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Carmack on Doom 3 Video Cards
mr_sheel writes "According to a Gamespy interview with John Carmack, Carmack says what he thinks about the video cards with Doom3: ATI Radeon 8500 is a better card, with a nicer fragment path, while NVidia still consistently runs faster due to better drivers. And of course, the GeForce SDR cards will not be "fast enough to play the game properly unless you run at 320x240 or so." And in a ShackNews interview with Carmack, he says that Doom 3 at E3 was only running at medium quality... wow."
I'd exchange speed of rendering for an affordable video card. The prices of some of these top-end video cards rivals the motherboard AND CPU put together. Not to mention having Linux drivers for the card.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Is there anything more sad than people who think they got first post and didn't? =)
Again, the leader of the field amazes us all. This will be INCREDIBLE...if they ever make a game with the engine. ;-)
-Del
First post?
yes, the idiiots (me included) who reply to them.
WH00oo00oo000ttt!!
The question, of "how much money will i need so spend on my computer, to play this" is completely pointless. For the price of a Radeon 8500, or NVidia card, i can probably buy an Xbox, GameCube, or PS2, which the title, will almost be forced to come to eventually. Save your money, keep the computers for coding, and the consoles for gaming.
0110100100100000011000010110110100100000011000100
So to play Doom 3 I will need a minumum of $130.
$50 for the game and $80 for Radeon 7500 - the lowest spec card mentioned as working.
And top of the line - GeForce 4ti - is about $300
(ebay prices)
I'd better start saving.
Great I just bought the right card 2 months ago, radeon 8500 retail :)
Doesn't Doom3 support SMP? Dual monitor set-ups?
First it comes out that multiplayer will be de-emphasized in D3. Then it's basically said that in order to display it properly you need to shell out $300 on a video card. I'll be more interested in Unreal 2. At least they actually care about what the PC gamer wants.
Cool cutting edge graphics are great, but really its still the gameplay that matters. It seems like all the gaming sites/rags/etc only get off on talking about pixel shaders, and game engines, when all the gamer wants is something original and fun to play. I just pray it can measure up to games like Half-life, No One Lives Forever, and Dues Ex. I want an ACTUAL STORYLINE, scripted events, and real NPC interaction. If its just Doom/Quake/Serious Sam style gameplay, with great graphics I won't be buying this time around.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
You know what? What if people were obsessed with lobsters the way that these guys were with fill rates?
you know, bob down at the creek is like: "Hey, I caught this lobster, and it's scurrying abilities are really great, but the sloppy curvature of its claws really kills it for me..." and then slim replies, "Well, shit, I'm gonna overclock my lobster boat and catch so many lobsters they're gonna elect me King of Red Lobster! And it's got bump-mapping too!"
My point being: You can stay up too late and have your weird z-buffered, anti-aliased dreams, but you can't get back that $400 you just dropped on the latest Bligblagdoodlehopper of a card, and dontcha forget itBR>
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
I wonder if any of the current laptops will be able to run Doom3... I'm considering buying a laptop with a GF4go as the Radeon7500 based ones seems to be slower... I wonder if its really worth it to go from 32 megs to 64 megs of ram?
He did not say that the Radeon 8500 was better than the Geforce4 at all. In fact, he said that the Geforce4 was better than current ATI offerings. However, he said that next-gen ATI offerings, which he used to demo at e3, were better than next-gen NVIDIA offerings currently (rumors are that it's just a scouped up gf4, something like a gf4 ultra).
That looks....fun?
No, that's not the right word...
When do we stop calling these first-person thingies "games" and start calling them VR adventures, or something more appropriate?
:-\
What Carmack actually said is,
"The GeForce 4 Ti is the best card you can buy."
So I'm wondering if we aren't being spammed by ATI marketing here.
--Blair
Consider this: Of the three games I've played almost exclusively in recent years, all three were Half-Life mods: Counter-Strike, Day Of Defeat, and Team Fortress Classic. However, with my current GeForce 3 based video card, I get the maximum 100fps at the highest supported resolution of 1280x960. So what exactly is the point of upgrading? Even if I upgraded to be able to play Doom III, I'd play it for at most a month, then go back DoD/CS/TFC.
PS: While we're on the topic of Half-Life, does anyone know why the engine doesn't allow resolutions above 1280x960? It seems like an arbitrary limit that could be easily removed. Maybe some of the people that invest months of time into writing HL cheats should try to figure out how to remove that limit instead...
Seriously.
I'm an "old timer", but still I'm not old enough to have been concious of when this phenomenon actually began; there was a fundamental change somewhere in the last 15 years where things shifted from games using existing hardware fully to where games became the reason themselves to create new, faster hardware devices.
Not that this is bad, nit by any means, but it does give one interesting meat to consider; no one will argue that games are what's driving things like new video card technologies -- when did the chicken outdo the egg?
Hilary Rosen's speech was about her love of money and her desire to roll around naked in a pile of money.
And you make this point rabiting on about some lobster analogy?
Nice one.
Whats the problem with looking at the latest engine, running on the latest cards?
Someones gonna buy it, its good to get a feel for the highend markup.
Before you start bitching coz he has more money than you obviously do, think about it.
'Nuff said.
^^ look up ^^
So some hotshot Ferrari-drivin' game developer who makes more money than God likes to buy video cards every week to compare 'em?
Actually dumbass, I think he gets the latest video cards sent to him for free.
Ok, first off, nobody makes more money than god. Churches are very profitable businesses.
Second off, sweet christ that was a terrible analogy, if only because maybe five guys in the world can relate.
Thirdly (and lastly, my beer isn't getting any cooler), why shouldn't there be a high end pc games market? Porsche doesn't have to use geo metro engines so that geo metro owners don't feel left out.
Lastly (I lied about the last one), of course you can't get money back that you spend. This is one of the fundamental tenets of capitalism. I'm afraid you're just going to have to get used to it.
--
pants ahoy
If ATI could just finally fix their drivers once and for all, they'd be on even standing with Nvidia.
