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ATI Drivers Geared For Quake 3?

Posted by timothy on from the arbitrary-benchmarks-met-arbitrarily dept.

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?"

3 of 511 comments (clear)

  1. A paralell question by OmegaDan · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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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  2. Since I never Run Quake by Royster · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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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  3. This is not simply optimizing for the game. by amohr · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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