, I will be changing my plans to buy a new Radeon to buying a new nVidia card - because nVidia has never given me such a reason to distrust them. On top of that, nVidia drivers are custom hacked for specific cards by other vendors, so if nVidia did try this, people would leak the truth.
This has the potential to really harm ATI. If ATI loses the faith of gamers, OEMs will continue to abandon ATI for nVidia. At a time when the global economy is already faltering, ATI does not need any lost sales, and if they look weak they could lose the support of companies like Dell and Apple that are already moving to nVidia.
the driver for the good old PowerVR PCX1 card (like the Matrox M3D) had this abilities to detect the name of the .exe then turn on or off some optimizations
just take a look at this apps for example which do the same things than the driver.
"Science will win because it works." - Stephen Hawking
If it wasn't for that goddamn ad ATI ran in Computer Shopper this month (S&M sells, bay-bee!) I would be very enthusiastically defending them. Right now, I am more likely to spend the extra bucks and grab a Matrox because the idea of using an image of violence against women to sell video cards is repugnant to me.
Oh yeah, I buy my DVDs used, too.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
ATI has nothing to gain by suppressing their other scores.. Double blind this test: change "3dmark2001" to "Quake3" and see if it runs faster. Then we would know if it was ATI optimizing for quake3 or Carmack lending some friendly help, suppressing other games frame rates to claim himself game coder king. And don't think for a moment that he doesn't have millions riding on this. If UT had the frame rate of Q3A, Think of how much they could have made selling their engine instead of Carmack making the dough selling his engine.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
Most of what I'll say has been said before, but the ignorance displayed here really depresses me.
ATI has not specifically optimized for Quake 3. What they have done, is prevent Quake 3 from using its highest settings, based on the program name alone.
Quack 3 will use the highest settings(just like the nVidia cards), Quake 3 will use ATI's crap-texture-quality settings.
Just wait til ATI's next driver revision is out. No textures at all!
And the revision after that, how about no rendering? Just a text message saying "You are now playing Quake 3" and buffer flipping. Look at them there fps!
It didn't actually do things to achieve more optimum performance...
IT DECREASED THE VISUAL QUALITY, effectively giving the cards less to do and thus making the cards perform better.
After reading both the HardOCP article and looking at the images, I couldn't help to think of the saying that with statistics you can prove whatever you want. And couldn't have cared less (one reason is that I don't play that game ;)) if it hadn't been for the last part of the article:
;)
"Our engineering team is committed to providing the best visual experience for the user in all applications, with the optimal combination of high frame rates, image quality, and stability"
I thought optimal meant that all of the three items should be at the best possible level. What I think he meant was:
"Our engineering team is committed to providing the best numbers for the reporter in all applications, with the optimal combination of high frame rates and stability"
Now, this would certainly be true. As for me, I'll stick with NVidia, they may be bullies and even lie at times, but never when confronted with facts (as far as I can remember). And besides, its too darn expensive to by a new card now
Thats my two cents anyway...
The question going through my mind is - why would the graphics driver care what the name of the executable is? If you had a way of cheating to improve performance, wouldn't you just apply it across the board?
Why would they _not_ implement this speed/quality cheat for everything they could? If they were worried about benchmark programs noticing quality problems, the logical thing to do would be to special-case WinBench, not Quake.
I wouldn't take the advice of a reviewer, but I'd try to find somebody who used the product before.
The best way to find out how reliable a piece of equipment is is to find out what's wrong with it.
my PCCHIPS motherboard would have been off my to-have list so quickly!
It's been a long time.
ATI has totally lost it's numero uno status in my books now. Considering that NVidia has been kicking ATI's ass ever since the TNT came out (what's that, 3yrs now?), I don't think that I'll be going back to ATI anytime soon. And I used to be loyal to ATI. After all, I'm a Canadian too.
I switched to NVidia when the TNT2 Ultra came out, and wow....these guys know what they're doing. IMHO, this is a wake up call for ATI. Get your driver-writing dudes cleaned up. They simply aren't up to snuff.
pi=sigma{n:0-infinity}[(1/16)^n][(4/(8n+1))-(2/(8n +4))-(1/ (8n+5))-(1/(8n+6))]
It's framerates in a Game, it's nothing major. Quake 3 is a popular game, so a company optimizes it's drivers for one the most playes, graphic intesive games, so what?!? The Radeon is a card aimed at gamers, ferfering back a previouse response, the reason it wasn't optimized for Counter Strike is that that games engine is old by comparision, and already gets great frame rates from the video card, is it worth squeezinf the frame rate up when there will be little to no noticable difference?
(I wonder if anything is connected to the right most LED digit on more recent machines, or if it's hardwired to zero?)
Judging from my Williams Twilight Zone, they're hardwired. The lowest point value you can get on it is 10 points anyway. Besides, it's not an LED display, it's an EL dot matrix array that they do animated graphics on. I believe the last machine that Williams made before they got out of the pinball business had a video display.