I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
Right about the time companies realized gamers would buy new hardware to play a game. Sounds retarded, and yet it's true...
Sent from your iPad.
Wing commander was the first game to start the hardware upgrade craze over a game. I have the PC Computing magazine that discusses this; it probably drove the move to 386's more than windows 3!
Carmack on ATI:
"the driver quality is still quite a ways from Nvidia's"
My jaw almost hit the floor after reading that.......NOT!
ATI is moving to a unified driver model like Nvidia's so maybe, just maybe, we'll start to see better refined drivers as ATI's product line ages.
-ted
I'm too lazy to put forth the effort to decode it. :)
As far as 3D-accelerators go, the point when people started buying hardware just for games can fairly accurately be pinpointed to the release of GlQuake - which was a free download after Quake shipped allowing hardware acceleration. For a few years after that games shipped with hardware and software rendering, but all the reviews for such games would say "this game looks wicked cool with hardware acceleration, but looks like dog vomit in software mode- only buy this spiffy new game if you have a 3D card". Slowly then games went from software render only, to both software and hardware rendering, to where we are today that all games require hardware acceleration. This trend has repeated itself for various features build into different generations of 3D accelerators.
And Falcon 3 (ok that was a different company, but still).
All of the reports, interviews, and so forth that I have read on D3 state a 'next gen ATI card.' Don't know if they also tested with the next gen Nvidia card also, but it doesn't sound like Carmack's talking about the 8500.
Also, to those concerned with gameplay, and not just the graphics engine, it sounds like this game should be pretty revolutionary in terms of storyline and interactivity with the environment (this is possible because of the advanced game engine). That's also why ID chose not to go the multi-player route with this game - to focus on gameplay, atmosphere, and interactivity.
Once upon a time, I turned to my friend and said, "When in God's name did graphics cards become more expensive than your CPU?"
Without missing a beat he replies, ".. Well, it's got more transistors..."
--
#include <malloc.h>
free(your.mind);
In terms of consumer graphics boards, I think the first major game to catch everyone's attention was Quake II. Quake I now has GL Quake, etc. but originally geometry rasterization was done in software. It was at E3 that Carmack and company demoed Quake II and what a 3D engine could achieve using hardware acceleration ... and caused Mr. Romero to flip out and tell his whole dev team working on Daikatana that they needed to switch over from the Quake I code base to the Quake II engine and leading to another year of delay ... but I digress.
Eric
The two main TV formats are:
NTSC(North America) 720x480
PAL(Europe) 720x576
Anything else needs to be shot, burnt, scraped, or just plan thrown away.
That's not fair. Don't lump us shoplifters with that copyright infringing scum.
So some hotshot Ferrari-drivin' game developer who makes more money than God likes to buy video cards every week to compare 'em?
Wrong John from ID software. Romero had the Ferrari, not Carmack, and it may still be for sale, for all we know. Would you like to be that hot-shot?
What if people were obsessed with lobsters the way that these guys were with fill rates
People would get sick of lobster. In early colonial days (N. Amer.) lobsters were incredibly plentiful. They would be collected as fertilizer for farms, there was a law limiting how often you could make your indentured servant eat lobster.
Kinda sad, but probably the biggest seller of all, back in the day, for hardware acceleration was the game "Tomb Raider" by EIDOS. I recall it coming out with 3dfx acceleration, and people crapping themselves in amazement about it.
Carmack obviously saw that Nvidia will soon own him and Doom III anyway according to this article:
/ 04 6208
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/03/20
Carmack is just covering his owners bases.
It's says "105 32 97 109 32 98 97 116 109 97 110" or "i am batman"
I know I'm going to hell, I'm just trying to get good seats.
There are possible penalties involved with fingering a GeForce at Best buy. While there are occasional busts of distributors of software its pretty rare for individual users to get busted. Also it takes a whole lot less effort, so he can get back to his fps.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
Old News for Nerds. Stuff that mattered last week.
For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled - R Feynman
They've hired a real science fiction author to write the story for the game. It's the same guy who did the 7th Guest story, if you remember that old (but excellent) game. I don't remember the guys name off the top of my head though...
And top of the line - GeForce 4ti - is about $300
Today's prices are meaningless. By the time this game arrives GF4 Ti's and Radeon 85xx's will medium to low end cards and reasonably priced.
omg, I can't stop laughing
that had to be the single best followup to any post ever
simply amazing
on another note, is it just me or is Id and john carmack dangerously close to becoming the george lucas of the game industry? I find myself incapable of getting excited about DOOM 3.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
I suppose my 486 50mhz that could run Doom1 & Doom2 at 320x200 won't cut it for Doom3.
Carmack has Ferraris (plural). There was a contest a few years back sponsored by MPlayer where you could win one of them.
I agree with you absolutely. Origin was definitely pushing hardware to the limits with its games of the early 90s, annoyingly so if you ask me. Whereas Wing Commander ran comfortably on my 386-33, just a couple years later I'd end up needing a 486-66 to play Strike Commander, Privateer, and System Shock. A couple years after that, Ultima Online was about to be released, and my PC was again useless.
The constant need to upgrade to enjoy the latest games just seems like a fact of geek life now. Thank you for reminding me of whom to blame for all this.
Because by the time a Mac version of the game is released, those expensive video cards will have been low-end for at least a couple years.
...
[Me 3 years from now]: Hey, I just got this cool new game, Doom III !
