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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 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??
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
When intel optimizes adobes plugins at the expense of amd processors -- so they can use it as a benchmark -- thats ok as well?
Free Techno/Jazz/DNB/MI Music by guys obsessed with monkeys!
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.
ZFS: because love is never having to say fsck
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."
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
Why the hell do they not want everything else to be similarly optimized?
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.
Not really.
The drivers check to see if the program calling them has the string "uake3" in the name. If it does, they use a certain set of internal quality settings. If it doesn't, they use a different set of internal quality settings.
What they are doing is having the video cards cut corners just for Q3 to make the benchmarks run better.
Gentoo Sucks
There's no problem with writing version-optimized drivers.
The update or improvement of such software is probably intended, first, for the new Quake buyers. It's a company that occasionally serves a fan base, it's not enslaved to the fan base that has all previous versions.
It's like a new model of a car with a beautiful v-8 engine that previous models have always used. If the new model is configured to optimize engine performance, it's not discrimination against collectors of previous models.
Goat sex free since 2001
does the same thing happen to Duck Nukem?
Let's try to start a flame by not posting stories that have FLAMEBAIT in them. That's what the comments are for.
Quake 3 is the biggest thing... for people who haven't found that everything else is better. HA! Now let the flamewar begin!
Nosce te Ipsum
>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?
Not if they:
a) didn't sacrifice performance for other games ONLY to get more out of quake3 (probably not the case)
b) admit that its true, if it is true
I suppose the alterior motive isn't better quake3 frame rates for ATI owners, but rather more impressive benchmarks, seeing as quake3 is such a standard graphics card benchmark. So if they are claiming that quake3 didn't get any special attention, but they DID give it special attention for benchmarks, well, thats a little misleading. Otherwise, I don't see anything inherently wrong with adding some post-design juice for the benifit of all the quake3 players out there.
Personally, I think they did it for better visibility in benchmarking.
"Old man yells at systemd"
It's possible that a specific driver feature or features causes Quake 3 to run 15% faster, but at the expense of making the system unstable or unreliable in other games. It would make no sense for ATI to make the cards run as fast as possible on Quake 3 and only Quake 3.
It's also possible that the Quack-quake transfer screwed something up in Quake- I'd be interested to see how a quackified exe performed on NVidia's chipset.
See this statement at the end of the text:
John B. Challinor II APR - Director, Public Relations at ATI Technologies Inc. "ATI optimizes its drivers on many different levels, including the application level, the game engine level, the API level, and the operating system level. That is, some optimizations work only on specific games, while others work only on specific game engines or only on specific operating systems. In the case of Quake III and Quake III Arena, we were able to achieve certain optimizations specifically for that game, as we do for other popular games. "
Bah, I don't even see where the "Optimizing for Quake 3 only" comes in. The Quake series has been and still is the benchmark of 1st person, 3D FPS graphics.
That being said, it would be convenient to have a checkbox in their control panel "(X) Enable unstable 3D support. May speed up certain apps, may cause problems. Use at own risk."
--I hate people when they're not polite -"Psycho Killer", Talking Heads
Or intentionally sped up. Perhaps the optimizations look for a program running called Quake3.exe and throw in a few optimizations to make it better. If that simple string match fails then the optimizations aren't thrown in. Makes sense to me.
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
When a developer is making a game they end up doing tricks to get the best performance out of the most common cards. So what happens is the more prominent developers make contacts with the driver developers at the video card companies, who make specific changes to accomodate some feature or design that the game developer needs. This often works both ways, with the driver developers guiding the game developer on how to get better performance, etc.
The point is that 3d graphics are complicated enough to not make it as simple as having an API that performs the same on multiple games and cards. Both the game developers and the video card manufacturers are doing this stuff. I doubt you will see this changing in the near future. But I don't think it's a conspiracy.