Beta sux! Join the Slashcott! http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4760465&cid=46173047
A quick interview with ATI here:0 01 31.html
http://www.sourcemagazine.com/csm/Forum2/HTML/0
If they've figured out some way to boost Q3A performance without having some performance trade-off somewhere ... then I say it's fair game.
Then it's not fair game.
Logically, if the tuning didn't hamper real-world performance, then the check wouldn't make "Quack" slower, would it?
I think this is perfectly acceptable: Quake 3 is the biggest game out there on Windows, and if ATI has invested a little extra time into pumping a few extra (meaningless) frames out of your Radeon 8500, is this really an act of treachery? I'm going to write a Voodoo 1 driver now to detect when 3dMark2001 is running at 1024x768x32 and have it force it down to 320x240x8; I should be able to get 10,000+ marks no problem! And it's perfectly acceptable because 3dMark2001 is the biggest 3d benchmarking tool out there on windows.
Does 'they' refer to ATI or HardOCP? At first I though it was ATI that was using a 'quackifier' but couldn't resolve that with 'makes it run 15% slower'. Guess we should never expect geeks to be great communicators, even to us semi compu-literate ;))
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
I seem to remember a loud outcry in the Mac community by some manufacturer (processor ugrade or video card) that had written their drivers to deliver good results under MacBench.
Mind you they did not optimise the driver for MacBench, they optimised their driver to report that it was doing well under MacBench.
According to what we have seen, it looks like ATi has written a driver that will report itslef as having good performance if it is being run under a benchmark. Since there is no direct access to hardware under Windows, applications such as Quake must rely on the DirectX drivers for that access, meaning Quake cannot reliably benchmark anything if the driver is being written to tell Quake whatever it wants to tell Quake.
Not since Marie-Antoinette played milkmaid has looking simple and honest been so fake and complicated.
ATI did something like this years ago. They had optimized their Rage/Rage Pro drivers for a specific benchmark (can't remember which one at the moment) and all of the magazines that relied on this benchmark had the ATI cards running faster than just about everything out at the time. It wasn't until they started running Quake, Turok, and other games that they started to see the Rage/Rage Pro chips as crap.
Fifty watts per channel, baby cakes.
Is it optimized for Return To Castle Wolfenstein?
It's coming out at the end of November, and if ATI is faster then I will get one.
I can't wait to fight off the Allies and then roast me up some jewniggers. That map has a bunch of ovens that you have to keep lit up or else the Zionists win.
Everybody except perhaps Nvidia does the same thing. And that's only because they get to have whatever feature they want put in D3D exactly the way they want it to go in so they have to do as little work in their driver as possible.
There's a ton of places where other companies look for Game X and change the way they map a certain D3D concept to physical hardware; and they're almost always to fix bugs or make the game work better; not just to get a fake benchmark score. I wouldn't presume that ATI is doing anything sinister here either without strong evidence to the contrary.
Anyone remember the Voodoo2's miniGL that was designed from the ground up for Quake2? What's the difference here? We aren't talking about benchmark tampering; they've found a way to optimize their drivers to make Quake3 run faster. Maybe there are geometric instructions that Q3 doesn't make use of that they disable? That would be a good reason for the optimization by executable name; it might not work on other games. Let's not cruxify ATi just yet; they haven't done anything wrong as far as I can tell...
-- Terry
what about other games? I mean if you're only playing quake3 sure, go get a radeon. But if you play tribes 2, CS( the most popular game on the net), or UT, it really doesn't do much for you.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
First of all, I dont think there are that many users of ATI products who would consider themselves to be gamers. 3d support is important in the gaming world and I for one would not use an ATI especially for those games that require hi frame pre second.
I have an ATI card, but it is solely used for its tv card add on in my windoze machine with my digital video camera. for this, Ati rocks it. for games? I think Not.
http://www.gamespy.com/stats/ - read it and weap boys. There are far more people playing half-life online then Quake 3 - Quake 3 is not the kind of game you'd want to play single player for long so I think this is a good measure.
Linux Journal wrote a piece about X windows, specifically advocating ATI for actively supporting development of open source Radeon linux drivers. As of the printing (on stands now), LJ purported that other vendors, nvidia and matrox, only developed closed source linux drivers. Eric Raymond took a knock at closed drivers, wondering whether you wanted proprietary closed code so close to the kernel. So what...? Well, ATI is the only possible challenger to nvidia (matrox isn't in the stratosphere), its a business, they ain't all bad, and frankly, using "reprehensible" to describe a game specific driver tweak is a bit overzealous. If you don't like their drivers, hack the source, nvidia won't even give you the chance.
According to GameSpy, Half-Life is a little over 10 times as popular as Quake3, and Unreal Tournament is slightly more popular.
After reading a few reviews of the ATi 8500, I was just as disappointed as anyone else with the performance showing. On paper the card looked like a true GeForce 3 killer. Unfortunately it just didn't seem to show up in the game benchmarks -including Quake 3.
As everyone knows, ATi is severely lacking in the driver department, and it has shown in the less than spectacular sales (I myself chose a GF over ATi for this reason).