[Everybody else]:
[Everybody else] (to each other, turning away): C'mon, let's go play Tribes 4.
c-hack.com |
One GREAT thing about Doom III, which really hasnt been done to this level yet, is that all of the scenes in the game (everything you see, period) is rendered in realtime. No more CGI videos, no more pre-recorded game scenes, its all done by your GPU. The hardware is finally getting to where games can do this and have astounding quality. I for one will NOT miss watching fuzzy videos that cut you away from the actual game, all while ruining the interactive feeling. To those complaining about having to buy a decent video card to play, thats how the world works my friend. Remember having to upgrade to a 486 to get in on the doom craze? As the media evolves, so must the equipment. This is a good thing for everyone, except bums. But hey, they're bums! :)
;)
Now, (off topic, i'd say a 48 degree angle), I have to completely agree with Carmack about the ATI/NVidia comparison. ATI would be a viable choice if only their drivers didnt suck so badly.. I swear, their entire software development team should be shitcanned, the software is such crap for everything they make, where the hardware is typically very good. The software design, the implementation, and the integration with the system is all garbage. Anyone with an ATI TV tuner card, or that had to use the old Rage Pro cards knows what I'm talking about. Hey maybe we'll get lucky and after DOOM III John will do some consulting for ATI. I'd imagine it would be a nice change of pace, and it sure would help out the 3D gaming industry. I can smell some new technology around the corner.
If ATI has some executives reading slashdot (haha, yeah right!), I'd actually purchase your products if they had NVIDIA caliber software. I know plenty of others who are in the same boat.
And (eek, another topic -- let me rant) to those of you who say "But the linux drivers are open source and great, and Nvidia's are closed source" -- who cares. Windows is THE gaming platform (Apple distant second), like it or not. Lets hope that the Linux gaming companies (err, now company) can make it worthwile for game developers to port to *NIX. That may be yet another way for ATI to sell some cards
I can see it already, Score: -1, Off Topic on multiple tangents.
This is a good thing, imo. Remember the day when people trying to create high-end 3d graphics had to buy some top of the line $1000 video card to animate?
These days, you can go to a local shop and pick one up for under $300. And they're about four times as powerful.
Granted, a render farm doesn't hurt. But for the average joe Q. animator doing it as a hobby, he can achieve top-notch graphics on a basic off-the-shelf system.
"Adequacy.org: Where congenital stupidity is not an option, but a requirement."
use the Quake III engine over the Doom III engine. Yikes. Thanks for forcing everyone to get new cards for recreation. I must be getting old since I can't justify this a new 3d card...
OMG! LOL! Go back to AOL.
"...no one will argue that games are what's driving things like new video card technologies -- when did the chicken outdo the egg? "
;)
It probably happened when people spent $3,000 on the latest computer hardware and demanded immediate return on their investment. At l;east that was my experience. My dad got me a 486-33 mhz machine back when they were seriously top of the line. That computer was like my supercomputer for many, many months. My dad dropped a pretty hefty chunk of change on it. He and I both felt that for all the money spent on it, it'd better be a day to night difference over the old 286 I had.
Fortunately, I had Wing Commander II. And boy was it superior on the 486! The game took advantage of the extra RAM to draw more stuff on the screen (like the pilot's hand controlling the ship), and it had the voice pack so your wingman could talk! And the game was smooooooooooooooth.
I think that game did more to impress my dad with his investment than the 3D stuff I ended up doing later on it. Any queeziness he had about buying me that machine melted that night.
I can tell you something, it's satisfying to buy new hardware and have it blow your old hardware away. That's why games like Halo are so important to the XBOX. Quake 3 was the game to do that on PC, but it looks like Doom 3 will easily take its place.
In any case, I think that explains the shift. To tell you the truth, if I didn't run Lightwave so much, I probably wouldn't have much idea how much faster one computer is over another. Guess I should play games s'more.
"Derp de derp."
And I was massively disappointed! That had to have been the most overrated game of its time!
Of course, I'm not sure that had to to with the story as much as it did the gameplay. It was basically boring boardgame-type puzzles embedded in a relatively interesting environment. I LOVE adventure games and whatnot, don't get me wrong--it's just that the 7th Guest puzzles were completely arbitrary and had nothing to do with anything in the storyline.
It's ironic in a way, then, that the 7th Guest gets mentioned in this context, as I recall it being a game that the critics all raved about for its technical merits, but really bombed when it came to actually playing it.
But again, it was a good story. Just not a good game.
I'm not sure it was glQuake that did it. I remember Quake looking OK in software mode.
What I remember of that time is that the game that made me buy a 3DFX card even before the game came out was the (now) much laughed at Tomb Raider. That was the first game I remember ever *needing* a a 3D card for as it just looked amazing.
Even if you don't like Tomb Raider now, remember that at the time Tomb Raider was amazing and offered a kind of cinematic experience really not seen before in games - an experience that was great increased with the 3D card (like the waterfall, or the T-Rex).
I recall a couple of other friends saying that they bought their first 3D card for that game. I think you'd be surprised at how many people did so.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Ok, first off, nobody makes more money than god. Churches are very profitable businesses.
Oh yeah? How much of that money d'you think God actually GETS?
All of it. It's just managed for him by his underlings. They make sure he's well-fed and bathes at least once a week though, so don't worry bout him.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Games with big, nicely rendered breasts ALWAYS do well, reguardless of any actual quality.
You want Doom III to have the same forced-upgrade appeal as the last two? Just put some big, nicely rendered breasts in it somewhere. Maybe on those fat grey guys from the screenshots.....
Robort knows all.
Carmack mentioned that the new ATI hardware can do 7 (or is it 8?) texture grabs in one cycle. I know that ArtX built this feature into the flipper chip for the gamecube. The idea is to grab 8 textures in one cycle, while being able to perform various operations (fog, custom shading, lighting etc) on each those textures. The developers of Rogue Squad II (Factor5) have already admitted that they are using this feature for their targeting computer and texturing effects. There might be a migration of ArtX designed hardware into the mainstream ATI graphics cards. If this is true, then it should not be too hard to get Doom3 on the gamecube. Don't discount the cube cause it seems wimpy. It's got some hot stuff under the hood!
Here's the relevant bit:
Doom III is very much hardware driven, and one of the controversies of this year's E3 was that the game was demonstrated on the latest ATI graphics card rather than a card from NVidia. "NVidia has been stellar in terms of driver quality and support and doing all of the things right," says Carmack, who has been an outspoken evangelist for NVidia's GeForce technology. "For the past few years, they have been able to consistently outplay ATI on every front. The problem is that they are about one-half step out of synch with the hardware generation because they did Xbox instead of focusing everything on their next board. So they are a little bit behind ATI."