ATI knows that just about every review compares cards primarily based upon Quake 3 (looks at any of a large number of sites to see this), often under the premise that it's totally relevant because so many current and up-and-coming games are based upon the Quake 3 engine.
True, but if you check out the articles linked, they are doing the optimizations for speed at the expense of quality. So they are making the graphic quality of Q3 look like crap in order to bump up the benchmarks.
Gentoo Sucks
PRESS RE-RELEASE:
With the release of ATI's newest Radeon 8500 and 7500 graphics cards, hardware review sites have been proportedly using ATI drivers that have been sepecifically optimized for Quake III.
Various ATI fan sites are now reporting new "Quackified" drivers, originally authored by Kyle Bennett of [H]ard|OCP. Rumors are flying about this unofficial driver's unfair optimization of games such as "Duck Hunter 5: More Buckshot" and "Donald Duck's Red-Light District Exploration".
"Wow, the animated ducks are faster, and die better," one anonymous gamer said on a forum. "And Donald gets so better action with these new drivers!"
ATI spokeduck, Rob Erduckie, denies any involvement in these modifications. "The claims are just false," said Rob. "We do not believe in unfairly offering advantages to one side or another."
Rob also made reference to cheating, "We also vehemently oppose offering cheat options, such as Asus's 'See-Through Duck' modification. We're totally about fair game play."
Environmentalists have been picketing federal facilities today in protest of unfair portrayal of their favorite bird today, with writings on picket signs such as "Free the Ducks!," "No luck for Ducks," and "Ducks Need Rights Too!."
Department of Fish & Game officials were unavailable to comment.
The Linux penguin released a brief statement: "I understand the pain that ducks are going through right now. Did you read what Linus said about me? 'A happily drunk penguin who just got some'? Sheesh!"
Unless the speed boost only occurs when the executable is named "Quake3".
__
Do ya feel happy-go-lucky, punk?
Question: Is this just a benchmark-boosting hack or does it actually improve the frame rate while playing the game?
Observation: With frame rates of 80+ at even the highest resolution on the HardOCP test box, it's difficult to see if there is any ACTUAL BENEFIT resulting from using ATI's drivers.
Suggestion: Repeat their tests with the original and with the quackified executables on a less powerful box so that the actual framerates are more like 10-15 fps.
Result: If the drivers actually help the game play, at that low frame rate, it should be readily apparent. If there's NO difference in the game play, then it's just a hack to boost the benchmark scores.
revision.
Everyone knows their current driver is horribly immature & the new Radeon 'II' drivers are due out (officially or otherwise) anytime now.
Personally, I don't give a fsck whether ATI optimizes for Quake or not, what I care about is who is making their specs open. It's ATI, not NVidia, so all I can say is: go ATI. Sell lots of cards.
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
Were there benchmarks for Nvidia cards under the same circumstances?
It's quite possible that rendering the different letters could account for the different frame rates. I'd be surprised if it were 15% but I think that if Nvidia dropped as well with the modified text, then that would show that the text simply took longer to render.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
Actually, Intel and other x86 mfgs have instructions in their microcode to run Quake about 15% faster than other programs, this can be demonstrated easily by renaming win.com to quake.com (on most Windows systems). You'll notice applications start up quicker and your mouse pointer has been replaced with crosshairs. Some systems will require you to select a skill level as soon as you start Windows, be warned that if you choose "Nightmare" keyboard shortcuts will be disabled and applications do about double the damage they would normally.
AC's cheerfully ignored
Go check the PCData Top Ten list for the past 50-60+ weeks. What is either #1 or #2 on all of those charts?
The Sims
Quake isn't anywhere near the biggest game on the PC. The Sims is a $100 Mil industry unto itself at this point.
The argument could be made that The Sims isn't a game. But, it gets charted with other PC entertainment sales, so for this argument it must be treated as a PC game product.
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?