So, the question now is: will this be the blow that sinks the precarious boat that is ATi. Or, more hopefully, will they finally realize that this is a serious issue, and begin to invest heavily into a decent driver coders.
With every driver release Nvidia has increased the value of their cards (most notably with 28.81). Now it is time for ATi to do the same, or give up on the high-end market as a result. (Their oem sales would likely keep them afloat for a while)
What are you talking about? This is just BS, first you should come out with some real numbers instead of spreading some FUD that one mod would have more users than two innovative games.
This is not tuning for a program, this is cutting corners. If the simple change of "quake" strings to "quack" causes a 15% drop in speed (if the hack really doesn't change anything else - would need to try other cards as well or something like that), then what they're doing is jumping routines.
I remember that Hercules once did this a good few years ago. Their drivers watched for repetitive procedures and then skipped some of the repititions, giving falsely high results. They got a pounding in the news because of it.
I used to suffer the same thing.
Basically I just kept playing for a really long time till I stopped throwing up.
Still can't watch other people play (and can't play with 3D glasses), but I can play FPS without any problems now.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
John B. Challinor II APR - Director, Public Relations at ATI Technologies Inc. "ATI optimizes its drivers on many different levels, including the application level, the game engine level, the API level, and the operating system level. That is, some optimizations work only on specific games, while others work only on specific game engines or only on specific operating systems. In the case of Quake III and Quake III Arena, we were able to achieve certain optimizations specifically for that game, as we do for other popular games. Our engineering team is committed to providing the best visual experience for the user in all applications, with the optimal combination of high frame rates, image quality, and stability."
If they're lowering the quality of the textures they're not really 'commited to providing the best visual experience' are they?
acm
Quake 3 is the biggest game out there on Windows
_wrong_.... Half-Life is the biggest game out there on Windows......
No, seriously, I just come here for the articles.
the definition of the "Biggest game on windows" changes with time, so any specifics are automaticly wrong
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
The problem is not that they've optimised thier drivers for a popular game; it is that they've optimised it for a game that is frequently used as a benchmark for preformance comparison without announcing the fact. This, if true, would appear to be an attempt to decieve reviewers into overestimating the card's preformance in thier reviews.
On the other hand, if they optimised thier drivers for Quake 3 and advertised thier cards as "optimised for Quake 3," there would be no ethical issues; reviewers would take not of this and take it into consideration when choosing and weighing benchmarks. Of course, if the link posted showing poorer visuals as a result of these optimisations was true than this could also be seen as a bit shifty.
well, half-life is the biggest game on my HDD, anyway.... over 1 GB, the last time I checked and still growing(Half-Life, OP4, CS, TFC, DoD, The Opera)... so, yeah, _HL_is_BIG_....
No, seriously, I just come here for the articles.
did it ever occur to them that manulipulating the Quake 3 binary just might mess it up a little, and make it run a tad bit slower?
"Flee at once, all is discovered."
Remember Minigl drivers from 3dfx? Just enough GL for Quake, but fuck all for any program that called a function Quake didn't use. Same deal here, the company I work for is making a GL game that runs fine on nVidia cards, but can't run on a Radeon 8500 because it doesn't support triangle strips up to spec. Funny that it runs Q3 no problem though.
I think it is premature to condemn ATI for this.
Ask yourself, what exactly does the logic in their driver do when it detects that it's running Quake 3? It must be some optimization that cannot be applied in the general case, for if the optimization were applicable in the general case, then I'm sure ATI would use it for all 3D applications. So perhaps theres something specific about Quake that allows this optimization.
Who knows, perhaps there are peculiarities that ATI takes advantage of in other 3D apps as well. For example, if HardOCP tried the same experiment changing unreal to unrael or something, they might stumble across Unreal-specific optimizations that ATI has implemented.
I've only taken 1 1/2 years of C++ (yes, I know, I know just about nothing about programming), but I could have sworn that a compiled executable was all assembly. All source code (and it's resultant variables) is thrown away upon compilation? Correct me if I'm wrong.
The gist of the article: for quake the atidrivers apparently only use 16 bit textures (this makes the difference with the "100" on the first page) and simply use a lower mipmap-level for textures (that is, they only use the graphic detail of the texture that would be used if it were farther away (and thus smaller). But the detail level of surfaces contains information that is often vital: The detail depends on the distance of the surface, if a surface is very detailed it is nearer than a surface with less detail. If you only see a part of a surface (through a gap or window for example) the detail is the only hint how far that surface is away. Many gamers probably use this information automatically without thinking about it. With the 'quake-improved' drivers someone accustomed to the previous detail levels will probably estimate that objects are farther away now (since they are less detailed). Even after being accustomed with the new detail levels, it still makes a difference: the more detailed a texture is, the smaller is the piece of surface you need to see to estimate how far it is.
To apreciate the importance of textures and structured surfaces for depth perception try q3a with different texturesettins and see what a difference that makes in a map like q3dm19. In quake 1 you could even switch of all textures, then, staring at a plain wall, you couldn't tell if it was 10cm, 1m or 10m away.
