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Carmack On ATI's Driver Modifications
CitizenC points out that John Carmack's .plan file has been updated to discuss ATI's driver optimizations. If you weren't paying attention, ATI put code in their drivers to optimize for Quake3, based on the name of the executable - so when running Quake3, you'd get a (good) set of optimizations for the game, but when running the same game after changing the name of the executable, you'd get a default set of optimizations with lesser performance. Some people called this cheating since Quake3 is a typical benchmark application these days.
What they did was not "Have Quake run in mode which is faster" but "Have Quake run in mode which has lower quality than it should so it will run faster"
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100% pure freak
Let me get this straight. ATI takes the time to create optimizations in their drivers that make Quake III run faster, and people are unhappy about it?
You're damn right I am. As someone who uses graphics hardware for scientific visualization, any time hardware manufactures spend on making games faster is a complete waste. With the latest cards and drivers from ATI, we've seen this problem en masse. Games run great, but code that we write (that's general OpenGL and works great on GeForce cards) runs slower than hell on the 8500.
So, if all ATI wants to do is sell cards to gamers (and that's certainly a good market), they can go right on ahead and do that. Nvidia takes more time with their drivers and makes them much more optimized for the general case...so they've got my buisness for now.
Just my thoughts. I'm going to skip the part where I tell everyone else that they're being knee-jerk.
One small comfort is that no one buys ATI cards for performance. Any cards of the GeForce (Nvidia's brand) variety handily whip anything at the same price point with ATI.
This really isn't true any longer. ATI finally released better drivers for the 8500 this week and it keeps up fine with a GeForce3 Ti 500, for $50 less. Here's a review at Tom's Hardware.
A lot of people still don't realize, what ATI's "optimizations" are about. It's not a optimization specific to Quake 3 which noone could complain about. ATI's drivers forced some features to be disabled massively sacrificing image quality only when Quake 3 is run. It's not clear what they did exactly, but it looks like they were forcing 16-bit textures and/or using lower-resolution mipmaps. See the results here. (The site is in German, but they have some nice details of screenshots, showing the difference onmouseover.)
If you missed the discussion in the first place.
:Our goal for the RADEON 8500 is and always has been to deliver the best possible gaming experience to our customers.
The Register : As we say, if you like the 8500's Quake III frame-rate but aren't willing to put up with the dip in image quality, buy a different card. Or wait for ATI to change its drivers, which, we understand, it's in the process of doing.
HardOCP was the first to publish about this: The Facts As We See Them: It certainly seems to us here at [H]ardOCP that ATi has in fact included application specific instructions in their version 5.13.01.3276 Win2K drivers that make Quake 3 arena benchmarks faster by up to over 15%. Either way, the driver optimisations for Quake III are just one of the (many) factors that differentiate different vendors' products. ®
firingsquad show show some details how the quack.exe is made and concludes:
To some of us, it seems like the evidence points towards intentionally deceptive code designed not only to inflate benchmark scores, but also to keep anyone from finding out. To others, this is nothing more than an overreation to a perfectly legitimate game optimization. In our eyes, anyone who vehemently peddles either of these explanations is either naive or pushing an agenda of their own.
there later in Q&A with ati explains in 2 pages that
yeah right.!
Anand did a new look at the 8500 with the new ATI drivers. He claims that the image quality is now identical to the Geforce3 and that the driver optimizations work for all Quake3 engine based games. Anandtech article
Well, actually, while ATI does not actively support Linux themselves, they do release more information about their chips than nVidia does. Because of this, third party driver developers can develop open-source, cross-platform drivers, which with nVidia, you are stuck with Linux on x86. So while nVidia invests more development time, ATI gives more information and therefore has more well-developed drivers on more platforms. Their linux driver implementation may not be as good as nVidias, but will be around even if ATI went out. If nVidia goes, and all we have are the binary drivers compiled for Kernel 2.4.x and XFree 4.1.x, then nVidia owners are in a bit of a fix....
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.