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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?"
When intel optimizes adobes plugins at the expense of amd processors -- so they can use it as a benchmark -- thats ok as well?
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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.
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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."
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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
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.