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
I believe the point of the accusation is that ATI is making "optimizations" to Quake to taint any reviewing process based on benchmarking to their favor. It is commonly known that Quake is used as a benchmark to test how "fast" graphics cards are. Thus, the accusation is that they are making drivers specifically designed to make them look better in any benchmarking reviews, though their product might not be any better in any other games. Quake is used as a benchmarking program, assuming that -- in general -- if graphics card A can run Quake faster than graphics card B, it can run most games faster.
So, basically, it is alleged that what ATI is doing is cheating on the benchmarking reviews of graphics cards which use Quake.
That said, let me say there is nothing wrong with putting options in a driver to optimize it for a specific popular game. However, such options should NOT hinder performance in other games, or should be optional ad-ins for the user if they do. Nevertheless, the fact that ATI had not told the CONSUMERS and PRODUCT REVIEWERS that it put in such Quake-specific optimizations suggests that they were doing so solely to look better in reviews. To me, this seems like a case of FRAUD.
However, if there are also built-in optimizations for other popular games, other popular programs, then this is NOT a fraud but an attempt by ATI to make their hardware work well with a variety of programs.
There is nothing wrong with optimizing the software(drivers) to get a bit more performance out of a companies own hardware. In fact, this is a GOOD thing. It means that consumers get a better product at no additional cost(as drivers are free, and the hardware would work better).
But again, if they're doing it just to look good on reviews, its fraud. Clearly, there needs to be some kind of investigation: simply put, at the moment, we don't have enough information to determine whether ATI was acting fraudulently, trying to make its product better with a variety of programs, or misguidedly trying to make their hardware better for one game at the expense of many others.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
If you look at the screenshots, it's clear that the images are different between Quake and Quack. To me, this makes it seem likely that ATI is trading off correctness for speed when running Quake. That is, rather than behaving as the OpenGL specification says that a graphics display should behave, ATI is shaving off corners that don't really matter for Quake, but might matter for another application. It's roughly analagous to Intel hypothetically shaving off some floating point-precision in certain applications for better performance where full floating-point precision is unnecessary for that application, but might matter somewhere else. 15% performance gain seems very reasonable for a technique like that.
This isn't about optimizing for a program, that would be great. They are forcing poorer quality textures when they string Quake 3 is present to get higher frame rates.
They aren't making it faster, they are just giving you lower quality textures!!!
Yes! Quake 3 is the industry standard for graphics card benchmarks by most popular web sites. If ATI optimizes their cards, or more likely cripples them so they don't have to process as much and can squeeze out a few extra frames then ATI can compete with faster cards without needing faster hardware. In the end the consumer would lose and that would be an act of treachery. I don't know what ATI does in their drivers, but in this world I don't trust any corporation until it gives everything away for free (GNU anyone?).
Modifying an executable to improve performance for a particular piece of hardware is BAD idea. Besides the potential of adding additional bugs and incompatibilities to the software, you could add future problems with upgrades. Will you be happy if your copy of Quake 3 stops working if you change to a different video card? Or, what happens when you can't install the latest Quake 3 patch, because the checksum on your game executable doesn't match? The small performance benefit isn't worth the heap of problems that it can cause, and it could cause other hardware manufacturers to pull the same stunts with their devices. I'm not looking forward to the day when my Sound Blaster "customized" copy of Unreal 2 to starts causing conflicts with my Intel "enhanced" copy of DirectX 9, and neither should you.
This is the most poorly thought out idea in Video cards since the See-Through NVidia drivers from ASUS.
I doubt ATI went to all this trouble just to squeeze a few measely frames out of Quake3 just becuase its such a great game and they wanted their users to enjoy it that much more. I think the reason is because so many benchmark sites rely on Quake3 FPS as one of their standard benchmarks. By doing this special optimization for Quake 3 they are providing deceptive feedback as to the GENERAL quality of their drivers for 3d performance.
You idiots aren't getting the fact that they didn't optimize it for the quake engine, but they optimized it to actually look for the string 'quake' in the program before it increases performance. This means that they're doing something special on quake-specific engines that they're *not* doing on all other ones -- means that they're cheating all other engines on purpose (not even based on the fact that they might be able to do something with the quake engine, but because they simply cheat all non-quake games)
Understand what an article is about before you go posting random comments. Who cares about what engine is being used for what? That's not even close to being the point.
> Quake 3 is the biggest game out there on Windows
Of course you never played BZFlag.
Surely you can't be that naive? Quake3 is one of the most widely used informal benchmarks out there. Tweaking the code so that it works better for an executable NAMED QUAKE3.EXE could alter quite a few reviews that are by the numbers, thus (IMO dishonestly) bringing in a few more suckers^H^H^H^H customers.
/*
I could see optimizing the code to work better on quake 3, but why would it change it just by changing the name of everything? The second poster mentioned that Half-life is more popular... you could just say it's because a lot of people have junky video cards, but UT has Q3 cornered on both sides.