Kinda funny, I'll be buying a Geforce4 (Geforce5?) when DoomIII comes out.
Well, this is only semi-true.
I know of at LEAST one guy who has stayed with the newest, fastest cards on the market for the last 2-3 years.
Every time a new "fastest" card comes out, he sells buys it, and then EBays off his old card.
So most of the upgrades only cost him maybe $80-100 after all is said and done.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
It's pronounced doo-mah.
The top of the line current hardware is the ATI 8500 and the GF4 Ti. Doom3 is being done to take full advantage of those existing hardwares, push them to the limit. IANAIP (i am not an id programmer) but i think its fairly safe to say the game will perform fairly well on a geforce 3, and use every single feature of that as well. Next generation cards are not going to be a requirement for the game, they'll just be able to run it with a little extra breathing room. So you might be able to run with everything cranked on your new GF4 and pull a perfectly acceptable 30fps, the next gen will just give an improvement on that which is probably nothing but geek-penis-length type noise (ie, fps even farther beyond what your eyes can process). geforce 2's are yesterday's toys. so yeah if you're still pushing a gf2 mx 64 (like me) it probably handles current stuff reasonably well, but everything for that has been done already. I don't see any case of GAMES pushing the DEVELOPMENT of new hardware devices, just the acquisition of current stuff from people who haven't cut themselves on the bleeding edge of hardware development the second it hits the market.
You're kidding, right?! Every serious game-company does this for the exact reasons mentioned by Carmack.
They have to be concerned with fill-rates. They have the crappy job to make sure that their game runs as good as possible on all plausible setups. Only one way to find out...
I think someone here is a little envious of the success (and money) of one Mr. Carmack. And come on.. The lobster analogy..? That seriously makes NO sense to anyone.
Remember, there are no stupid questions. But there are a lot of inquisitive idiots.
lucas does the same thing. all you just described was a tech demo and a horribly void sex life. people who care can get pixel shaded bump mapping from...well...anything with pixelshaded bump mapping. and last time i was in the weird world of "outside" i saw a lot of stuff casting shadows.
the question is, will id include all of that crap with a game worth playing, or is "the guy from doom" gonna end up wandering around casting a shadow and telling nataly portman "i dont like the sand, its rough and irritating" in dolby digital 5.1 just like another recent heavily hyped tech demo with a few good action scenes.
I know 10 years ago I bought a faster pc so that I COULD play games. Games have allmost always been more 'intense' for the hardware than simple desktop applications.
WordPerfect etc still ran great on my 8086 but if you wanted to play for example doom, you needed a faster machine(a 486 in my case).
Now look at it from the other side: would their ever be so much money invested in the development of faster hardware if there where no games? You don't really need a fast CPU to type a letter or make some spreadsheets.
Do you have a mouse on your precious console ?
games have been doing the cutscenes using the engine for quite a while. sacrifice is a good example. i think even JK2 the cutscenes were done by the engine, the character models look the same.
And that he gets clean linen
fuck that innovation stuff. lets just keep the same old tired 3 year old shit for games. change is scary.
It was a valid comment that was in no way infammatory. Kudos and total agreement with the original poster. Whoever the modder is, you are a vapid little bitch without a clue.
So some hotshot Ferrari-drivin' game developer who makes more money than God likes to buy video cards every week to compare 'em?
:-P
I hightl doubt Mr Carmack has to buy graphics cards, I would assume that as an ISV iD get whatever they want essentially for free, since they drive hardware sales in their niche of the industry to such a degree. Hardware manufacturers would be only to eager to do anything in return for him recommending their products to his millions and millions of fans. But I suspect that as a purist, he's only swayed by superior technology and not by perks!
You can stay up too late and have your weird z-buffered, anti-aliased dreams, but you can't get back that $400 you just dropped on the latest Bligblagdoodlehopper of a card
Sure you can. Sell it on eBay, or think of the money you aren't wasting at bars when you're at home playing
I had the pleasure of seeing Alan Cox speak in Dublin a couple of months back, and he made the point that it was unreasonable for people to expect Nvidia to release the full source for their drivers. The Nvidia drivers were what gave them the edge. He reckoned that the ATI cards were generally a bit faster if you looked purely at the hardware, but Nvidia have had the advantage of working on the same codebase for their drivers for years now.
I've often said that if it wasn't for games, we'd probably all still be using 486's for our day-to-day desktop office machines. I've always thought that it's been the games market that's driven the technology advances, particularly in sound and video. Of course, there are lots of other applications that require fast hardware, (site servers, video and stills graphic design, university research etc) but for the average joe home user, it's been games which have led to them having a 1ghz+ machine on their desktop for writing docs and surfing the web.
And the people shall be oppressed, every one by another, and every one by his neighbour Isaiah 3:5
Lowercase music, this wonderful new style of music, is easy, and so beautiful! I just had to contribute. Listen to my interpretation and try to get a sense of how I feel about lowercase music.
quietart.mp3
Or search for art160.mp3 on WINMX
there was a fundamental change somewhere in the last 15 years where things shifted from games using existing hardware fully to where games became the reason themselves to create new, faster hardware devices.
Not that this is bad, nit by any means, but it does give one interesting meat to consider; no one will argue that games are what's driving things like new video card technologies -- when did the chicken outdo the egg?
When games started taking a long time to make. Used to be even a revolutionary game could be made from start to finish in months. Wolfenstein 3-D took about 6 months to make. The original Doom took about a year. iD has been working on Doom3 for about two years and they've still probably got at least a year to go.
When Carmack decided the technical parameters of the Doom3 engine back in 2000, he would have been an idiot if he designed it to only take advantage of the features of existing hardware. Instead he designed it to use features and require performance which he knew would be entering the mainstream by the time the game was released.