I don't know what the actual laws are or what the actual subroutines are that get optomized, but as a matter of principle I don't believe it's fair to make optimizations geared only to a certain application that could possibly benefit a wide variety of applications. This means that the ATI producer has a bias towards Quake and by making these optimizations hinders the speed and performance of Quake's competitors, and that's not right.
On the other hand, this benchmark seems sketchy to me. There are a lot of variables that go into large applications such as Quake and an example might be (although this is purely hypothetical) that there are resource files that are tied to "Quake.exe" first and then have alternate, slower methods being accessed. When the name is changed from Quake to Quack, the slower methods have to be used. That's just a made up example but it's they type of thing that needs to be taken into consideration. However, like I said before, if these people actually did make optimizations for Quake and only for Quake, I think what they did was unfair and harmful to computer users.
~ now you know
I would bet it's not quality settings but compatibility settings. If it was simply quality settings, they'd give you a nice little checkbox in a configuration utility that says "run everything 15% faster"
It says it goes in and changes everything from "Quake" to "Quack". Could this also be mudging up the code just a little?
Possible, but it would be unlikely that a string replace would result in a lower framerate - If the affected code branch was executed, an immediate crash would be much more likely. If it wasn't executed, then no differences would be evident, whether they were performance related, or crashes.
In summary I doubt that they have code in their driver saying If quake3 then overclock else underclock. or something. That would make no sense.
On the page, they mention that the string "uake" in fact shows up in the ATI drivers. It actually seems to be that they degrade image quality in favor of framerate for Quake. As for making no sense, it is very common for drivers to be optimized for benchmarks at the expense of general use.
__
Do ya feel happy-go-lucky, punk?
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.
I'd be interested to see how a quackified exe performed on NVidia's chipset
Well, then why don't you read the artical...
In closing we would like to say that all the same testing was run on the latest set of NVIDIA DetonatorXP drivers without any of the same issues.
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
It's not unethical to optimize drivers for specific performance. Meaning, if ATI's drivers make Quake 3 faster than the competition, that has added value for someone out there.
From a business point of view it's not the wisest thing to do. PC games have a tendency to be an extremly rabid bunch. Buying mobo's, processors, graphic's cards and anything else that lets them milk that last bit of performance out of games. They do this frequently,by keeping up on all the latest hardware and it's associated benchmarks and purchasing accordingly. They will even go to silly lengths to make sure what they are buying is the best, such as doing a grep for Quake3 and changing it to Quack3, then seeing if the performance is the same. Even without such lengths, a gamer would be sure that more than Q3 was fast on their hardware, so that when the next rage comes along, they can buy the game and expect it to run fast. So, ATI is shooting themselves in the foot by focusing on one game's performance, rather than going for general performance and as such games won't buy their cards....
Burn Hollywood Burn
http://www.3dcenter.de/artikel/2001/10-24_a.php. (In german), they compared the effects of the "optimizations". Apparently, ATi is fudging the quality in order to get the frame rate up. This fudging only occurs on "Quake3", and is how the improved frame rate occurs.
Test your net with Netalyzr
Maybe now people will have to put a little more effort into their hardware reviews now.
Everyone and their mom can do a review with Quake 3 and report claiming to know what they're talking about. Reviewers will now have to come up with their own benchmarking tools to convince end-users of the validity of their benchmarks.
Even though it is underhanded of ATI, it'll all work out in the end. Sort of a "can't fool all of the people all of the time."
As a former slav^H^H^H^H employee of ATI (Rage Pro D3D drivers) I can add a little bit here. When I worked there, we used games (many titles to boot!)and WinBench as test platforms. Many times we would find a way to speed up routines used in these games only to find they broke some stupid little D3D app that had to be 'perfect' or Microsoft would not pass the driver through WHQL (so the driver could not be 'certified' and not on the Windows CDs -- and it was very important to be there.) These apps -- Rock'em Robots, Twist, etc -- came with the DirectX SDKs and had to run and run well. We'd try to massage the optimization so that we'd sacrifice some of the speed gain in favor of the test apps. Sometimes that wasn't possible. Back then, we discussed checking for application names but never implemented the checks because the PR would be too bad.