Personally I don't belive them, maybe they created a bug at the same time they changed all the names.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
Nobody should be shocked or surprised that this goes on, but users should be very wary.
Having previously worked at Microsoft testing display drivers for 3 years, I can tell you that this is no surprise at all. As a comparison, the last ATI driver that Microsoft wrote a very long time ago was about 5k of source code. The same corresponding ATI developed driver was over 700k of source. The difference? Gazillions of conditional tweaks to make games, and especially benchmarks look better and run faster. Sounds nice in theory, but an exponential increase in code and code paths means an exponential increase in test cases that usually don't get examined. The truth is that most display vendors depend on Microsoft supplied test kits for most or all of their testing and these kits are not designed to test the special cases IHV's have coded in. That's why "performance" drivers are often much less stable than Microsoft certified drivers where vendors have turned their conditional execution off.
ATI is hardly alone, they've -all- done it and they all continue to do it. At one point several vendors (which will remain nameless, due to previous legal threats) were in trouble with Microsoft because it was discovered that their code was bypassing GDI in some cases to eke out a 1% gain in performance in general Winbench scores. Coding around GDI, the DIB Engine, or DirectDraw for that matter is inherently dangerous and the core cause of 99% of hard locks and a good 75% of blue screens.
How can we prove that ATI didn't also "optimize" for 3D Benchmark 2001, or other tests?
I must admit, I have been a loyal fan of NVIDIA for a while, even though none of my gear is actually NVIDIA-based. However, when I heard how great the new Radeons were testing, they became a serious contender for my next card, which will be bought in a month or two (depends on if Santa is paying, or me). Now, of course, I cannot trust them at all, and will buy a Geforce instead.
Get off my launchpad!
A thought for a moment here..
If Linux is "The gay conspericy" then isn't Microsoft the gay bashing 700 Club?
Know for calling "pagan"s "Satanists".. I guess that would be Apple.. Think diffrently.. Blessed Be.. You know Apple dose seem like a good anolog for paganism.. free sprits etc.. well let's move on..
That kind of makes sence...
Christanity was born as a good religion.. like Dos.. but was added to.. like Windows.. and packaged for the mass market.. like Windows.. then went on a crusaid killing off compeating religions..
It say Windows is garbage is silly...
a lot of Windows isn't sutable.. Windows isn't useful for 90% of the market..
But it has a significant userbase where it's absolutly perfict..
Christanity.. same diff.. 90% monopoly.. "Sunday christans" They aren't really christan instead they just go through the motions and don't think about it. Much as Windows users. They never thought about Linux or MacOs..
But some Christans are real christans.. they really know the religion and practace the religion.. religously.. those people are the best...
Same with Windows.. there are "what ever it is" users and real Windows users... the real users actually use Windows know Windows and like Windows...
I guess Linux is atheism.. MacOs is paganism... and I'm using the wrong os... I'm a pagan using Linux..
Oh thats ok... I know a gay christan bashing pagan who works for Microsoft...
quoth the poster: "In fact it's been over a year since I've even played Quake3, and I don't know anyone else who still plays it either."
Well now you do. Counterstrike is *OLD* and lame (yeah, ok I admit it. I'm trying to start a flamewar here. But I don't think my karma can take any more punishment than it has already...). Why so many people play that game *religiously* is beyond me. I got cstrike running with a perfect 50fps in wine, totally stable. I played it for less than a month, then I saw much better mods for quake3 and deleted cstrike for the diskspace.
Let's hear it for Urban Terror!
Everyone who prefers a mod where your player doesn't hold his gun on a weird angle raise your hand....
...into machine/assembly at compilation? I can understand 'variables' existing in text type support files like your typical *.ini file and the sort, but if I were to crack open the Quake.exe with an assembly editor, would I expect to find any 'quake' variables in there? I just don't see how this tester could find all 'quake' references without having the source code. Did he get a pirate version of the engine from a Quake licensee? And why would there be 'quake' refernces in the .exe, after all it would have no need to refer to itself, it IS the reference. I guess I'll have to read the story first. I can understand a company coding drivers specifically for a game, but I have a hard time seeing how this guy could find this out.
...but I think I have the gist of the scandal down now. From what I understand, when Johnny Fragmaster chooses to play Quake at visual quality 'X', the driver forces the game to play at less that quality X (despite wjat Mr. Fragger specified), therefore putting less a load on the CPU, which naturally allows for better frame rates. If anything, it's the Quake players that suffer, since they expect to play the game at a certain visual resolution, but the driver secretly forces the game to play at a lesser quality simply to boost benchmarks. Anyone see a hole in my general analysis?
I'll take fun/origional/interesting over eyecandy any day (although I do have my limits in that respect, I can no longer stomach the graphics of my old favorites, X-Wing and Daggerfall).
