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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."
Just get the mid end equipment, that or last generation high end equipment. Right now, the GF4 Ti4200 is a very good buy, at ~$200. It's still one of the most expensive parts inside the box, but very good bang for the buck.
If you want an even cheaper solution, go for a GF3 Ti200. It's still fast enough to play everything (including, I assume, Doom III), and goes for like ~$120.
Whatever you do, don't get a GF4 MX. They aren't actually that slow, but their architecure is on the level of the old GF2s.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
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).
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
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.
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.
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...
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."
One shall speak only if what one has to say is more beautiful than silence
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?
Unfortunately, as both the GF4 Go and Mobile Radeon 7500 lack hardware pixel shaders, they will not be able to render Doom3 in its full glory. Of course they will be able to run it, but many of the graphical goodies will either be missing or will need to be (very slowly) computed on the CPU.
As for 32 vs. 64 MB, I'd go for the latter if you want to run Doom3. Surfaces in Doom3 can contain up to 5 texture maps, which means tons of RAM usage at anything but low texture detail. If you run out of room on the card, you need to store textures in main memory and access them over the AGP bus, which is too slow for that sort of thing. IIRC both the GF4 GO and Mobile Radeon 7500 are available with 64 MB, although I suppose one sometimes doesn't get the choice when buying a laptop.
Basically, the top-of-the-line 3D cards of today are going to be necessary to run Doom3 decently, so the top-of-the-line mobile 3D cards--which are about a generation behind the desktop--are going to be able to run it, but somewhat mediocrely. Of course, Doom3 probably won't be out for at least a year, maybe a year and a half. By that time you'll be able to buy a laptop which runs the game beautifully. If you have to buy a laptop now then it'll be a bit tougher. Kind of makes you wish laptop 3D cards were upgradable like desktop ones...
I recently bought a Gainward 'Golden Sample' 4200 ti (128 mb version). It was a bit more than most 4200 boards (~$230), but Gainward's Golden Sample cards include a utility for overclocking beyond normal ranges, while still remaining under warranty. My PIII 1 ghz machine is a bit underpowered for it, but the water in Morrowind sure is pretty.
What if the Hokey-Pokey really is what it's all about?
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:
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
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