IMHO, what probably happened is a developer actually implemented a speedup / namecheck and forgot to disable it before checking it in. Or management has gone insane. You decide.
--jdp Maintainer of VisEmacs
What exactly had them poking around in the first place, looking for evidence of this? Not that I think they're being disingenous or have anything to hide, but it's not like we all just get the idea into our heads to run strings on drivers and come up with ways to "quackify" binaries :)
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
I seem to recall that somebody (quite possibly ATI) looking for specific strings in the WinMark benchmark set and doing something special in the driver, just to pump up the numbers.
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
In the HardOCP article there is a link to a .zip with two uncompressed screenshots -- one from their run of Quake, and the other from "Quack".
The screenshot from Quake is clearly of a lower quality than the one from Quack -- it's especially obvious on the texturing of the teeth of the "mouth". From this I can only conclude that they are getting the extra boost by sacrificing image quality for a specific game used in benchmarks.
As to why they don't have a checkbox - because anyone who actually wanted to get higher framerates at the expense of quality will do so within a game's settings menu. What compromise you want to make between quality and speed will vary from game to game. This checkbox would be system-wide, and not satisfactory.
Plus, no benchmarker would have ran with the "15% faster" option, as that would violate the benchmarks run under "highest quality". So if they did that, their little hack wouldn't have helped their quake scores.
The enemies of Democracy are
Well, they have in fact optimised the speed, so its really true optimisation. They haven't optimised the video quality; but then I guess most players prefer speed over quality that play Quake III so its kinda legitimate (kinda).
I mean if Quake III looked really bad, the card wouldn't sell; so there's checks and balances here atleast.
But it would have been much better if they had given the user some control of the video quality.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"It could be that they change the default pathway of the graphics calls for Quake, or that they skip things that are actually in the spec, but that Quake doesn't rely on. Or they could be ignoring error conditions that don't show up in Quake.
Engineering and the Ultimate
The only place I know of where Quake3 is the biggest game out there is for benchmarks. That's why it's unethical. ATI is trying to manipulate benchmarks to make their product seem better than it really is.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
Well, basically they do. The only game older than Quake3 that is used is Unreal Tournament. They use newer games, like Max Payne, that at high resolutions and detail really tax these cards/CPUs.
The enemies of Democracy are
Fraud?? I guarantee that there is no claim about image quality, nor even one about frame rates. Furthermore, I'll bet the EULA for the drivers makes it clear that they are not making any particular claims and are not liable if it doesn't somehow live up to your expectations.
Personally, I'm glad to see application-specific enhancements. This whole thing is wildly overblown.
http://firingsquad.gamers.com/hardware/radeonquack /default.asp
They are not "Optimised" for quake 3. The image quality is seriously suffering to gain performance. This is purely wrong. When I set textures to be 32 bit in a game that's what I mean. If I want faster I'll set them to 16 thank you, I don't need my driver doing it for me (Note that that was just one of 3 cheats used)
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!
Read
You are rushing to judgement. It's not "optimised" it's vistually crippled to gain scores in benchmarks. At the same quality the 8500 runs SLOWER than a $99 ti-200 in Q3.
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!
Which gets us back to the issue at hand. I don't know anything about the inner workings of the Radeon driver, but there are probably a number of similar tradeoffs involved in its design. The most reasonable interpretation is *not* that Radeon has optimized for Quake 3 at the expense of other programs. If that were true, it would run at the same rate whatever it were named. The better explanation is that when the driver knows what program is being run (such as Quake 3) it optmizes itself to the known characteristics of that program, and when a program which the driver knows nothing about (such as "Quack") is run, it uses default settings.