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
considering the source, this is the same "reputable" site that went into how generous microsoft was for donating 5 million dollars in cash and 5 million in software after the WTC disaster when it was clearly a move to get their software on most if not all of the machines that were going to be replaced, 5million in advertising for M$ is a drop in the bucket.. perhaps ATI isn't the only one who's "optimizing" as they put it. ;)
Hey, don't blame all of Canada for ATI's fuckups. My Matrox Mystique 220 still rocks, and it only cost me like $30 in 1997... well, plus the money I got from returning some Microsoft crap at Computer City. The video-in and out are very nice. Of course, Matrox's 3D is nowhere near competitive nowadays. Hmm, maybe you were on to something about those Canucks after all.
The user is normally allowed to choose between pretty graphics or faster frame rate. The user doesn't have that choice with these drivers. You can't get the best graphics even if you wanted them.
The user could get this sort of performance with the older drivers simply by reducing their graphics settings. ATI has simply decided to do that for the user whether they want it or not.
This is BS, ATI tried to pull a fast one on the video card reviewers and they got caught.
-Elendale
IANAT (I Am Not A Troll)
Meant to write something like:
void main()
{
...
class call:
call = quake3;
...
}
I guess I see understand more in a few more classes.
ATI is not to blame... ID software is.
They are planning a monopoly on shootem up games and will in the future include their own os with every game sold + browser + word processor.
Its true.. I worked there since yesterday, got fired when I discovered my boss does satanic rituals every day.
As you can see in this article at firingsquad, the drivers are downgrading texture quality in Q3 to decrease bandwidth and look better in the benchmarks.
I believe it's unethical at the very least.
The point is that they've not keyed their special enhanced behaviors to respond to certain states the Quake3 code brings about, but to the actual name of the executable, and the strings found therein.
That alone, in my mind, smacks heavily of benchmark shenanigans.
If they were to optimize their driver for certain intensive routines within the Quake3 code, that might well be a controversial move, but it at least would be an above-board one, and one clearly based on their target audience's focus.
To check the name of the file being run, or to munge for strings inside the executable, seems perverse and shady.
Personal me, collaborative you
Wait a sec... Does this mean if I modify quake to the Quack version that I will get better quality performance out of my ATI drivers?
org9
that last statement is quite incorrect. At any given second of the day, more people are playing CounterStrike than quake 2,3 and unreal tournment combined...much less just Quake 3!
The issue here is that the Quake games (although I personally would say Unreal Tournament...) is accepted as the most graphically intensive games around. It is THE standard for "quick" benchmarks. People will buy or write off a card based on it's Quake 3 performance...and with Ati's recent driver woes (let's face it they SUCK hard!) having a card with drivers that perform amazing in Quake 3 but nothing else...is extremely suspect. Of course anyone who wants good graphics will buy NVidia anyhow...Ati doesnt provide neough informaion for DRI to write them up a good driver...and NVidia cards have the best linux driver performance and perhaps stability although I don't know that part for sure. Anyhow...I digress.
Derek Greene
Something that is being glossed over in thisi frenzy is this:
ATI has a loooong history of poor drivers. Especially when it comes to compatibility.
I can guarantee that no set of drivers is released by any comapny without making sure that it runs rock solid (stability-wise) in Quake benchmarks. If you remember ATI's first attempt at a 3d chipset the Rage 128 (I think) it was derided in the reviews of the 2nd/3rd gen 3d chipset reviews (voodoo 2, riva 128, tnt, verite, powervr. etc... ) because the drivers were crappy and it look like crap in Quake 2 (as I recall the next "ugliest" was riva 128-- which was considered much better)
What ATI has done here is not different than when M$ optimizes Windows for IE and adds code that causes instability with Mozilla / Netscape (I sure timothy fell on the other side of the fence on that debate)
ATI has been ridden over and over again in the "bleed edge" press about fixing their drivers, and instead of putting the effort in really putting together a good driver set, they had looked narrow-mindedly at making only one aspect good.
This is also an issue of compatibility... the drivers are unable to properly use the full potential of the chipset in the majority of titles.. just quake 3 (someone should use a different benchmark program and quake3-ify it to see what that does.. but I would guess that it would either make it fun faster, or make it less stable)
What happened to supporting OPEN STANDARDS.. like 3d labs and their OpenGL 2.0 proposal.. I like nvidia and all, but this move by ATI is taking us down the same path... proprietary driver calls and all... lets just chunk direct 3d and OpenGL and got with Glide, Metal, and pvrGl (not the real name.. I forget what powerVR's GL was called).. Not that they are bad.. but it should be about not making developers write for the 3d chipset... that's what consoles and arcade boxes are for.
OK enough rant...
... The slant seems to be that there is something inherently wrong about writing application-specific optimizations into operating systems, if in fact this is what Microsoft has done. I think this is perfectly acceptable: Office is the biggest application out there on Windows, and if Microsoft has invested a little extra time into providing a few extra (meaningless) services for your word processing, is this really an act of treachery?
Graham
Graham
USE YOUR BRAINS PEOPLE
WTF about %15 loss of performance due to the way they inherantly hacked the quake3 executable?
I mean.. hello?!?!? It's not like they rebuilt
from source...
*smacks all of you for such a lame post in the first place.
