Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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!
Seeing that CounterStrike [counter-strike.net] has the largest online community
Are you actually trying to measure the success of a game solely based on its "online community"?
I rarely play Quake 3 online... the bots are too damn fun. Let's compare sales figures, and see where we stand.
"And like that
When 3Dfx had the MiniGL did anyone complained about it? It was a special porpuse OpenGL driver for just 1 game. And it was used in ALL benchmarks although you had the opengl32.dll which was the generic thing. So well now Nvidia releases a post under this HardOPC and everyone sees the light. I remember them screwing their RIVA drivers quality to death to get some frames in Quake 2 (and ONLY under Quake). I would say that this HardOp post would be ok if it just compared 10 games for both card and reaches the conclusion that the ATI card sucks in every game but in Quake. The bottom line is that optimizing based on strings found in a binary or name of a binary is NOT a good thing. Optimizing for top rated games is desirable because other games developers know this and try to follow that path to benefit from that highly optimiced code (avoiding functions nobody implements that are almsot usually crappy slow). Signature: mod me up please!
unfinished: (adj.)