Thus, it's not necessarily favoring Quake 3 over other applications, but is instead using optimizations for for known programs which are not available for unknown ones. There's nothing in this article to indicate that similar optimizations haven't been made for Counter Strike, Half Life, or any other popular 3D programs.
Your line of reasoning stands like a drunk one-legged man in a hurricane.
First off, the only thing the "quackified" executable screwed up was the string Quake.
Second, if you look at the screenshots taken with Quake vs. Quack, you'll see that the Quake screenshots are of far worse quality. Their "optimization" was to detect that quake was running and reduce quality to get higher benchmark scores.
There is always the chance that their honestly-intended game-specific optimizations somehow had as a side effect reduced quality in Quake AND breaking any other game, such that these results were produced. But Occam's Razor cuts that to pieces, since at that point you're still not doing anything but turning down a detail slider.
The enemies of Democracy are
Many years ago I bought an ATI expert@play card because it had good Quake benchmark numbers. Guess what, they had written the drivers for that benchmark and the card itself couldn't actually play games at the speed the benchmark indicated. Nothing new here. This is also why I stopped buying ATI cards.
Do really dense people warp space more than others?
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.
They worked with Id to have their card perform a bit better with Quake 3 (and maybe other games based upon the same engine), which just so happens to be a game that a lot of people play. Betcha there are similar calls for Valve software's Half-Life games, considering the card comes retail with three Valve games. And so what if they did? Those folks who are swayed by such thing play those games and will reap the benefits, and those of us who aren't will buy the card based upon other real-world merits.
This story really seems to be nothing more than turd-stirring, especially since they haven't looked for any other improvements. Poor journalism brought to us by a bunch of hacks.
The next thing you will try to tell me is the NSA string found in SP5 a while back does not matter...
(grin)
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
ANY company, ESPECIALLY a computer hardware company, will trumpet any 'optimizations' to anyone who'll listen in multiple press releases. Stupid little minutiae that make no difference in frame rate for the average user (AGP, anyone?) are announced as if they were the next generation in computer 3d graphics.
So. If ATI didn't think they were doing anything wrong, there'd be something like a sort of freaky stepchild of an iD/ATI agreement where ATI would plaster "Quake 3 optimized!" all over their boxes and take underhanded swipes at Nvidia et al. in their press releases about it being an exclusive.
They didn't. So it's clear, to me, that regardless of what the Slashdot/HardOCP/etc. community thinks, ATI thought it was scummy enough to keep it under wraps, AND make a non-statement regarding it once they'd been caught.
Pretty damning, I'd say. I can't wait to hear what Tom has to say about this. (Or has he spoken up already?)
-- If we were in any other industry they would've shot us a long time ago.
First I think the naming convention is a classic example of duck and cover.
The unmitigated gall of some companies, what is next? A post sequil to Moon Over Orion being called Moo3.exe? When will the horror ever stop.
Ok, my sarcasm and stupidity stops now.
In essence ATI is trying to make their hardware look better. Compared to the current GF3's I understand they stack up very well, but in "classic ATI fashion" their drivers blow goats/ducks/chunks (insert colorful phrase).
ATI has always been a mass hardware producer and now is trying to break into the high end gaming market...they have the visual quality, that is a given, but their speed is/has always been lacking until recently.
But, their lack of quality drivers has been dogging them and they have always tried to duck the issue...so maybe there is a subliminal message to this "quack.exe" thing.
( i could not resist, sorry, that was too good to pass up).
I just sincerely hope we do not end of with a ATI only version of D3D or GL or Gl-ATI-ide.
They will just be painting themselves into a corner like 3dfx did to some extent.
Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
"...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?""
Quake ]|[ is THE standard for PC game benchmarks. John Carmack's engines are generally regarded as the best and fastest in the industry, and test overall performance of a system without getting bogged down on the CPU like other engines do. The Quake X engines also tend to support just about every performance enhancing feature they can (Even if the games themselves may not take advantage of it.). Quake X engines also tend to be the most OpenGL compliant engines around - something that figures greatly into why ATI would do this.