Regarding interpretation of "FPS": Heck, even Duck Hunt is a first-person view shooting game.
Perhaps we should have fs^-1 for framerate instead
We already have a term for this: "hertz", abbreviated Hz. Hertz refers to the number of repeated actions per second. Examples of such actions include wave crests in audio or display renders or refreshes in video.
(I dunno how to do superscript, so I've used the power symbol instead).
On Kuro5hin (and many other Scoop-based sites), Everything, or Wikipedia (or other wiki-like sites that allow HTML), use <sup>...</sup>. On Slashdot (and many other Slash-based sites), you can't.
Will I retire or break 10K?
You changed another game's name to Quake 3? Or changed the video drivers. Assuming the string length is checked and if so it's the same number of characters.
Here is ATI's reponse ("ATI Responds to Radeon 8500 Questions" on SourceMagazine.com).
Cryptnotic
My other first post is car post.
Like Doom 2. Seriously, I'm still loosing 15% of my frame rate which calculates to be around 100 FPS. A frame loss of this magnitude can't be ignored.
God spoke to me
"Is it OK for a company to override your image quality settings in a game without your knowledge?"
See, this has nothing to do with "optimizing" for a game. They didn't optimize ... they fucked around with the image quality on the sly in order to gain performance. Firing Squad has an in-depth look that will show you how.
Optimizing = Achieving better performance WITHOUT sacrifice.
Cheating = Achieving better perfomance through undocumented overriding "features" for only specific games.
My point is this ... when someone sets a game to a specific image quality, what gives ATI the right to think they know better than you? I would gladly give up performance for image quality any day (I'm shallow that way), so why should I be saddled with lousy image quality for a few extra frames?
"We can't be so fixated on our desire to preserve the rights of ordinary Americans ..." Bill Clinton
Writers imply. Readers infer.
Quake - great graphics engine, lousy game.
Quake doesn't get interesting until someone who actually knows how to write a game uses it for thier graphic engine.
Are there any other UK residents on /. who giggle at ATI naming their graphics cards after cheap washing powder?
EtF.
Personally I'll continue to use ATI graphics cards because of their excellent Linux driver support (unlike other graphics card manufacturers who release binary-only drivers.
Blaming GW Bush for the Iraq war is like blaming Ronald McDonald for the poor quality of food.
Try to do envmapping using OpenGL generated texture coords, on an ATi Radeon card with ATi Radeon drivers... looks awful huh? Now switch on a light by calling glEnable(GL_LIGHTING) and glEnable(GL_LIGHT0). Et voila! the envmapping works!
This is about basic OpenGL 1.0 behaviour that is not working correctly in ATi's drivers and is NOT FIXED because they don't have to: Quake2/3 look ok on ATi Radeon cards, so why bother fixing it?
Other crap: specify too less elements when calling glDrawElements() -> POOF your box just died.
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
Sorry, but that would be clever. What ATI have done instead is check to see if common benchmarking program Quake3 is running, and if so override the texture quality settings to something nice and low that the hardware can cope with better. For real world image quality, it means that you can compare the medium quality numbers from a GeForce series card with the high quality ones from an ATI. At which point the Radeon gets beaten by the new budget version of the GeForce3 and ATI is in big trouble - presumably why they have resorted to such underhand tactics.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
Well, it sure throws a monkey wrench in the workings of benchmarkers who pray to Quake3 and Quake3 alone .. I can see how it would infuriate Kyle who doesn't care much for hard work for his reviews - or the look of his website, for that matter.
It's one thing to optimize for a game or a specific set of calls, it's quite another to build in a different driver path which is only executed for that game based on the name of the program and not the data being sent. Quake 3 is not just a game, it is a benchmark, possibly the most observed benchmark, and ATI knows this. This driver optimization appears to attempt to skew the results of that benchmark by cutting corners which cannot be cut when running other identical software. It's not looking at the OpenGL stream and optimizing for a set of calls, it's using predetermined knowledge of corners which can be cut through human intervention, perhaps not even executing all the graphics calls being sent. This makes it a deliberate attempt to deceive people reviewing cards. This is not an entirely new phenomenon, but it is dishonest, this is not a good thing whether you play Quake 3 or not.
If you want to bench your card with 3D games use Parsec (www.parsec.org). It is OpenGL and runs on Win32, Linux, Mac and MacOSX. You can compare everything with one (1) game and see how your card performs. It is the most reliable source, because no one (I'm sure Nvidia is doing the same) ever wrote a patch for those, plus you can compare the cards in all platforms.
Nothing wrong with the original description techwise, but the statement "Quake 3 is the biggest game for windows" is absolute nonsense.
It might compete and win as best benchmark against 3dmark.
It lost a long time ago against counterstrike onlinewise, and has about the same amount of regular players as Unreal Tournament.
And saleswise, its a mere drop in the ocean compared the awful Myst series.
So did they put it out in the really big box or what?
Smid
years ago. I forget who but basically the program would act as normal but when it detected more then 5 different viruses on your machine it assumed it was being benchmarked and changed how it scanned the system to give a better result.
