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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?"
Seeing how these are just conjectures, and there's no proof of exactly what happened, how do we know that these optimizations don't indeed effect other games as well?
Why (indeed how) would you put in optimizations that only work when a quake3 reference is found? Have they tested other games as well to see? Perhaps the only thing is that the drivers disable certain safeguards or throw certain performance slowing features out the window if you run a high profile game?
Did they grep the ATI drivers to see if infact there was a reference anywhere to quake?
If God gave us curiosity
Quake 3 is the biggest game out there on Windows
Not according to Gamespy. In fact, it isn't even close, and hasn't been for the past couple years.
OK, so Gamespy is hardly the final word in game popularity, but let's not forget that some of the most popular mods going today (CS, TFC, etc) are HalfLife mods.
According to GameSpy, Half-Life is a little over 10 times as popular as Quake3, and Unreal Tournament is slightly more popular.