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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?"

9 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!
    1. Re:Wha?? by John_Booty · · Score: 5, Informative

      "Have they tested other games as well to see?"
      "how do we know that these optimizations don't indeed effect other games as well"

      If you actually read the article, you'd know the answers to these questions. I suggest reading the HardOCP article... it's a good article.

      I highly disagree with the original posters assertion that "The slant seems to be that there is something inherently wrong about writing game-specific optimizations into drivers"... I think that HardOCP is completely NEUTRAL about the issue; they simply want to know the truth.

      Remember, they run a LOT of benchmarks on video cards. Q3 is a common benchmark program... lots of people buy cards based in part or in whole on Q3 performance, under the assumption that Q3 performance is fairly representative of the card's performance in other games. So if ATI is skewing results only for Q3... well that's not "wrong", but testers and buyers NEED TO KNOW THIS that so that they can interpret Q3 benchmarks accordingly. I applaud HardOCP for raising this important issue.

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      OtakuBooty.com: Smart, funny, sexy nerds.
  2. 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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  3. 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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    I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
  4. It IS wrong... by levendis · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

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  5. 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

  6. 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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  7. No, but... by mblase · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  8. remember Dhrystone? by jejones · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.