By focusing driver development on Quake ]|[, ATI is able to produce a card that will perform very well on the standard PC benchmark. Honestly, I would rather have a card that performs well on any system out there. ATI has always had horrible problems with OpenGL performance caused by weak drivers, and this has long been one of the biggest criticism of their cards. By rewriting the driver to show a great amount of Quake ]|[ performance, ATI is able to convince potential buyers that they have been fixing the OpenGL code; which if Kyle's speculation is correct, is probably one of the sleaziest things in the history of computer hardware.
I will be keeping a close eye on this one in the next few days. If this is true, I will be changing my plans to buy a new Radeon to buying a new nVidia card - because nVidia has never given me such a reason to distrust them. On top of that, nVidia drivers are custom hacked for specific cards by other vendors, so if nVidia did try this, people would leak the truth.
This has the potential to really harm ATI. If ATI loses the faith of gamers, OEMs will continue to abandon ATI for nVidia. At a time when the global economy is already faltering, ATI does not need any lost sales, and if they look weak they could lose the support of companies like Dell and Apple that are already moving to nVidia.
If it wasn't for that goddamn ad ATI ran in Computer Shopper this month (S&M sells, bay-bee!) I would be very enthusiastically defending them. Right now, I am more likely to spend the extra bucks and grab a Matrox because the idea of using an image of violence against women to sell video cards is repugnant to me.
Oh yeah, I buy my DVDs used, too.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
ATI has nothing to gain by suppressing their other scores.. Double blind this test: change "3dmark2001" to "Quake3" and see if it runs faster. Then we would know if it was ATI optimizing for quake3 or Carmack lending some friendly help, suppressing other games frame rates to claim himself game coder king. And don't think for a moment that he doesn't have millions riding on this. If UT had the frame rate of Q3A, Think of how much they could have made selling their engine instead of Carmack making the dough selling his engine.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
The question going through my mind is - why would the graphics driver care what the name of the executable is? If you had a way of cheating to improve performance, wouldn't you just apply it across the board?
Why would they _not_ implement this speed/quality cheat for everything they could? If they were worried about benchmark programs noticing quality problems, the logical thing to do would be to special-case WinBench, not Quake.
written by work-obsessed coders who want to make the best drivers possible
.1 frames per second more out of my ATI card if it crashes before that frame is even drawn.
Are we forgetting this is ATI? Your situation isn't even remotely plausible... remember this is the ATI that has had significant difficulty releasing a stable Windows 2000 driver. And remind me, how long has Windows 2000 been released (let alone how long the developers have had it)?
I specifically chose to buy an NVidia product because ATI's Windows 2000 drivers were/are terrible. I don't care if I get
Anyone remember the Voodoo2's miniGL that was designed from the ground up for Quake2? What's the difference here? We aren't talking about benchmark tampering; they've found a way to optimize their drivers to make Quake3 run faster. Maybe there are geometric instructions that Q3 doesn't make use of that they disable? That would be a good reason for the optimization by executable name; it might not work on other games. Let's not cruxify ATi just yet; they haven't done anything wrong as far as I can tell...
-- Terry
what about other games? I mean if you're only playing quake3 sure, go get a radeon. But if you play tribes 2, CS( the most popular game on the net), or UT, it really doesn't do much for you.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
And they blatantly lie... I would have no problems with optimizations, but what it is doing is discarding user preferences for high-quality textures. There is a visual difference between the "quack3" and "quake3" runs with ATI at the *same* settings. The drivers cheat for framerate because review sites don't ever actually look closely at the game itself, only the numbers that get spit out. Makes you wonder about those 3DMark scores..
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
This goes for everybody else who responded to me as well:
READ THE ARTICLE BEFORE POSTING.