Of course, Carmack is unique in that he can actually influence Nvidia, ATi, etc. a bit into supporting the features he wants. On the other hand, you have to realize that back in 2000 Carmack, Nvidia, ATi, etc. already had a very good idea what sort of features would be supported in the 3D cards of 2003. Of course there is some guessing and tweaking involved (which Carmack seems to be particularly good at), but a good 3D engine designer has to design for the hardware of the time when the game will be released, not the hardware of the time when he's designing.
As for why games take so much longer these days, that's another story but the basic point is that they are not only more complex technically but that there is ever increasing detail in the art, scripting, level design, etc. that it takes much larger teams with much better tools much longer to make a game than in the old days.
I agree. I dont understand the mindset of people who want first person shooters to have such awesome graphics. Go play Quake III deathmatch for 10 minutes, then tell me how much time you spent looking around at the awesome graphics.
The enw unreal engine allows rocket paths to disturb steam that comes up from vents as they pass through it.
so what? I dont even notice that shit in real life, let alone video games.
This obsession with graphics has got way out of hand. The reason Doom 3 is so hyping its graphics is that that is all there is. Where are the innovations in gameplay?
Face facts kids, this is Doom I with better graphics. Big deal.
I recently upgraded to a GeForce2 MX. Any developer releasing games that dont run on my card simply wont get my money. Developers like Ensemble that DO worry about supporting older cards get shedloads of my money.
Not everyone is a ferrari driving video card obsessed freak.
Why doe people think a low-graphics game like the Sims sells so well...
..the question arises as to what video card we should all go and treat ourselves too when Doom 3 hits the streets.
Will Matrox get a card based on their Permedia GPU out in time, and will it kick ass? I'd quite like the excuse to buy a Matrox card as their support for the Millenium was excellent.
Will NVidia get another generation of GEForce cards out? If I'm not going for Matrox, this seems the best supported.
Will ATI get a decent set of drivers ? Even better, will there be a Open Source Linux set ?
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Cheers.
Doom took a year? If I remember correctly, Doom was about a year late when it came out...am I wrong?
Tim
The enw unreal engine allows rocket paths to disturb steam that comes up from vents as they pass through it.
so what? I dont even notice that shit in real life, let alone video games.
You get rockets shot at you in real life?
Where do you work??
He couldn't find any damn quantum processors on pricewatch, or else he would have taken some higher quality shots.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
when this comes out il be able to pickup a fairly good vidcard cheap on ebay. you know the used ones that all of the are hawking to afford the latest and greatist, thankyou Carmack.
I want 2D games back.
Wrong!
What Carmack actually says is this:
With regards to 8500 vs. GF4, he meant that the 8500 has better hardware on paper, but GF4's efficient hardware implementation makes it faster. He mentioned driver quality as a separate issue from speed.
In talking about ATI's next generation hardware, the R300, he says the following in separate emails. From www.rage3d.com.
However, he was comparing R300 to a GF4, not NV30. In this email to nvnews:
At home we have 2 computers with ati cards and 2 computers with nvidia cards. Here's my opinion:
Ati -- better tv tuner and vivo than nvidia.
Ati -- better 2d image quality than nvidia.
Nvidia -- faster 3d hardware than ati
Nvidia -- better drivers than ati.
ATi's improving on the driver front and has just about caught up on the hardware front.
Nvidia based cards are improving in the TV tuner/vivo area.
Can someone explain what Carmack is talking about here? This has sparked some brain cell activity, but my inability to comprehend what he is talking about has left the brain stalled.
Carmack: There is something to be said for grappling with a challenge that only involves the forces of nature (ignoring, for the moment, the regulatory challenges), rather than consumer tastes.
The appalling inefficiency in the aerospace industry is also a bit of a driving factor. Due to an accident of history tying them to ICBMs, the evolution of space vehicles has wound up tending towards a local optimum that is in a completely different area than better global solutions, and it doesn't seem likely to break out of the current context. The aerospace industry needs a fresh reboot. There is an order of magnitude improvement available in low hanging fruit.
I have a reasonable time table going for all of our development work, and things are proceeding satisfactorily
-Leader of the Free Peoples - http://mobgroup.net
John, please lay off the crack pipe. I guess your the only one in an industry of hundreds of thousands of the brightest engineers, scientist and very shrewd businessmen that has thought there could be a better way? Put the pipe down please.
nohup rm -rf ~/. >& zen &
Carmack said he moved all of his code to C++. Was most of his past development with Objective-C? I'm guessing it was, since he used NeXT as his development platform for such a long time.
mbbac
You might also point out that when you steal a video card from Best Buy, they no longer have it to sell. When you steal software, the software company still has it.
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
Metal Gear Solid did this long ago, not to mention, Metal Gear Solid 2 which is much improved.
- sigs are for wimps.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Also, I cannot tune several channels with it and when recording it likes to just hang up the entire machine. Playback of video that was recorded (even before it hangs up) is choppy and has a lot of artifact.
Did I just get a crappy card, or is the Radeon crappy? If so, does the 8500 provide more stability and how about them drivers? I remember an interview about 1.5 years ago (or maybe more) by a review site to the president of ATI. (Sorry, its been awhile and I can't pull it up on google yet) The important question was, "ATI drivers and support have been, shall we say lacking, in the past. How will you address this problem in the future?" The response by the Pres (or was it CEO...) was, "I agree, however the issue was really that of bad hardware. You can have the best drivers in the world, but if the hardware does not support it or does not scale, then they will be useless. Bad hardware design of course, also makes it much harder to develop ANY drivers beyond the initial release, and in the past it was difficult to interface with DirectX and OpenGL because of this. The Radeon is designed with this future scope in mind." he goes on to explain how they will basically use a unified driver/interface architecture much like nVidia does.
So, where are those drivers many are asking? Is the problem in the software or hardware arena this time? Does the 8500 provide a better platform for driver support, and now we are just waiting for decent drivers to be released? (also is it true that there are still some features that have yet to be 'activated' by the drivers?)
