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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?"
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.
"Have they tested other games as well to see?"
"how do we know that these optimizations don't indeed effect other games as well"
If you actually read the article, you'd know the answers to these questions. I suggest reading the HardOCP article... it's a good article.
I highly disagree with the original posters assertion that "The slant seems to be that there is something inherently wrong about writing game-specific optimizations into drivers"... I think that HardOCP is completely NEUTRAL about the issue; they simply want to know the truth.
Remember, they run a LOT of benchmarks on video cards. Q3 is a common benchmark program... lots of people buy cards based in part or in whole on Q3 performance, under the assumption that Q3 performance is fairly representative of the card's performance in other games. So if ATI is skewing results only for Q3... well that's not "wrong", but testers and buyers NEED TO KNOW THIS that so that they can interpret Q3 benchmarks accordingly. I applaud HardOCP for raising this important issue.
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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.