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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?"

4 of 511 comments (clear)

  1. Wha?? by FortKnox · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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??

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    Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
  2. The real question is . . . by SanLouBlues · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Why the hell do they not want everything else to be similarly optimized?

  3. Re:I'd have to say yes... by general_re · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Normally I'd agree with you, but that's because in many cases, vendors seem to tune their drivers for the benchmarks at the expense of everything else - Q3A scores go up, but real-world performance suffers. If they've figured out some way to boost Q3A performance without having some performance trade-off somewhere (and they aren't spending so much time on Quake tweaking that their drivers lag in other areas), then I say it's fair game....

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    ABSURDITY, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.
  4. Re:The right way? by InfinityWpi · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Simple.

    Because that would require actual work.

    Knowing the coding community as we do, which is more likely: this was written by work-obsessed coders who want to make the best drivers possible, or written by a handful of people who are pissed at management and just want ot make it -look- faster so they can get more money for the least ammount of effort, go home, and be with their families?