If people want to drop $400 every couple of years in order to enjoy the newest high-end video games at the highest resolution and refresh rate possible, why should you care? To you, it may be a waste of money, but it isn't to them.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Come on John, who makes a game that wont run smoothly on a GeForce? Just because you made Commander Keen doesn't mean you can pull this shit. If I have to get a new video card for this game, I'm gonna get the money from you.
true. and the fundamental reason why somebody might buy something from someone is because they both, in the end would feel better, richer than they were previously.. Being Rich doesn't have anything with CASH, property includes.. Thats spending for u ..
In the article(s), it is said that they are stressing single player play for Doom III. I think this is great, because (as some1 else said), I don't have time to sit around all day honing my skills @ deathmatch so that I can get my ass kicked online.
However, am I the only one that feels that there has been a huge loss since most of the games since the original doom series haven't had multi-player cooperative mode? I remember sitting on a couple computers for hours playing cooperative doom w/my brother back in the day, and it was great fun.
I'm really dissappointed that cooperative mode seems to have disappeared... If it's fun for a single player, it's also fun for multiple people to work together.
Am I the only one that feels this way? It seem that game designers aren't creating as many games that allow people to work together. Sure, it's fun to blow up your buddies every now and then in a deathmatch, but I find that cooperative can be much more enjoyable, as you work thru the game's problems together. It turns the single player experience into a group thing, instead of one person being holed up in a room w/the computer all day...
Place sig here.
I remember the first two Dooms fondly because they were engrossing single-player games. Quake I was good as well, but Quake II, Arena and games like Unreal, etc. catered to the multi-player crowd. Fine, that's what some people want, but not me.
Quake II wasn't bad for single player, but it definitely had more of a multiplayer focus. We used to play it at work on occasion and I had fun because I regularly fragged the non-game players that I worked with. Then I played it online, got the floor wiped with my carcass, and quit.
I think the main reason that I don't like multiplayer FPS games is that I suck. My friends (when we can co-ordinate something) kick my ass, and I get tired really quickly of having my ass fragged on the net by some 14 year-old who runs circles around me. I don't have my whole life to devote to improving my Quake skills. Therefore, I like to play single-player, where I can set my own handicap.
Agreed. While I think that the multi-player games with classes and different skills are neat (Counterstrike, RTCW, Medal of Honor), I'm no good at them. If I'm going to get into a game where the object is to simply kill stuff and blow stuff up, I want to be able to do so without having to worry about learning all the different skills and techniques and so on for the mechanic, medic, sniper, rocketman, etc. I just wanna sit down and frag for 20 minutes and then go read a book. I don't have the time to devote to learning the intricacies of "ultra-cool new multiplayer game" because I have a job and a life to deal with. I'm sure I'd think differently if I were a teenager.
IMHO, we need more games that focus on the single-player experience. I just bought Jedi Knight II this past Friday. It was great fun, I had a blast. I also had beaten it by Monday monring. So much for the $50 it cost me. I tried playing a little bit of multiplayer Jedi Knight but it was not enjoyable. You couldn't have a single character that had all of the skills and weapons available like in the single-player game. You had to customize your character so that you only had a subset of the single-player abilities. So after spending a weekend learning how to play JK2, I had to relearn a completely new playstyle just to even think about being competitive online. I remember in the old days when games had 50-100 levels and it took weeks of playing to beat them. Nowdays games are considered deep if they have 25 levels and last you a weekend. Modern game companies spend so much time working on making sure that the latest game has all the cool multiplayer functions of the last big hit that nobody really works at producing good, single-player games.
Honestly, what is so much fun about running in circles and shooting each other just so that you can trash-talk them afterwards? Can you really play a multiplayer fragfest for 3 hours and say that you enjoyed it? I just can't see what is so engrossing about this playstyle. Especially since every game out there (Unreal Tournament, Q3A, RTCW, CS, etc) has exactly the same multiplayer features (classes, game types, weapon types). The only thing that's any different are the images onscreen.
Doom took a year? If I remember correctly, Doom was about a year late when it came out...am I wrong?
I believe so. The original design document (pdf) for Doom is dated 11/28/92. The release date was 12/10/93.
Obviously work was started before the design document was finished, but as you can tell by perusing it, the game was still being sketched out at the end of November, 1992. Several reports say that iD began Doom only after the Wolf 3D expansion Spear of Destiny was released, which was September, 1992. So, if we take that as the start date, it looks like about 15 months.
As for an iD game being a year late, I'm not sure, but you may be thinking of Quake 1?
Although the term "VR" is a tough sell these days, you have a point.
Names of media tend to stick, regardless of whether they remain relevant.
"Comic books" are rarely comical anymore.
I don't agree with your point, but I just gotta say, your lobster analogy rocks. LOBSTER BOATS ARE ALWAYS FUNNY!
Dahlgren
~~ What's stopping you?
Dammit. That should have had a qestion mark.
~~ What's stopping you?
> there was a law limiting how often you could make your indentured servant eat lobster.
I've heard the same story about salmon and oysters, and workhouses. (Oysters certainly were a cheap plentiful food in some places in the past).
rant
who makes more money than God
Actually, the preachers are the one making money...
They do this by trying to fool you in believing in a non-existent being called god.
Try it! Library of Babel
There is a lot of condemnation against the current establishment (Boeing, Lockheed, NASA, etc.) as they are not seen as working towards Cheap Access To Space (CATS).
There is some truth to this, but the nature of rocket technology was pushed too far with simple technology instead of an incremental expansion of technology with better understanding.
Arthur Hansen
No! It's a *SIG*. Keep the Special Interest Groups away! (Con joke!)
A few years ago, my parents bought a mac, a Performa 5260 (one of the most un-upgradable and unsupported machines on the planet, which I knew at the time), and I kept saying, don't get a Performa, don't get a Performa. Well, they got the Performa (and later got quite angry when I told them that I'd told them not to get it).