Image quality is worse in Q3 due to the optimizations. If you do the Quack3 rename, the image quality gets better and the frame rate gets worse.
You're telling me that you're okay with a graphics card manufacturer deliberating reducing the image quality of Q3A in order to get better frame rates, when it just-so-happens that Q3A framerates are an important benchmark? And not giving you any indication (other than reduced quality) that this is happening, nor any way to change it?
I stand by my original view.
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Nonsense. If that was what their users wanted, their users could have selected something other than 'High Quality' in the Quake3 video configuration screen.
ATI did this because it was what ATI wanted, a high framerate number on benchmarks.
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
According to GameSpy, Half-Life is a little over 10 times as popular as Quake3, and Unreal Tournament is slightly more popular.
This is not tuning for a program, this is cutting corners. If the simple change of "quake" strings to "quack" causes a 15% drop in speed (if the hack really doesn't change anything else - would need to try other cards as well or something like that), then what they're doing is jumping routines.
I remember that Hercules once did this a good few years ago. Their drivers watched for repetitive procedures and then skipped some of the repititions, giving falsely high results. They got a pounding in the news because of it.
But it doesn't benefit from the ATI drivers... go figure. :P
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The gist of the article: for quake the atidrivers apparently only use 16 bit textures (this makes the difference with the "100" on the first page) and simply use a lower mipmap-level for textures (that is, they only use the graphic detail of the texture that would be used if it were farther away (and thus smaller). But the detail level of surfaces contains information that is often vital: The detail depends on the distance of the surface, if a surface is very detailed it is nearer than a surface with less detail. If you only see a part of a surface (through a gap or window for example) the detail is the only hint how far that surface is away. Many gamers probably use this information automatically without thinking about it. With the 'quake-improved' drivers someone accustomed to the previous detail levels will probably estimate that objects are farther away now (since they are less detailed). Even after being accustomed with the new detail levels, it still makes a difference: the more detailed a texture is, the smaller is the piece of surface you need to see to estimate how far it is.
To apreciate the importance of textures and structured surfaces for depth perception try q3a with different texturesettins and see what a difference that makes in a map like q3dm19. In quake 1 you could even switch of all textures, then, staring at a plain wall, you couldn't tell if it was 10cm, 1m or 10m away.
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Yes randy, but the data segment is unaffected:) If you want to compare the name of a file to "uake3" then you need to *store* "uake3" in your datasegment so you have something to compare it against.
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> They are blatently trying to manipulate independent benchmarks, and *that* has gotta be unethical. no?
Yeah, if they are only manipulating benchmarks, but they aren't.
I think you would have a point if they'd only changed the benchmarks; but they have actually given you a greater framerate. The point of Quake III is that it can use higher framerates, or atleast lots of players seem to think so; so it's actually a legitimate optimisation. I mean its not THAT obvious when you are playing the game is it?
Its not nearly as bad as other optimisations I've heard of- Sun's Java VM JIT actually optimised away a benchmark entirely at one point and just returned the right answer. They'd added the *entire* benchmark into a list of bytes for the compiler to look out for... Compare that to this.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"I'll take fun/origional/interesting over eyecandy any day (although I do have my limits in that respect, I can no longer stomach the graphics of my old favorites, X-Wing and Daggerfall).
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"Is it OK for a company to override your image quality settings in a game without your knowledge?"
See, this has nothing to do with "optimizing" for a game. They didn't optimize ... they fucked around with the image quality on the sly in order to gain performance. Firing Squad has an in-depth look that will show you how.
Optimizing = Achieving better performance WITHOUT sacrifice.
Cheating = Achieving better perfomance through undocumented overriding "features" for only specific games.
My point is this ... when someone sets a game to a specific image quality, what gives ATI the right to think they know better than you? I would gladly give up performance for image quality any day (I'm shallow that way), so why should I be saddled with lousy image quality for a few extra frames?
