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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."
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
Well, while Doom III certainly looks good, I don't think the whole "medium quality" issue is so big a deal. If it was, they'd have taken more of an effort and shown it at high quality, or at least they'd have told just about everyone that it'd look better at high quality.
:P
In the "interview" with Shacknews (actually it's just one email), Carmack says that high quality settings opposed to medium ones would mean "uncompressed textures" and "anisotropic filtering". While especially anisotropic filtering is nice, it's not that big of a deal. The game would look better, but not stunningly so, and I'm not actually sure if you'd notice the higher quality in the low res movies that are available on the net.
The interview is quite interesting, though, even though it doesn't really tell us anything we didn't already know (Nvidia faster than Ati, Ati's drivers suck, GF4 Ti best buy). Please note that the story (for some reason) links to page two of the review, page one is available, too.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
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...
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.
I remember Carmack saying that the Geforce4 MX cards won't fully support Doom 3, since they're basically modified GF2s and don't support some of the new shaders Doom uses or something. Any GF3 or regular GF4 should work.
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!
Nonsense. Doom 3 isn't slated for release any time soon. As I recall, the only timeframe they mentioned was 2003, so I'm tentatively guessing Christmas 2003.
Graphics architectures have been evolving rapidly over the past few years. Doom 3 was demo'd on a yet-unreleased ATI card. NVIDIA is working on their next-gen card. 3D Labs and Matrox have announced their next GPUs. There should be some fierce competition in the consumer video card market later this fall, and that's great news for all of us -- lower prices.
By the time Doom 3 comes out, there should be plenty of affordable cards that can play the game. For example, that yet-unreleased ATI card that appears to be running Doom 3 fine right now will probably be at least a generation behind when the game is released.
The point is: don't sweat. Competition is great for us.
Eric
In a way he did. When it comes to pixel programmability and texturing pipelines, the Radeon 8500 is a step ahead of the Geforce 4. Remember, the Geforce 4 was only an evolutionary step up from the Geforce 3 in terms of programmable hardware features. So in terms of hardware from that perspective, R8500 > GF4.
Software is a different story. NVIDIA's drivers are known for being rock solid and highly optimized. ATI's are not. Thus the GF4 currently performs better than the R8500 because the current set of R8500 drivers aren't all there (yet).
Eric
There isn't any reason why any of the current consoles won't be able to play Doom III, though the odds are best for the Gamecube and XBox, and probably more likely the XBox.
Nevermind the fact that the console versions would be running at a lower resolution and thus require much less video capabilities to render the scenes, but the fact that the game will be coded closer to the metal will take off a huge percentage of the required system specs.
I personally would be very amazed if Doom III didn't at least make it to the XBox. Kid yourself all you want, but by about this time TWO YEARS FROM NOW, PCs will JUST be catching up to the XBox. This is of course based purely on the assumption that Xbox/Gamecube developers don't continue to outdo themselves well on into that time frame and show us stuff we assumed the machines simply wouldn't do.
Simple Case and Point. Quake III on the Dreamcast outperforms Quake III on a Pentium II 400 with an 8 megabyte video card and 24 megs of system memory. In fact, I'm not sure Quake III would play on a PC with those specs at all, yet it kicks much ass on a Dreamcast.
Expect to be blown away.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
That's what folks always say when comparing PCs to consoles, and it's certainly not untrue. The beauty of any current console, though, is that in one year, I'll still be able to enjoy brand new games made for that console, with the knowledge that the games are running exactly as intended. This is unfortunately not always the case with a PC.
Different articles are quoting different parts of what seemed like a larger interview. In an email to nvnews Carmack said the demo was run on ATI's next gen product because, even though they tried, nV lost to ATI in every test based on the test samples each company was able to produce.
The comparison was based on the R300 (next gen ATI) vs a super pumped GF4. nVidia didnt have any working NV30 samples from what I can tell.
Carmack also stated that nVidia is 6 months behind in development due to the time they spent on the xbox.
Seems to me that nvidia is trying to play catch up by throwing MHz at the problem...can you say Pentium III?
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.
All right, people. You're technically correct about the NTSC specifications, but with TV, it's not the same as it is with your VGA cards. On your computer you can see the full 1024x768 or whatever, but your TV gets chopped off at the edges, quite significantly, it's interlaced and there are intentional, inherent degradations in an NTSC signal because of bandwidth limitations. I think the original poster was being generous when he allowed for 400x500.
ATI did the graphics for the GameCube. How were they able to keep up with the personal computer market when Nvidia couldn't?
mbbac
Also, resolution isn't the limited factor of image quality of video games on TVs. Until id Software's next video game looks as good on my TV as a Saving Private Ryan DVD, resolution doesn't matter.
Right now resolution is just the easy way to cheat to try to get better graphics. Quake 3 at 1280x1024 on my PC still doesn't look anywhere near as good as Starship Troopers does on my TV.
mbbac
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?"
Also, launch a super nintendo emulator on your pc, then try to tell me you wouldn't rather have a controller. Controllers are simply the best input device for certain games.