My stepfather asked me, one day, after he'd had his computer for a while, how you compare one computer to another, in terms of speed. My simple reply was 'games'. See how a game plays on both systems. He didn't believe me that games are used for benchmark numbers, if not entire benchmarks. 'Why would anyone buy a better computer just for games?' he asked.
Our Performa came with a ton of useless crap on CD, but it also came with a copy of FA/18 Hornet 2.0, a flight sim. Stepfather is very into planes, so he started playing it one day. Over the next few months, he was more and more into the game.
When Hornet 3.0 came out, he purchased it. Same with A-10 Cuba, and the Hornet Korea upgrade. He even bought a game he couldn't play (Falcon 4.0), just for when he later could play it (i.e. got a new machine). He was also very disappointed when I told him he couldn't add a 3D accelerator to the Perorma, to get the beautifully textured goodness of Hornet 3.0. I think it was at this point I told him I'd told him, and he shouted that I had not.
We run a home-based business, or rather, they do, and I used to help. They needed a new computer, and the local Mac shop had a great deal on a G4, 17" monitor, laser printer, and so on, so they leased it (the whole purchase = tax deductable as a lease). GeForce 2MX (great at the time) and a sweet sweet 533 G4 processor.
Wouldn't you know it, Falcon 4.0's hardware acceleration only supports RAVE, and ATI cards directly, neither of which is supported on the GeForce 2, and no OpenGL support. What's the first thing he thinks of? Buy an ATI card for it, spend a few hundred bucks that they really don't have, and upgrade, just so that one game plays nicer than it did before (it plays very smooth in software mode).
I agree with the other posters, and my anecdote supports the claim. 3D is what drives sales. I remember WC3's 3D gameplay (basically software 3D done beautifully) on my friend's 486, and it was amazing. Let me tell you, if you didn't have the hardware to play it, you damn well wanted to buy the hardware to play it. That was the major turning point (for me). En masse, QGL sounds about right. DirectX was another important turning point, too. By making games faster (in Windows), people could write more complex games with better graphics, and they didn't have to bother with a DOS version. Then, people who didn't have Windows 95 had to get it, and people who didn't have the hardware for Windows 95, or barely had it, had to get that. If you wanted to game, you HAD to have W95, or you were stuck playing legacy games until eternity (which, for a hardcore gamer, is not an option).
So DX, OpenGL, GLide (which sucked), and use of these technologies are, to me, what really turned the tables. Game development took off, and so did hardware purchases. Now, everyone's chasing their first 3D high.
I'm just waiting for a holodeck.
--Dan
And grits.
The following pure speculation, but given the following:
1. John Carmack has been a proponent of virtualized texture memory for some time (using system RAM as texture memory and only fetching small blocks of textures as needed, as opposed to uploading an entire texture + mipmaps).
2. Nintendo GameCube's video hardware was designed by ArtX, and is a proven working example of hardware using virtualized texture memory.
3. ATi owns ArtX.
4. DOOM III was demoed on ATi's next-generation R300 chipset.
The speculation bit: R300 has some ArtX influences, including virtualized texture memory. If so, this is a good thing (for reasons Carmack outlines in the linked document above).
y
If the Geforce SDR isn't fast enough to run Doom III, why the hell did he tell us it would?
He also said that the savage4 would work with some details turned down, so I'm damn glad I have a Geforce 4!
Damn you and your lying ways, John Carmack! First telling me Doom(1) will run on a 386, now *this*!
It's been a long time.
This batch of comments from me have let people draw conclusions that leave me scratching me head wondering how they managed to get from what I said to what they heard.
Other people have outlined the issues in detail in comments already, but the crux is that, even with driver quality removed from the discussion (not counting conformance issues, running at fill limited resolutions), GF4 hardware is still faster than 8500 hardware on basically everything I tested. The 8500 SHOULD have been faster on paper, but isn't in real life.
The hardware we used at E3 was not an 8500, and while the drivers were still a bit raw, the performance was very good indeed.
Take with a grain of salt any comment from me that has been paraphrased, but if it is an actual in-context quote from email, I try very hard to be precise in my statements. Read carefully.
John Carmack
Sure you can, and you probably will, by not leaving the house for 3 months.
why shouldn't there be a high end pc games market? Porsche doesn't have to use geo metro engines so that geo metro owners don't feel left out.
:)
Interesting thought. Why aren't there any truly high-end supercards out there? I'm talking custom built 8x AGP Pro + 2 PCI slot cards with 3 DVI outputs that perform game functions like a Wildcat 5110 does Maya...
Probably wouldn't sell many of them at $2-5000 a pop, but they'd be there for geek bragging rights at least. Plus I could pick one up on Ebay a year or so after it comes out for a pittance
... and there is no doubt, that one day he will be
where the eye of his telescope has already been
We know for sure that we will be excluding some of the game buying public with fairly stiff hardware requirements, but we still think it is the right thing to do.
The requirement for GF1/Radeon 7500 as an absolute minimum is fundamental to the way the technology works, and was non-negotiable for the advances that I wanted to make. At the very beginning of development, I worked a bit on elaborate schemes to try and get some level of compatibility with Voodoo / TNT / Rage128 class hardware, but it would have looked like crap, and I decided it wasn't worth it.
The comfortable minimum performance level on this class of hardware is determined by what the artists and level designers produce. It would be possible to carefully craft a DOOM engine game that ran at good speed on an original SDR GF1, but it would cramp the artistic freedom of the designers a lot as they worried more about performance than aesthetics and gameplay.
Our "full impact" platform from the beginning has been targeted at GF3/Xbox level hardware. Slower hardware can disable features, and faster hardware gets higher frame rates and rendering quality. Even at this target, designers need to be more cognizant of performance than they were with Q3, and we expect some licensee to take an even more aggressive performance stance for games shipping in following years.