Personally I'll continue to use ATI graphics cards because of their excellent Linux driver support (unlike other graphics card manufacturers who release binary-only drivers.
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Try to do envmapping using OpenGL generated texture coords, on an ATi Radeon card with ATi Radeon drivers... looks awful huh? Now switch on a light by calling glEnable(GL_LIGHTING) and glEnable(GL_LIGHT0). Et voila! the envmapping works!
This is about basic OpenGL 1.0 behaviour that is not working correctly in ATi's drivers and is NOT FIXED because they don't have to: Quake2/3 look ok on ATi Radeon cards, so why bother fixing it?
Other crap: specify too less elements when calling glDrawElements() -> POOF your box just died.
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It's one thing to optimize for a game or a specific set of calls, it's quite another to build in a different driver path which is only executed for that game based on the name of the program and not the data being sent. Quake 3 is not just a game, it is a benchmark, possibly the most observed benchmark, and ATI knows this. This driver optimization appears to attempt to skew the results of that benchmark by cutting corners which cannot be cut when running other identical software. It's not looking at the OpenGL stream and optimizing for a set of calls, it's using predetermined knowledge of corners which can be cut through human intervention, perhaps not even executing all the graphics calls being sent. This makes it a deliberate attempt to deceive people reviewing cards. This is not an entirely new phenomenon, but it is dishonest, this is not a good thing whether you play Quake 3 or not.
Ok then, let's do benchmarks on Half-Quake, CounterQuake, Max Quake and other very popular FPS games ... Oops, almost forgot Quake Raider and Noone Quakes Forever.
You missed the point entirely. They didn't optimize for Quake3... they looked for the string "quake3.exe" or some permutation of it, and falsely reported better benchmarks for that .exe name. If they'd optimized for the quake3 code, it wouldn't matter what the .exe was named; the card would have performed the same regardless.
BTW, I believe it IS an open source driver...
Whatever happened to JonKatz?
is that Quake3 already has the ability to let the user turn down the texture details, an option that makes Quake3 look very much like it does with these cheating Radeon drivers.
All ATI is doing is saying, "no high quality mode for you, we want those high benchmark numbers", which is pathetic. If they want to go that route, they should put on their web page a notice that says, "our Radeon card sucks too hard to play Quake3 with high texture quality enabled. For the best playing experience, please play at low quality, or just go out and buy an Nvidia card."
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
>This is NOT an optimization, this is ignoring settings when they aren't good
>for benchmarking, the players of Quake 3 gain absolutely nothing from this.
I can see where you are coming from, but the players do atleast get the extra framerate.
Still, depending on how the card is advertised this optimisation may be illegal, the card has to be advertised truthfully.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"That's always ATI's excuse. Before their drivers even get a chance to mature - the hardware is already obsolete.
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The entire point of the article was that, if you change the name from 'quake3.exe' to 'quack3.exe' then the game performs differently. In fact, ATI detects if 'quake3.exe' is running, and skimps on the graphics to make the card appear to run better, but does not do so if 'quack3.exe' is running.
.exe was! 'quack3.exe' would have turned in exactly the same benchmarks that 'quake3.exe' did.
Therefore, ATI drivers are NOT, repeat NOT optimized for the id Software code, but instead designed to see 'quake3.exe' cut corners accordingly. If the drivers had been written to take advantage of some feature in the code itself, the drivers wouldn't give a shit what the name of the
Whatever happened to JonKatz?
But it is correct. If the drivers are written to detect and take advantage of certain parts of the quake code, changing the .exe name shouldn't affect anything. Clearly, all they did was look for the name and silently trade visuals for FPS in order to fool the gaming public.
The real point here is, ATI fudged the operation of their drivers to make the Radeon appear to perform better than it actually does with standard benchmarking tool. Whether or not they manage to think of a way to justify it is irrelevant. I've never been impressed with ATI, and IMHO this tears it. I'm through with them.
Whatever happened to JonKatz?