Ok then, let's do benchmarks on Half-Quake, CounterQuake, Max Quake and other very popular FPS games ... Oops, almost forgot Quake Raider and Noone Quakes Forever.
I don't read gaming magazines anymore. Most writers for these publications are self important idiots who think they know more than they do, and think that because they play games, they are fit to design them and even talk about hardware.
I found it somewhat amusing that the HardOCP fellow who wrote the article was impressed by readers' ability to load a DLL into a hex editor and search for a string. quote:
"We immediately started getting feedback from programmers with skills far beyond mine, looking deeper into the drivers."
Yeah, programmers. That's what they were. They have WinHex. Sheesh.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
I happen to know that both ATI and nVidia write in driver optimizations for all the big games... and why not? A lot of benchmarks are based on these games, and people want the most performance they can get with them.
The big thing was that there WERE NO "OPTIMIZATIONS" for Quake 3. What ATi did was NOT to make their card perform better on Quake 3. They crippled the benchmark so it was less demanding on their hardware. Try http://firingsquad.gamers.com for another article on the same issue. Here's the facts:
ATi hard-coded image quality settings into their drivers. When you run Quake3, it FORCES you to uses 16-bit color for your HUD, a lowered texture quality, and lower geometric detail, and possibly bilinear filtering instead of trilinear. In other words, if you select HIGH detail, you're still only running MEDIUM detail, except Quake3 doesn't know it.
Instead of making large-scale 32-bit textures faster, what ATi did for the Q3 benchmark was force it to use small 16-bit textures in places. Imagine that, you can get better framerates at low quality than you can at hight quality.
They didn't change the performance. They changed the benchmark. The same crap they've pulled periodically for the past decade. This is not a driver-quality issue. They deliberately hard-coded lower values for texture quality for Quake3 so that the user would be incapable of using a high texture quality.
Don't flame about nVidia or 3Dfx doing the same thing. They haven't. If their texture quality was low, it was low in every application, and it was because of a hardware deficiency or bad driver. A driver "upgrade" is supposed to make the HARDWARE perform better with the DATA it is given. Notice those key words. What ATi did was lower the amount of DATA that was being given to the hardware and pretend the hardware was magically faster.
Generic explanation: When other companies "optimize" drivers, they try to make "Feature X" go faster.
ATi decided to disable "Feature X" because it made their hardware run slower on benchmarks which, *gasp* rated it's ability to handle "Feature X".
Yes, I'm an nVidia supporter, but only because of the products they've released, and the support behind those products. As far as I'm concerned, ANY hardware company is always one generation away from extinction. 3Dfx forgot that, and it cost them dearly. I was actually hoping ATi would give nVidia some real competition this time around. After all, competition is a catalyst for improvement. The Radeon 8500 is still a good hunk of hardware, possibly even preferrable to a GF3 variant, depending on the needs of the individual. However, in the same manner I refuse to buy ASUS on grounds of their twice-released 3D cheating drivers, I personally refuse to buy any ATi product until they stop their methods of deliberate bait-and-switch. Let your hardware do it's thang in the real world. Don't go changing the world to pretend you're something you're not.
Dude, everybody knows that the biggest game in windows is Solitaire! just look around your office fuckstick
Most computer magazines i read, use a quake 3 benchmark when they are reviewing a new graphics card. Or comparing it to an old one.
Cruise TT
is that Quake3 already has the ability to let the user turn down the texture details, an option that makes Quake3 look very much like it does with these cheating Radeon drivers.
All ATI is doing is saying, "no high quality mode for you, we want those high benchmark numbers", which is pathetic. If they want to go that route, they should put on their web page a notice that says, "our Radeon card sucks too hard to play Quake3 with high texture quality enabled. For the best playing experience, please play at low quality, or just go out and buy an Nvidia card."
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
That's always ATI's excuse. Before their drivers even get a chance to mature - the hardware is already obsolete.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
It's not *just* better graphics (although that's a major bonus). Gameplay too.You really should try it. Check out www.urbanterror.net if you're interested.
:-)
It's the same kinda style play as CS, in that you can have "team survivor mode" where it's in rounds, and when you're dead you're dead (it's also got other modes like CTF too). When you get hit you bleed, and have to bandage yourself or bleed to death. There's full area damage, not just BS (random) "headshots" - you can get hit in the heart / lungs / liver / neck etc too. Players limp when they've been hit in the leg.
And your player actually points his gun straight ahead. After playing UT I can't stand to look at CS, it feels what I can only describe as "gammy" - in CS your player holds his gun on a 45 degree angle across his body. Oh, and the gun models look *fucking sweet* (as well as the player models and stuff) in UT - especially on other players (put your chase cam on another player and you'll see what I mean).
His sidearm acutally comes out of the holster when he's using it, and he slings his primary weapon on his back. (I say "him" but there are female models too). Oh, and you can actually kill stuff with grenades.
Anyway... I could go on all day, but I won't. You've just gotta play it for yourself. Trust me it rocks