Games using the new engine will be on shelves FIVEYEARS (or more) after the initial design decisions were made. We had a couple licensees make two generations of products with the Q3 engine, and we expect that to hold true for DOOM as well. The hardware-only decision for Q3 was controversial at the time, but I feel it clearly turned out to be correct. I am confident the target for DOOM will also be seen as correct once there is a little perspective on it.
Unrelated linux note: yes, there will almost certainly be a linux binary for the game. It will probably only work on the nvidia drivers initially, but I will assist any project attempting to get the necessary driver support on on other cards.
John Carmack
Pretty interesting comments from the man himself.
Kinda reminds me of this.
In his .plan file, he said something along the lines of that the GeForce 4 Ti was misleading and crappy, and that a GeForce 3 would be a better card for Doom 3.
Now he's changed his mind, and is saying that a GeForce 4 Ti will be better than a GeForce 3 on a machine with a decent CPU.
Ah.
mogorific carpentry experiments
Did you learn that from video games? GTA3 is in the process of teaching me differently.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
That would be true. I know Digital Extremes gets piles of video cards from companies trying to sway them to work with that card. I'd think id has more video cards than CompUSA's entire chain.
http://www.target-sale.com/tusa/items/videoagp/i03 080.html
many years back...
there wasn't even 3d graphic processor...
then they appear....
(voodoo, tnt, geforce, radeon etc etc.)
why did they appear?
because games supported them.
I don't think the technology can progess...
if the game don't push the hardware to the limit.
with 3dlabs and matrox returning to the gaming hardware market.
it show just how important the market is.
hopefully the competition will make it healthier.
and we can enjoy the new standard of gaming!
...stuff I posted on a distant forum... Blah blah... However, it depends on how the story is told/unfolds. As far as games go, I'd like it to have a story, but I like to be puzzled as well (I like to expore), and I like to be treated with a cutscene as I solve a certain puzzle (but cut-scenes are so distracting, hmm). (A movie is a movie a game is a game. How to weave a story in a game). And Halo, well, the game is good, the story is good (the story unfolds). But I think the game is a bit linear and levellish (like most games, incl RTCW). Halo is a damn good game, by all means, best of it's kind. Tombraider is a classic as well. Tombraider (part 1!) has charm/athmosphere, it involved animals/puzzles/caves. There was only one human enemy. It was not only involved about blasting away and killing (humans). I like TR 1 is best I guess. Personally I want to see (like many others aware of it's existance, here I go again) Exile in 3D form. Exile is an adventure, it has a story (70's sci-fi athmosphere). A LOT of 3D potential (it would be a game unlike many others)! It's about a guy checking out on a distress call, colonists are dissapeared. some dude stealing your ship's 'destinator', being stranded, mission: to inspect and rescue survivors + more, finding entrance to cave. etc etc. Exile is a work of art (particle system, wind/gravity etc). Actually, Exile on A500 (ECS) is like Halo on Xbox (a coding miracle?), the only difference is that it's 2D. But then again, you'd have to play (AND finish, which is hard) the (full) game to understand it's 3D potential: http://www.nemmelheim.de/exile/index.html (get the demo) Read the online exile novella (to get an impression): http://members.netscapeonline.co.uk/jeremyalansmit h/level9/exile.htm
Game mechanics:
http://www.nemmelheim.de/exile/exile-gamemechanics . tml
Sceenies:
http://www.nemmelheim.de/exile/exile-screenshots.h tml
Mapped cave-system (to get a sense of scale):
http://www.columbusforce.net/files/exile-officialm ap.gif
It would be a relief if some software company realises it's potential and make an (exact) 3d version of it. Much better than all these dedicated Exile fans, trying to recreate it (in both 2d annoying birds/monkeys stealing stuff from you, killer bees, (A.L. (TM)) etc, robots, lightning balls !, transporters, tools/passes that can be found in caves in order to progress in the game, Habitatable areas inside cave built by lost colonists, ancient doors (rune) flooded areas, radiactive areas etc.)
- no levels, just one HUGE cave to explore (and surface, with colonist's base/your ship)
- flashbacks (in form of samples/cut-scenes), coherent to the logs (=story), depending on area's you explore. (Dead bodies of colonists > passes,weapons,vid logs)
Quake 3 engine (halo's engine?) would be perfect for the game. (shadows and stuff, blah) ...Hoping you've read the bit above Mr. C., the game is good, check it out. It needs to be redone in 3D. And um.. I bet it'll look good on an ATI card.. =o/..
You stupid shits wouldn't know humor if it bit you in the ass.
Even though it came out after quake2. Perhaps the resolution thing is affected by this? It also says a lot for what comes after the engine is built.
In the late 80s there was some very slick hardware available for PC price. The main disadvantage of it was that it "wasn't IBM compatible", which businesses, but not gamers, cared about.
Consequently, gamers flocked to the superior platform. In 1985 the IBM PC had 4 colours. The Amiga 1000 had 4096. The difference became evident in visceral graphics action (2d scrollers usually).
I was the typical example of a kid who played games (and spent money on them!) but who was also a coder who wanted to take advantage of the other aspects of the machine - something Nintendo couldn't help me do.
The Amiga was therefore taken into sucessive hardware revisions thanks in large degree to gamers. When the IBM PC caught up (in raw speed - if not architecture) the race had already been running for years.
Because 18 months after yuo bought it it would cost $400 and not act as a room heater (probably).
Nerd: Derogatory term typically directed at anybody with a lower Slashdot ID than you.
"Singleplayer" style gamers love eyecandy, eyecandy need high systems. New exciting features.
"Multiplayer" style gamers love the higger FPS rate, somethimes hate eyecandy. Love dumb, simple engines.
The arquitecture of DIII will be similar, I suspect, to the Max Payne game. The playability of Max is very high, but the lack of multiplayer play is a pain. I suspect that the moddable attitude of DIII will be the higgest of all the Quake scene. The problem here is that you can get more netgamers that love dumb engines with high FPS than spgamers that love eyecandy.
Will be the solution brain-candy? High modding capabilitys?
telejano.berlios.de
-Woof woof woof!